And to Joseph Heller, Speed Vogel and the guy who ran off with the baby sitter. And Milo Minderbinder's inspiration. A frozen moment. And then the moment passed when Laurie collapsed theatrically in the seat beside me. “The drive here was craaaazy,” she said. For me, it isn't about what Towles writes as much as HOW he writes. Elegant, thoughtful. I fall into his stories and just go wherever they take me. This time it was to Hollywood and Los Angeles in the ‘30s, with some interesting characters and stories.

No one chronicled–or lived–the 60s in LA like Eve Babitz. Her work has languished out of print for much too long. Now, at last, she’s being celebrated not just for her beauty and for the long list of men she inspired and caroused with before they became art and music superstars, but for her writing. The day I was 18, Sally and I had a reunion because we were still friends though we saw less and less of each other. We went to Pupi’s, a place devoted to cake, overlooking the Strip. I invited her to this surprise birthday party my mother was giving me that night (though she would never do anything so unforgivable as actually surprise me; I hate surprises). Read more. On the phone, she talked like she looked. On the phone, she talked like she wrote. On the phone, she was what Laurie said she no longer could be: She was Eve Babitz.

had already begun. “Predictably, and now a bit tiresomely,” a Kirkus review observed, the novel was about California, and “ Babitz’s L.A. weltschmerz has gotten rather clotty and overdone.” And still, Jacaranda was a few It's quite a while since I read Rules of Civility and I would perhaps have enjoyed these stories about how Eve got on in Hollywood after she had left New York at the end of that book, if I'd read them earlier. She mined the most unusual and the most everyday moments – ice skating, shopping, a screening of the surfing movie Five Summer Stories, a Los Angeles Dodgers game. In The Answer, she drops acid with a local hippy-bohemian who decides he needs to go to the bank. It is not absolutely necessary to have read RULES OF CIVILITY before reading EVE IN HOLLYWOOD, but I would suggest doing so. It not only removes some Spoilers, but it also provides side references that will cause the “knowing” among us to smile.

Overall, the takeaway is, this man can WRITE. From his description of the opening of the great west as “…giving way to the high, lonely deserts west of Exodus and east of John,” I’m hooked, impressed, envious. I’ll read anything he ever writes. Please let there be more. After most of her work went out of print, she was praised in a 2014 Vanity Fair article by Anolik as an overlooked and unbowed genius. Eve’s Hollywood, Slow Days, Fast Company and other books were reissued, a well-regarded biography by Anolik was published in 2019 and Babitz was discovered by a generation of younger women, leading her to joke: “It used to be only men who liked me, now it’s only girls.” And to the future good will of Consumer's Liquor, the best liquor store in America and aptly named.You can tell that Towles wrote it, his voice shines through, but it’s pretentious, incredibly unorganized, and just a pain to read. I thought that maybe this was scrapped material from Rules, but all of the prose is B-grade when placed against the other novel. She was published in Rolling Stone and Vogue among other magazines and her books included Eve’s Hollywood, Slow Days, Fast Company and Sex and Rage. Some were called fiction, others non-fiction, but virtually all drew directly from her life – with only the names changed. Company,” her essay collection from 1977—also recently reissued—Babitz stops by the Chateau Marmont for a drink. Mid-conversation, she starts

Anything seemed possible – for art, that night,” she would remember. “Especially after all that red wine.” début, “ Eve’s Hollywood,” Babitz pays manic, tossed-off tribute “to the Didion-Dunnes for having to be who I’m not,” “to time immemorial and Here in this book, we discover Eve's adventures after she doesn't catch that train home in The Rules of Civility. And to David Giler who couldn't have turned out the way Mr. Major wanted either. What with Nancy Kwan and everything . . .All this sounds a little overblown and hysterical, I’ll grant you, and yet I believe now as I believed then that it’s accurate and true. And to Derek Taylor. Tell them, Derek, how great I am. Like you once introduced me to a Beatle as "the best girl in America." In a decade, people are going to be teaching courses centered around his work. As creative as Dinesen, but with a thoroughly American voice. Maybe the next Twain? She wrote of being driven home in her teens and kissed by an older man, Johnny Stompanato, who, in one of Hollywood’s most sensational scandals, was later murdered by the daughter of Lana Turner in what was ruled a justifiable homicide. I appreciate the author's sense of restraint. There seems to be as much in what he doesn't say, as what he does. I love the way he develops his characters. He doesn't overplay them, but lets me find each character in my own way. I like how he respects each character, thereby respecting the efforts of the reader as well.

I really loved the debut novel Rules of Civility, so I was delighted to find this book of six linked stories, which looks at what happened to character Evelyn Ross after she left New York. "Rules of Civility" was based around three friends - working girls Katey Kontent and Evelyn Ross, plus the wealthy and handsome Tinker Grey. Set in Jazz Age New York, the novel centres on Katey but, at the end of the novel, Eve leaves for home and somehow ends up in LA. These stories tell you how she made her way to Hollywood and what happens to her while she is there. However, it is not necessary to have read "Rules of Civility" to read these stories, which do stand alone. Brief yet marvelous, Eve in Hollywood is the sonnet for LA, whereas Rules of Civility was a love letter for New York. While essentially a novella, Eve in Hollywood is made up of six short stories, each from the perspective of a different character. I loved seeing Eve from the points of view of innocent bystanders (including Olivia DeHaviland!) instead of her Rules of Civility co-star, and then, finally, hearing from Eve her herself. She is a freight train.The six delightful stories, told from six different perspectives, take Eve from that cross-country train trip to just before the snapping of that celebrity photograph. In between, the Reader meets some wonderful characters. They aren’t “wonderful” in the sense that they are all pleasant, but they are all vivid and quite memorable. (One even foreshadows A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW!)