Jim Gavin's Los Angeles Stories

IT'S not often that a book of short stories as good as Jim Gavin's Middle Men rolls across our desk -- rarer still when a book of any kind captures Los Angeles, especially its overlooked, non-mythic aspects, quite so intelligently.

And don't take our word for it: The galleys of Middle Men come with so many raves from execs, editors, and publicists at Simon & Schuster than I can picture dewy office interns being flogged by their bosses, "Write a rave for Gavin now or you are out of here!" But it's all in the service of a great work, so we here at The Misread City are happy to see this kind of medieval method applied.

Gavin has been in and around L.A. for a long time, and pursued a number of "failed careers," including gas station manager and quiz-show gopher, and seems to have paid close attention all the way through: There's also an understated comic quality from the very first paragraph.

Among the things we have in common with Gavin are an obsession with California detective writer Ross Macdonald, a connection to Loyola Marymount University, Irish Catholicism in the family (though less unalloyed than in his), some years on Curson Avenue in the Fairfax district, and some serious damage from the 2008 Wall Street crash.

This dude is there real thing. Check him out at Skylight Books on March 14. And don't miss Middle Men.

Here is my Q and A with the author.

These stories seem to view LA from a number of fresh angles – from the middle you might say. What is your experience with Los Angeles – what ‘hoods have you lived in and what kinds of things have you done here?

I’m fourth generation SoCal on my dad’s side, which is always a smug and annoying thing to say. My dad is an old Long Beach guy, a “scholar and champion” from Long Beach Poly. I grew up for the most part in Orange, CA.  

As a kid, I played tons of sports, went to the beach in the summer, ate lots of fast food, lost my mind when Gibson went yard in ‘88. I graduated from Loyola Marymount University in West LA. While there I was a DJ for their radio station, KXLU 88.9 FM, which broadcasts all over Los Angeles. I loved it and spent a lot of my time going to shows at a lot of places that no longer exist, like Jabberjaw and the Alligator Lounge. 

After college, I worked on the sports desk of the Orange County Register.  Later, I lived up north in Berkeley for a few years, and when I came back down I lived in Long Beach, in an apartment called “The Versaille.” It was significantly less opulent than the one in France. After that, I lived in the Miracle Mile, within smelling distance of the La Brea Tar Pits. My local tavern was Tom Bergin’s, which recently went through a bunch of pointless renovations. Basically, they just made the menu more expensive, and they no longer serve chicken tenders. I’m not happy about these developments.  

I moved back up north between 2007-2009, and then I spent a year in Boston, my first and hopefully last winter.  

I currently live in Culver City, a block from the Culver Studios, in one of those little bungalow courts from the 1920s.  I’m pretty sure my apartment is haunted by a hack screenwriter who hung himself in 1947.  I can walk to Trader Joe’s and the new Expo line station, which is awesome. I’ve gone downtown more in the last six months than in my previous 36 years of existence. I also love driving down Sepulveda between Pico and Jefferson, because if you squint, it’s like your driving through Los Angeles in 1973. 

The city, here, seems about as far from the old “sunshine and noir” trope as I’ve seen in literary treatment. We don’t have a sense of a palm-treed utopia, a paradise lost, or of a seedy underbelly. Do feel a connection to any of the classic writers of LA or California fiction who help build those mythologies?

Ross MacDonald is one of my favorite writers.  I’ve probably read more books by him than anyone, though they do blend together.  But he is brilliant, and Lew Archer is my favorite LA detective (followed closely by Jim Rockford).  Based on a few off-hand references, I figured out that Archer’s dingy bachelor apartment was in the Miracle Mile, somewhere north of Pico, and east of Fairfax.  I was living in that neighborhood when I figured this out, and suddenly the Spanish fourplexes on Curson Avenue took on a new and brilliant grandeur.  

Raymond Chandler casts a long shadow too, of course, and I can’t drive Mulholland without thinking of him.  One of my great dreams in life is to be tailed by goons.   So I love the noir legacy, and part of me wishes I had the ability to write a detective novel.  I love all the great Hollywood novels too.  One of the stories in my collection is based on my experience as a production assistant for a certain game show. It views Hollywood from the bottom, but I think it still fits in that tradition.  

But like the detective novels, most Hollywood novels are written by people who didn’t grow up here and so they can only see it as it as a nightmare funhouse populated by tawdry phonies.  It certainly is a nightmare, but there is a whole other realm of experience in Southern California that, like any other part of the country, can only be captured by someone who has been here a long time and who can see the place on its own terms, not refracted through the vision of Hollywood.   

In the last few years,  wonderful writers like Victoria Patterson, Dana Johnson, and Michael Jaime-Becerra have staked out their own territory, and as a native, reading their work provides a special kind of pleasure.  I get to see a familiar world for the first time. 

Craft typically sets the story apart from the novel. How do you approach craftsmanship? Where does a story usually start for you, where does it go from there, and do you revise like crazy?

I always know what I want to write about, I just don’t know how.  There will be some experience that haunts me in some way, but I don’t what the story is. I just know that I can’t get a certain image or moment or line of dialogue out of my mind.  Months will pass, years, and I’ll bang my head against a wall for a while, but then I’ll write a sentence that has a certain spark to it .  There’s a coiled energy in the tone and voice, and I try and let that sentence lead the way.  

I had wanted to write the story “Bermuda” for over a decade.  I had actually been there as a young man on a doomed romantic mission, but I had no idea what the story was, or who was telling it, until I wrote these sentences: “Ravens nested in the lemon tree and each morning a woke in the shadow of a minaret. Plus we had cheap cable.” For whatever reason this gave me the narrator and the rest of the story fell into place.  

I spend a lot of time on the opening page of a story.  Everything has to be there.  The tone, the language, the hierarchy of characters. The ending is always in the beginning.  I tend to revise as I go. I don’t write a first draft and then go back to the beginning.  Instead, I spin my wheels, rewriting the same sentence over and over, but I think that’s when you’re writing the rest of the story.

I can’t quite figure out Max Lavoy – the Walloon quiz show host, self-absorbed history buff, etc. – from the story “Elephant Doors.” Sometimes I can’t stop thinking about him, either. Give us a sense of where he came from in your imagination, how he fits into your vision of the story, the book, the city.

I remember hearing a story about Mad King Otto of Germany.  I have no idea if this is historically accurate, but apparently he got it in his head that if he didn’t execute a peasant each day, the kingdom would collapse.  So each day his handlers would fetch a peasant who worked the royal grounds and they would put him in front of a wall and hand Otto a rifle.  He’d shoot the peasant and then go about his day.  But as soon as he departed, the “dead” peasant would get up and go back to work.  

The whole thing was staged.  The gun shot blanks and the peasant pretended to get shot.  All these people went through this ridiculous charade every day to appease the whims of a king.  

I don’t if this actually happened, but I think it is a brilliant illustration of how all organizations essentially work.  There is a king at the top, and everyone down below, scrambling to appease.  This is true in the corporate world, in Hollywood, and in many families. I had this in mind when I was writing the character of Max.  

He’s a king, of sorts, and gets whatever he wants, which, in a way, means he will always be isolated and unhappy.  Someone on the other end of the spectrum, like Adam, the production assistant, has to perform any number of ridiculous charades while convincing himself that this kind of humiliation is worthwhile and necessary.  Adam is just as narcissistic as Max, but he at least knows this about himself, and in the end he chooses to humiliate himself on his own terms, by rededicating himself to stand-up comedy, rather than jumping through any more hoops for Max. 

The book as a whole feels shadowed by the crash of 2008, and the diminished expectations, that followed -- without being “jaded” in a hackneyed way. I expect much of it was begun back in the good old days, but did the downturn have an influence?

Yeah, I think it had a big influence.  My family has always had lots of ups and downs, so being broke isn’t anything new to us.  

In “Play the Man” there’s a sort of sub-story about the collapse of his family, though the narrator is too wrapped up in his own life to totally understand what his parents are going through, financially and emotionally. But this recession got us good and we lost the house in Orange where I grew up.  It was a long and exhausting process and I still can’t bring myself go down to Orange. It makes me too sad.  

At the same time, I feel lucky that I got to grow up in a house, and I can only hope that I can provide something similar if I ever have kids.  A simple middle class wish, but it’s becoming harder and harder to come by, especially in California.  

Our house already had multiple mortgages but the whole bankruptcy/foreclosure process started in earnest after 2008 crash.  I remember those months, the shame, the fear, the insomnia, the sense that something had been irretrievably lost.  That mood definitely worked it’s way into the stories, especially “Bewildered Decisions in Times of Mercantile Terror.”  

It seems the worst of it is over, but like everyone else, my dream is no longer to get rich, it’s simply to get out of debt. 

One element that sticks out is what I’ll call “non-Latino Catholicism,” or judging from your surname, Irish Catholicism. How did growing up with some relationship to the church (school perhaps) shape your approach to seeing and writing?

It’s been a huge influence.  I grew up with a lot of kids whose parents were born in Mexico and Central America, so when I think of the Catholic Church, I’m more likely to think of Archbishop Romero and the Maryknoll sisters, than the grandeur of St Peter’s Basilica.  

My parents made a lot of sacrifices to put me and my sisters through Catholic elementary school and high school and later I went to a Jesuit college.  I have fond memories of all those places, but that has more to do with the people I was lucky enough to meet than with any real understanding of the Church.  

In typical lapsed fashion, I had to drift away from the Church to finally become interested in its history and theology.  Sixteen years of Catholic school and I was never assigned the Divine Comedy!  I had to discover all that on my own, and sadly I think that’s pretty common. 

Everything that is beautiful and inspiring about the Church has been buried under the rubble of a few conservative talking points and the ongoing horror of the sex abuse scandals.  

All the characters in the collection come out of this parochial environment, and though Catholicism isn’t always foremost on their minds, they can’t escape its influence, and they see the world accordingly.  My favorite songwriter, Dan Treacy of Television Personalities, has a beautiful line in “Everything She Touches Turns to Gold”:

Catholic school, the pain the guilt

My story is no different to tell

Every young man’s hell

Just waiting for the bell

That could be another epigram for the collection.  In fact, I’m kind of annoyed that I didn’t use it.  

In any case, there is the pain and the guilt but there is also this idea of mercy that I think plays a central roll in the book.   I think we all want mercy, and a few of the protagonists are lucky enough to find a person who is selfless enough to provide it.  

Congrats on Middle Men. What’s next for Jim Gavin?

I’m working on a novel and trying to improve my golf game. I play at Los Feliz.  $7 for nine holes and the greens are littered with cigarette butts. If I can start hitting under 30 on a consistent basis, I will be very happy. 

Cool New California Novel

A fine new book with a perfect-pitch Southern California setting, has just dropped: Model Home, which starts out in an  '80s gated community, is the first novel by  Eric Puchner, whose Music Through the Floor provoked Charles Baxter to call it "the most auspicious debut of a short story collection that I have encountered in years." Model Home looks at a family that's driven by golden dreams, but finds itself downwardly mobile: It's the perfect novel for the West Coast's brutal Great Recession.

Puchner has an understated, almost Chekhovian touch, as well as a quiet humor. Unlike a lot of Gen X writers, he's not into comics, sci-fi or other hip genres -- he's an old-fashioned craftsman, sort of refreshingly square. He's also got excellent taste in rock music, especially '80s alt-rock, as you can see in this NYT piece. (I should add here that Puchner, who lived in the Bay Area for years, where he was a Stegner Fellow and taught at Stanford, has moved to LA, where he grew up, to teach at Claremont McKenna College and has since become an occasional drinking buddy.)

Here's my Q+A with Puchner, who appears at LA's Skylight Books this Thursday and embarks on a national tour in March.

Model Home has a very distinct – and distinctly Southern Cal – setting: A nouveau-riche gated community close enough to the ocean that surfboards seem to be everywhere. What made this the right place to start the novel?

Well, part of what the novel's about is the phenomenon of the gated community, and how the rise of these enclaves has shaped our landscape and our sense of community and the great geographical and ideological schism that's occurred between where we sleep and where we earn our livings. That sounds high alutin', and the honest truth is that there's something very attractive about some of these places: Warren Ziller, the father in Model Home, loves where he lives, and in part I wanted the first part of the book to counter the whole cliché that the suburbs are inherently evil and devoid of culture.  (Just look at the great music that came out of the South Bay in the eighties, when the novel is set). 

The second half of the book takes place in a very different kind of gated community: a block of tract homes in the middle of Antelope Valley, designed to lure lower-middle class Angelenos out to the desert where they can afford to buy their own homes. The Zillers end up living out there by themselves, in this sort of post-apocalyptic setting where it's too hot to go outside and the coyotes are eating each other. So I consciously structured the novel to contain these two polar opposites, these two versions of the Californian dream.

Your stories and the novel seem to have a gently sardonic tone, a minor key of black humor, in common. Can humor or irony undercut the emotional impact of a scene, or do they work together?

Well, of course I think they work together. Who was it that said Waiting for Godot was the greatest tragedy of the 20th century? It's a play that has its roots in vaudeville, and it makes you laugh and gasp for air at the same time.  It's also extremely moving. It's almost a paradox, but I actually think that writing a scene with too much gravity is more likely to deplete the emotional impact: you need that lightness of tone, that friction, or else you're doing the emotional work for the reader and letting him off the hook. 

I have to say, too, that I can't imagine trying to capture the absurdity of contemporary American life without humor. Laughter and despair, they come from the same place for me, and I'm interested in mining that place in my work.

How much is this book and its characters inspired by your own life?

I was a teenager in Southern California in the eighties, and we were downwardly mobile in something of the same way that the Zillers are -- but everything that happens is utterly fictional. The characters are completely made up and bear absolutely no relation to my family (thank god). I do feel it's in some ways a book about my father and about my own youth -- but it's an emotional resemblance, not a literal one.    

You’re back in LA after living for years in the Bay Area, traditionally considered the seat of culture and literary life on the West Coast. By contrast, how does 21^st century Southern California strike you?

I absolutely love San Francisco, but I have to say there's something refreshing about the weirdness and messiness and unrepentant ugliness of L.A. In some ways, San Francisco has become a bit like Paris or Manhattan: a beautiful city in a bottle (or in quotation marks). It's got this rich cultural history, but artists and writers and musicians can't afford to live there anymore. In L.A., there will always be pockets of affordability, and so there won't ever be that sort of cultural diaspora, I don't think. Also, it was born wearing quotation marks.

And for a city that makes it's money off the movies, there are terrific bookstores. Skylight Books is fantastic. 

There have been a number of good Gen X novels and memoirs set in the ‘80s recently. What do the Reagan years mean to you? Culturally, musically, politically or otherwise.

That's a pretty big question, and hopefully I already answered it by writing the novel. It would take another 360 pages.  So maybe here's where I tell people to read the book?

New "Lost" Story by John Cheever

I'm pleased to direct my distinguished readers' attention to a story only recently unearthed called "Of Love: A Testimony." the story was part of cheever's first story collection, from 1943,fell out of print for decades,  and it's now up on the site fivechapters.com, which is typically dedicated to work of contemporary authors.

(this post is also the latest in my "WASP writers of the 20th c" series. good scotch and unseasoned food will be served.)

cheever watchers should know that blake bailey, author of "a tragic honesty," the acclaimed richard yates' biography, will soon publish is cheever bio, and the library of america will put out everything the bard of westchester ever wrote, edited by bailey.

i cant think of too many writers who've given me more reading pleasure than cheever. discovered him not in college or grad school, where he is very rarely taught, but while living in a WASP milieu in connecticut -- it would be a commonplace to say that his work transcends that setting. what i most admire about cheever's work is his control, his insistence on making every sentence nearly perfect and elegant, and his ability to bring things to a persuasive emotional pitch. simply unbelievable writer -- the art tatum or teddy wilson of the short story.

curious what my readers thing of this new (old) one.

Photo credit: Flickr user 25