Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A.

A memoir or a not-quite memoir--Babitz writes about LA (definitely a character here), her life as a 30ish woman in the pre-AIDS era, her friends and lovers. She uses pseudonyms for real people, some who went on to successful public careers have been identified.

I enjoyed LA as character--the roads, the winds, the long trip to Bakersfield (the road is better now), the crowds of actors and artists hoping to make it big. Some things are the same these days, but some are very different.

What I found interesting was what is missing--the Vietnam War. This book was published in 1977. Amongst all these men, where are the vets? They had to have been there? Was this an intentional exclusion, or were those men truly absent from her life--whether show more they were married with kids in the suburbs, or suffering from PTSD and not hanging out in crowded, loud bars. show less

Hmm.
My immediate reason for reading this was as background before reading a joint biography of Babitz and Joan Didion, having read much Didion in the last few years. I had previously wanted to read Babitz to know more about 1970’s California, having grown up with a soundtrack of the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac, to counterpoint British progressive rock.
This book is a collection of autobiographical fragments published in 1977, and in a magpie fashion knowingly depicts a very privileged white Californian life.
With Didion’s writing about California she is always very much present, but the story isn’t about her, whereas with Babitz, she is central to the story, which for me very much dated the pieces.
There are descriptions to admire, but show more more indulgence and attempts to shock, that diminish the writing.
As cliché quotes: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Glad to have read it, but just the one book by Babitz is needed to satisfy my curiosity. show less

The book delivers on its promise--and then some. I read it twice in a single month, and participated at a local Hollywood book club (which added to this novel's mystique, as we discussed places mentioned in the book that are still alive and kicking). Eve's (and yes, I feel like I can speak of her using her first name, because of the intimacy shared within the pages of her novel) passion for life is something I both admire and respect.

I loved Eve Babitz’s novel, Eve’s Hollywood, which came out in 1974 and captured her fans of all sorts, as she exposed the 1960s through mostly the L.A. scene, all from the inside. In that book, she casually dropped famous names from rock music, the art scene, as well as some of the biggest film stars, not as dry reporting, but from her personal and legendary experience. She was linked “romantically” (as the press of that time wrote) with so many stars. She was drinking heavily, partying hardy, dropping all manner of drugs, and very active sexually, as she was on her way to becoming a legend.

The style of that previous book was looser and much more scattered than Slow Days, Fast Company, which while still describing the excesses show more of the 1960s and 70s, is better written. Yet, while containing a more refined style of writing, I have to say that if I’d read this title first, I’m not sure I would have read more of her work, as I so loved the wildness of what she was living and writing. In a way, I miss some of the excesses and the pure chaos of the first book, but I still loved this book. She will be in the middle of describing and explaining a scene, when she will drop killer lines that are so clever, wild, and unexplained, but that fit the story perfectly. I’ll come back to this review after I reflect on the book some more. show less

A NYRB classic, Babitz in her witty singular voice offers up Los Angeles and Hollywood of the Sixties and Seventies, not long after my first enchanted visit, and her incomparable portraits and badass tales. I had a good time with this book.

Babitz at her best is a great writer, and there are a number of essays in here that are compelling and pack a serious punch. They look at the world, dissect it, and look some more. Unrelenting, but not cruel, curious, not vicious. Read it.

A NYRB classic, Babitz in her witty singular voice offers up Los Angeles and Hollywood of the Sixties and Seventies, not long after my first enchanted visit, and her incomparable portraits and badass tales. I had a good time with this book.