A frozen moment. And then the moment passed when Laurie collapsed theatrically in the seat beside me. “The drive here was craaaazy,” she said. 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.

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. In this chain of six richly detailed and atmospheric stories, each told from a different perspective, Towles unfolds the events that take Eve to the heart of Old Hollywood. Beginning in the dining car of the Golden State Limited in September 1938, we follow Eve to the elegant rooms of the Beverly Hills Hotel, the fabled tables of Antonio’s, the amusement parks on the Santa Monica piers, the afro-Cuban dance clubs of Central Avenue, and ultimately the set of Gone with The Wind. 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.

About the Author

Company,” her essay collection from 1977—also recently reissued—Babitz stops by the Chateau Marmont for a drink. Mid-conversation, she starts

Babitz lived for a year in New York and for a few months in Rome, but Los Angeles was her home and inspiration, a playground for self-invention, a “gigantic, sprawling ongoing studio”. In her essay Daughters of the Wasteland, she remembered her disbelief that others could find Los Angeles empty and unlivable. 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. The ending doesn't feel as much like an ending as a segue into the next chapter, which, sadly is not there. I would like to journey on with Eve to the rest of the places on her "list". I sat down on the grass, waited for the nausea—from the smell but also from being six weeks pregnant—to pass, for my emotions to settle. I kept expecting to feel some particular way about the lunch, like upset or sad or frightened. Instead I felt a jumble of all those things. What I also felt and what I mostly felt, though, was excitement. Eve and I were in a story together, like I’d thought. I’d just been mistaken about the kind. It wasn’t a romantic comedy. Was something far more primal, far more urgent—a Greek myth. And she wasn’t in the phone book or West Hollywood or anyplace else I’d looked because, really, she was in Hades, the underworld, where she was being held captive by a ferocious dog with three heads, the heads: isolation, madness, and despair. ( That’s what her person and space stank of. Filth, decay, and squalor, yes; but actually isolation, madness, and despair.) My task was to rescue her from that monster, deliver her from darkness. surfeit of style. In “ Sex and Rage,” Babitz’s novel from 1979, reissued this month by Counterpoint, the protagonist is a Babitz double namedShe 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. From that point on, Eve always took my calls, and I made them, several times a week, for years and years. The rapport that eluded us in person, where every encounter was abrupt, stilted, awkward, was, over the phone, effortless. I didn’t respond because I didn’t know how to. She wasn’t thanking me, and I don’t think I’d have been able to bear it if she was. (Eve didn’t do humbug emotions like gratitude.) There was a half smile on her face, and she was looking at me intently, something I couldn’t recall her ever having done before. I felt the need to speak, only I couldn’t think what to say. Couldn’t think, couldn’t think.

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.Near the end of Amor Towles’s bestselling novel Rules of Civility, the fiercely independent Evelyn Ross boards a train from New York to Chicago to visit her parents, but never disembarks. Six months later, she appears in a photograph in a gossip magazine exiting the Tropicana Club in Los Angeles on the arm of Olivia de Havilland. 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 And a minute after that, Mirandi was at the table too, and an energetic discussion ensued about the best route to take from the Eastside to Hollywood at midday. 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. 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!)

To a lot of people, the idea of an extended bed rest sounds like heaven. But the truth is, lying in bed you get no respect and being a burn patient is a visit to torture land,” she wrote. “Everyone keeps telling you to relax, which you have absolutely no way of doing anyway.” I hadn’t really liked Elizabeth Taylor until she took Debbie Reynolds’ husband away from her, and then I began to love Elizabeth Taylor,” she once wrote. 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.

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 Anything seemed possible – for art, that night,” she would remember. “Especially after all that red wine.”