Los Angeles fiction

I was just in Los Angeles for a few days, and its gorgeous weather, abundant green foliage, vivid bougainvillea, and stretches of stunning beaches were all so appealing, and so evocative of all the Los Angeles novels and movies we have all read and seen. (We won't talk about the terrible traffic and the smog....) Even the street names are so familiar, so intensely L.A.: Sunset Boulevard, Laurel Canyon Boulevard, Mulholland Drive.... And the different parts of L.A. have such magical names: Venice, Santa Monica, Hollywood.... When I was there this past weekend, for some reason I started thinking about Nathanael West's novel "The Day of the Locust," which portrays the best and worst about L.A. I also thought of Joan Didion's novel "Play It As It Lays," and her essay collection "The White Album"; both of these evoke a sort of part-dreamy, part-alien, part-scorched, part-fertile Los Angeles - all the stereotypes, all the contradictions we all know, but so beautifully expressed as only Didion can. I also remembered living in Glendale for a few months as a child, near the famed Forest Lawn Cemetery, and so thought too of Evelyn Waugh's "The Loved One," the satirical novel about the funeral industry set in L.A. and featuring a very Forest Lawn-reminiscent cemetery. Although it has been many years since I read any of these books, each of them sticks with me - not the details or even characters or plots, but the feelings, the atmospheres, the tones. Although as a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, I occasionally criticize Los Angeles, there is something seductive about it, something mythic, something that draws you in.