Stories and a novella suggest that Rifkin is what might have
happened had Nathanael West lived on and been even more talented.
"Encino could be a sunny place to have fun, resembling countryside
France burnished at sunset, or maybe the Midwest, the smalltown
parts where kids trade baseball cards and mailmen sleep in their
trucks." Rifkin's centerpiece is the title novella. Richard Leviton
has managed to eke out a life in LA, doing a little writing, a
little acting, marrying three times, and having a child, but like
everyone else he's lonely. An early-life fling with the eccentric
Jaime Gorski seems innocent enough-he ignores the letters she
writes him. But years later, when he follows a mysterious impulse
to buy an SUV, there's Gorski again. Leviton is reintroduced to her
life, and soon enough to her confused son. Complications abound:
the son, Peter, rips off the SUV and disappears, Leviton winds up
having a close encounter with the kid's girlfriend, Peter ends up
working at a strip club to find himself, Jaime worries as she
enters old age. But what's notable here is the vast and random
portrait of LA that emerges, seemingly picking up from where West
left off in tragedy and carrying it through the subsequent
meanderings of modernity. Every bit as pleasing as the plot is
Rifkin's language, full of wit, truth, and spot-on nonsequiturs. No
less pleasing are the meditative shorter pieces, like "The Idols of
Sickness," a stream-of-consciousness treatment of defect starting
with strung testicles and ending with an inherited modeling agency,
and "After the Divorce," a boy's journey to see an estranged father
among the star homes, a meeting bound to lead to disappointment,
though someone says, "Even today, I can hold out as long as the sun
is up for the story to have been about hope." Exquisite. (Kirkus
Reviews)
Five stories track boys and men as they navigate among the ghosts and mirages of greater Los Angeles. Rifkin's male protagonists are part fuck-up, part primal force, and full of longing -- for fathers, for mothers, for sex, for faith, for just getting it right.
A one-time actor staggers toward his demise and clings to a ledge of possibly lunatic faith; a young boy is haunted by cosmic loneliness in the form of a medical encyclopedia; the heir to an absent father's wealth can't quite bring himself to claim his portion.
Far from the metropolitan glitz of Hollywood and downtown L.A., these stories take place in the off-the-grid, suburban neighborhoods of stucco-dwellers. Among car lots and strip malls, dusty brown hillsides and oil derricks, the ordinary becomes epic in the contested terrain between faith and doubt, love and sex, spirit and flesh, reality and illusion.
Alan Rifkin is a writer for "Los Angeles Magazine." He lives in Long Beach, CA.
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