Down These Mean Streets, ‘90s Style...

Who says the L.A. riots were for naught? They seem to have spawned--perhaps resuscitated is more accurate--an urban noir genre that clearly has L.A. at its center. Literarily speaking, what could be more perfect? L.A., the end of the western continental line, the country’s last stubborn frontier of dreams even as we enter the next century, implodes and falls slowly amid silent screams and gallant efforts to save glittery face.

Our history of urban strife is relatively recent, and the image of deprivation still hangs on L.A. poorly, like an ill-fitting suit. Bebe Moore Campbell fictionalized the growing contradictions recently in “Brothers and Sisters,” but quickly fell prey to the very shallowness she sought to explore. In two new works, Larry Fondation’s “Angry Nights” and Frank Norwood’s “The Burning,” the writers return Los Angeles to its Raymond Chandler, pulp-fiction roots and view the city from the very bottom of the social order. It is there, in dark alleys and burned-out buildings, that both works discover a terrible beauty and wring from it a depth, elegance and poetry that is often startling because it is incidental, an unexpected byproduct of physical and spiritual impoverishment.

But it is also that strength that lapses into excess at times and renders L.A. a garish picture culled straight from the pages of X-Men or some such comic book; there’s too much mayhem, too much choreographed violence for anyone to relate to except, say, John Woo or Sam Peckinpah. At moments like these, you can practically hear a moody soundtrack swell, hear the sharp click of heels on rain-drenched asphalt as characters unwittingly head to yet another disaster. And suddenly you’re uncertain whether this is drama or simply high style: L.A. in one more undefinable setting, pulling a vanishing act. Foiled again.

“Angry Nights” is the more elusive of the two books, a series of cinematic vignettes. This is a work about the pathologies that attend living in places by default, not choice; the result, according to Fondation, is violence. characters plot murders, shoot up, have primal sex that is more rape than an expression of emotional need. The landscape--Norwalk, South Central and other long-forsaken corners of the city--is an unsettled stomach that vomits up disillusion. The young inhabitants of this world--Maria, Frankie, Poz and other appropriately multicultural sorts--do not speak so much as confirm fears; they are as terse as this 100-page work.

There is barely enough continuity in “Angry Nights’ ” collection of fleeting looks to compel the reader or leave a lasting impression. The art is clear, the life less so. I was often too aware of Fondation’s hand; the parameters of his ravaged world seem too carefully drawn. The whole frustration of living poor in L.A. is that the have-nots can clearly see what they are missing--the beaches, the uninterrupted spreads of bougainvillea--but here there is no such sense. One character named Paul (a refreshingly lucid sort) does recall excursions to the rose garden at the Huntington Library, but none of the others seem as exposed, or perhaps we have glimpsed too little of them.

“Angry Nights’ ” long suit is language; stretched taut to a bare minimum of descriptives, it shimmers with a real heat, though it also sometimes suffers from Dragnet-style artifice (“He did not have a mustache. His shirt was not blue.” Ouch.). An obviously skilled writer, Fondation needed to trust the horror a little more and rely less on writerly conceits to convey it.

Frank Norwood utilizes a fair number of conceits himself in “The Burning,” but emerges far more of a traditional storyteller than Fondation. Like Fondation, Norwood works in Los Angeles and knows it well, a fact reflected in his work, though the city is never actually named. And like “Angry Nights,” “The Burning” weaves together various tableaux and individual tales of grief and loss. But here the fabric is denser, more sweeping, spinning its emotional heft page by page. The story revisits the 1992 riots in a one-day-in-the-life-of-the-inner-city fashion, delving into the lives of its inhabitants, the police, those living warily outside the ghetto, which suddenly mushrooms to gigantic proportions--all in a mere 24 hours.

Like Fondation, Norwood’s sense of urgency is immediate and all-encompassing: Chapter 1 introduces us to a black man, slightly out of his mind, tottering on a high wire made of clothesline above a sea of anxious faces. The police arrive on the scene, ostensibly to coax the man out of a possible suicide attempt. Things go wrong, tempers flare and what follows sparks a nightmarish descent into a maelstrom of fire, flood and indiscriminate killing. Gruesome as all this sounds, it is merely the backdrop for the stories of many people: the rookie cop Larry, who flees for his life and finds unlikely salvation in Arletha Mae, a 15-year-old girl with an infant son and out-sized dreams; J.D., a vagrant veteran still trapped in the killing fields of Nam who transposes his destructive tendencies to the riot; Ben, an unemployed engineer who is forced to prowl the mean inner-city streets in search of his lost, brain-damaged son; the gang leader Slope and his posse, who preside over the madness with gleeful, if uncertain authority.

Norwood doesn’t shy away from any of his subjects; he dissects all with an abandon that infuses his work with the wild, unpredictable energy of the flames leaping skyward each chapter. There’s a visceral quality to Norwood’s ravenous attention to detail--the Greek-chorus hilarity of J.D.’s observations, the visual irony of the policeman Larry only able to prop himself up on an old toilet bowl in an abandoned building. Training his camera across this human panorama, Norwood finally zooms in on that rather small and old-fashioned thing: compassion. Exaggerated though it gets at times--sometimes unforgivably so--this book is really about making small human connections, and about the unbelievable lengths we must go to sometimes to make them. So it is only because he winds up in the hospital with no car that Ben befriends a Korean woman, Irene; it is only the riot that compels Arletha Mae to stand vigil over Larry, not a cop anymore but a scared 24-year-old kid.

The book’s most heart-rending scene is in fact one of its smallest: Ben’s retarded son, David, inadvertently wanders into Slope’s territory. One of Slope’s crew, 9-T, prepares to beat the boy, but something in the gang leader balks and he calls the off the attack. It is a brief, unresolved moment, one that still finds Slope “with mayhem in his heart, and the poor honky child whose legs were looking to run, only his nerves wouldn’t allow. And it stayed like that for what seemed longer than it was, the heat and hurt rising in 9-T’s thin, mean face until he could stand it no more, and he broke away and so did the boy, heading in opposite directions, David stumbling, 9-T just going.” Norwood has a passion for words and poetic phrasing, but he nonetheless knows when to leave such oddly tender moments alone, because it is just such moments that give the book its soul.

The danger in Norwood’s go-for-broke approach is going too far. In his haste to represent all segments of society Norwood renders Arletha Mae far more inarticulate than she needs to be. Such heavy-handedness is uncalled-for and puzzling, since Norwood fleshes out most other characters well with little regard to color or socioeconomic standing. Popular notions of what and who is black, white, Latino and Asian are actually stood on their heads: Ben is unemployed, the Good Samaritan who rescues him is black, the targets of the National Guardsmen’s wrath are Korean.

Norwood’s saving grace is his ability to get inside everyone’s logic and rattle around, stir up ghosts. Ben, cruising around the city in a desperate attempt to locate David, cystallizes all those ghosts when he unexpectedly gets to the bottom of his tormented feelings toward his son. He guiltily realizes he is experiencing “that most American of things, the desire to abandon and replace whatever was damaged or flawed.” Ben’s refrain in this book is rocker John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Ain’t That America,” but more to the point--for Ben and all other characters--would be, “Ain’t That L.A.”