First the East Coast — John A. McDermott’s THE LAST SPIRITS OF MANHATTAN is a literary novel about what the author says was a real party Alfred Hitchcock threw in the 1950s at a house owned by McDermott’s relatives. I don’t know if it’s really based-on-truth (authors fudge that stuff a lot) but I also don’t mind. I picked the book up for the historical fantasy aspect — as I write it, it’s interesting to read it — and for the cool cover (my apologies to the artist for forgetting to note the name).
Carolyn, one of the lead protagonists in the ensemble cast, is an upperclass young woman contemplating a marriage proposal; she’s not really into him but then again, what else is she going to do with her life? Meanwhile Peter, a hustling young Manhattanite winds up hunting for a haunted house for Hitch’s party; trouble is, Manhattan’s developed and redeveloped and built up to the point old haunted houses are rare. As it turns out, Carolyn’s family have a house that looks spooky enough — it’ll do even though obviously there won’t be any real ghosts there to disturb Hitchcock, his wife Alma, Henry Fonda (then acting in Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man) and the other guests.
It’s an interesting setup but as I’ve mentioned often enough, literary fiction isn’t usually to my taste. McDermott’s literary stylings didn’t hold my interest, which is not his fault; I also found the more interesting stories (Carolyn and Peter) lost amidst the ensemble cast — I was much less interested in Henry Fonda’s tormented angst, for instance. Ultimately this didn’t work for me.
Now, the West Coast — ECOLOGY OF FEAR: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster by Mike Davis is a late 1990s jeremiad showing the utter insanity of massive multi-million dollar development in Southern California given what an insanely unstable environment it is. Earthquakes. Wild animals becoming increasingly dangerous as we move into their territory. Drought. Tornadoes. Wildfire. All of which Big Money makes worse.
Malibu homeowners, Davis says, oppose sensible firefighting measure such as controlled burns because the ash and smoke hurts their property values; nevertheless if they lose their homes they can count on the state government reimbursing them. By contrast, frequent tenement fires in LA’s poor districts leave tenants unhoused, with little support, and the fire department can’t even bother to make the required fire inspections on the rat-traps.
It’s an interesting read that branches into disaster movies set in LA (he dismisses Blade Runner as having little to do with the real city’s architecture and locations), then a closing chapter on the future that predicts the growth of exurbs and gated communities will kill the suburbs as the suburbs killed the downtown. This stuff was interesting, even if I don’t buy his conclusions, but it also left me feeling like I’d finished one of the 19th century fin de siecle prophesies of doom like the Victorian books Stephen Arata writes about. I’m curious whether much has changed in the quarter-century since the book came out, but not enough to research it.
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