LATIMES.COM/CALENDAR SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2019F9
BOOK REVIEW
Fictionweeks
on list
1.The Nickel Boys by Colson
Whitehead (Doubleday: $24.95)
American history told through
the story of two boys sentenced
to a reform school in Jim
Crow-era Florida.7- Dog Man for Whom the Ball Rolls
by Dav Pilkey (Graphic: $12.99)
Dog Man finds himself the target
of an all-new supervillain.
3- Inlandby Téa Obreht (Random
House: $27) A frontierswoman in
1893 Arizona Territory awaits the
return of her husband and elder
sons.
2- Where the Crawdads Singby
Delia Owens (G.P. Putnam’s
Sons: $26) A young woman living
on her own in the coastal
marshes of North Carolina
becomes a murder suspect.
43- On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
by Ocean Vuong (Penguin Press:
$26) A son in his late 20s writes a
letter to his mother who cannot
read, unearthing a family’s
history rooted in Vietnam.
12- Normal People by Sally Rooney
(Hogarth: $26) A high school star
athlete and a loner connect while
attending Trinity College in
Dublin.
19- Old Bones by Douglas Preston
and Lincoln Child (Grand Central:
$28) A young curator and
historian lead a search for the
infamous “Lost Camp” of the
Donner Party.
1- The Last Good Guy by T.
Jefferson Parker (Putnam: $27)
Private Investigator Roland Ford’s
hunt for a missing teenager finds
a group of American Nazis
hidden in a desert compound.
2- Chances Are by Richard Russo
(Knopf: $26.95) Three college
friends in their 60s reunite on
Martha’s Vineyard to recall the
mysterious disappearance of the
woman each of them loved.
4- Dangerous Man by Robert Crais
(G.P. Putnam’s Sons: $28) Elvis
Cole and Joe Pike attempt to
determine why a young Los
Angeles bank teller was seized by
kidnappers.
4Nonfiction
1.Three Women by Lisa Taddeo
(Avid Reader Press/Simon &
Schuster: $27) An investigative
look at the sex lives of three
American women for more than a
decade.7- Educatedby Tara Westover
(Random House: $28) A young
woman raised without schooling
by survivalists describes her path
to Cambridge University.
77- Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino
(Random House: $27) A
collection of essays on
self-deception, surging beneath
the surface of our lives from
scammer culture to reality
television.
3- The Subtle Art of Not Giving a
F*ckby Mark Manson
(HarperOne: $24.99) How not
being positive all the time will
make us become happier people.
122- The Pioneersby David
McCullough (Simon & Schuster:
$30) The Pulitzer Prize-winning
historian rediscovers the settling
of the Northwest Territory
through five pioneers.
16- Tiny But Mighty by Hannah Shaw
(Plume: $25) A San Diego kitten
rescuer on saving the most
vulnerable in the feline
population.
1- America is Better Than This by
Jeff Merkley (Twelve/Grand
Central) Senator writes about
child separation, border issues.
1- The Library Bookby Susan
Orlean (Simon & Schuster: $28)
The story of the 1986 fire at the
Los Angeles Public Library.
45- Make Your Bed by William H.
McRaven (Grand Central: $18)
The commencement speech
from Navy Seal, Adm. William H.
McRaven at the University of
Tex a s.
60- Maybe You Should Talk to
Someone by Lori Gottlieb
(Houghton Mifflin: $28) Behind
the scenes of a therapist’s world.
12BESTSELLERS
LOS ANGELES TIMES
SEPT. 8, 2019Fiction
1.Conversations with Friends by Sally
Rooney ($17)
2.The Overstoryby Richard Powers
($18.95)
3.The Goldfinchby Donna Tartt ($20)4.Good Omensby Neil Gaiman and Terry
Pratchett ($7.99)5.A Gentleman in Moscowby Amor
Towles ($17)Nonfiction
1.Calypsoby David Sedaris ($17.99)2.Born a Crimeby Trevor Noah ($18)
3.Sapiensby Yuval Noah Harari ($22.99)
4.How to See by Thich Nhat Hanh
($9.95)5.The Spy and the Traitorby Ben
Macintyre ($11.99)Rankings are based on chain
results and a weekly poll of 125
Southland bookstores. For an
extended list: http://www.latimes.com/
booksPAPERBACKS
latimes.com
/bookclubL.A. Times Book Club
Join the discussion:
latimes.com/bookclub
facebook.com/groups/latbookclubMortician Caitlin Doughty is
dead-set on changing the Ameri-
can funeral industry. The former
teenage goth took her first job in
the death biz in San Francisco
when she was 22. Sometime
around shaving her first corpse
and operating the 1,800-degree cre-
matory oven, she locked eyes with
the Grim Reaper and never
blinked.
After graduating from mortu-
ary school, she opened her own fu-
neral home, wrote two memoirs
and developed a web series, “Ask a
Mortician,” where she educates
the morbidly curious (ahem, all of
us) on such taboo topics as necro-
philia and sewing a mouth shut.
Her approach is wickedly funny
while packing in concrete info.
In her new book, “Will My Cat
Eat My Eyeballs?” Doughty an-
swers the frank queries of teen-
agers and other kids (“Can I keep
my parents’ skulls after they
die?”). At her Los Angeles apart-
ment decorated with vintage curi-
os, we talked about what’s missing
from the typical American funeral.Why are you on this mission to
talk about death?
I want to tell other people what
I am seeing. I feel like I have some
privileged access, like I was almost
inducted into a secret society. But
why don’t we all have this knowl-
edge? That’s what got me so inter-
ested in the history of the Ameri-
can funeral industry and how
death has become so hidden,
corporate, and away from the
family.What’s wrong with the funeral
industry?
There’s a complete lack of
family involvement in any sort of
ritual or hands-on experiences
around the body — 100 or 50 years
ago, families entirely took care of
the body, the funeral and the buri-al. It was 100% the family and now
it’s 100% a business that does it.
There’s this perception that you
have to immediately turn a body
over to a funeral director, and only
they know what to do with thisunwieldy dangerous body. But
listen, it’s not going to start im-
mediately decomposing or re-
leasing Ebola. It’s your mom.Why did you decide to address
kids?
Kids are so articulate and
curious. They’re allowed to have
these dark questions and bring
them to their parents, and the
parents will engage them on it.
The idea is also to give older peo-
ple a vocabulary. To be able to talk
about death not only to their kids
but to themselves. I’m trying to
reinforce with my friendly voice
again and again that it’s OK to be
interested in death. It doesn’t
mean you’re a disturbed or bro-
ken, it means you’re curious.
There’s nothing wrong with asking
about death.Wappler is the author of “Neon
Green” and a former co-host of the
Pop Rocket podcast.Bringing new life to the topic of death
By Margaret Wappler
‘WILL MYCat Eat My Eye-
balls?” author Caitlin Doughty.Mara ZehlerMost longtime Angelenos
learned early to read between the
lines.
Los Angeles has been both ele-
vated and suffocated by the
strength of its legends — about the
promise or calamity of this place.
These stories are rooted, of course,
in a deep history of civic boost-
erism — real estate narratives,
spleen-venting newspaper col-
umns and all manner of quick-
money speculators. Those entice-
ments, while inventions, have long
legs and the sort of staying power
that continues to shape conversa-
tion and sense of place, both inside,
and out of, city limits.
As summer wanes and waves of
travelers looking for that Los Ange-
les — of orange crate vistas and
Hollywood art direction — make
their last loop, the season calls for a
history refresher course about Los
Angeles, this city that bloomed out
of the desert.
Gary Krist’s “The Mirage Fac-
tory: Illusion, Imagination and the
Invention of Los Angeles” (now in
paperback), tunnels to the roots of
these invention narratives, identi-
fying the individual threads, and
shows how they began to work in
tandem to create a fantastic tapes-
try. Krist’s elegant and expansive
study charts the region’s growth in
the first 30 years of the 20th century
— from an agricultural town with a
population of 100,000 on the edges
of imagination, to a dazzling desti-
nation spot beyond par.
While Krist explores Los Ange-
les’ rapid and spectacular transfor-
mation, the book more specifically
considers the manner in which
that “mirage” was willed into be-
ing: There is a seductive power in
hope of what might beand Los An-
geles sold that to the world.
By juxtaposing the trajectories
of three larger-than-life figures —
engineer William Mulholland, who
brought water to the desert; direc-
tor D.W. Griffith, who spun dreams
projected on screens; and evan-
gelist Aimee Semple McPherson,
who sold spiritual exploration and
salvation — Krist illuminates a
compelling version of the city’s
drawing-board years. Each figure
played a key role in shaping an
evocative notion of the region’s
sense of potentiality.
As Krist points out, while all
three were all outsized dreamers
who raked in measurable success,
they also “all had elements of the
swindle about them.” They all fell
— dramatically.
If you’re curious — or dubious —
about the fortitude of these early
conceits, Shawn Levy’s “The Cas-
tle on Sunset” details the multi-
chambered history of the famed
hideaway Chateau Marmont. The
book picks up where “The Mirage
Factory” leaves off, exploring the
power of myth and place. Like Mul-
holland, McPherson and Griffith,
Marmont founder Fred Horowitz
nursed a dream to build a French
chateau on the side of a hill where
Los Angeles ended and Beverly
Hills’ bridle trails began.
Much like Krist’s exploration of
L.A. as an activation point, Levy’s
narrative concurs: “The history of
California is the history of people
reaching for the impossible and,
often, stretching far enough to
grasp it.”
Horowitz envisioned the
chateau as a luxury apartment
building at the edges of the city, ris-
ing out of a still-wild plot of land —
with views of Mt. Baldy and Santa
Catalina and the dusting of city
lights demarking a growing city.
He got the seven-story struc-
ture built, perched seductively
above a still-developing stretch of
the city. It opened in early 1929. But
he didn’t envision a stock market
crash. Wracked by the Depression,
he had to walk away — and in the
ensuing decades the Chateau
would take on different character-
istics, often informed by the life of
the changing serpentine thorough-
fare, Sunset Boulevard, it surrepti-
tiously overlooked.
The chateau, Levy writes, “be-
gan as a dream for high living [and]
settled into a steady hum of quiet
gentility....”
“The Castle on Sunset” is
stitched through savory anecdotes
that navigate us through an ever-
shifting city, as the building’s own
story arc mirrors Hollywood’s vari-
ous transitions: from the studio-
run golden era, to Laurel Canyon’s
singer-songwriter scene, to the
years of the comedy clubs and pri-
vate bottle service rooms. Over the
decades, writers, painters, photog-
raphers, directors, actors and sing-
ers have been inspired or rejuve-
nated by their environs.
The hotel also gained a reputa-
tion for being a “safe harbor.” Dur-
ing and post-World War II, Europe-
an exiles made themselves at
home. In the ’50s and ’60s, when Af-
rican American entertainers had
limited offerings for lodging, then-owner Erwin Brettauer made it
known that “we have no color bar-
rier.” Duke Ellington was among
the first to take up extended resi-
dence. Others would follow:
Quincy Jones, Pearl Bailey, Nina
Simone, Odetta, Sarah Vaughan.
But for all of its muted glory, the
Marmont hasn’t quite overcome its
early ’80s, headline-grabbing trag-
edy: John Belushi’s death by over-
dose in one of the bungalows. The
story catapulted the Marmont out
of its quiet hideaway status and
gave it, for a time, a ghoulish cachet
that its staff worked for decades to
plaster over.
In a city where the past is often
rewritten by wrecking balls, the
Marmont has remained a unique
portal to the past. With more re-
cent tweaks, however, manage-
ment is finding itself performing a
curious sleight of hand — restyling
common areas to the era of the ’20s,
upgrading some rooms in the
styles of the ’40s and ’50s. In this
sense, they are purely playing into
guests’ imaginations and expecta-
tions: “It’s not a real past,” a staffer
tells Levy. “The past is really not in-
teresting.” They’re not just sellingrooms but atmosphere, a frame of
mind — enabling a guest to
glimpse a different self.
Here’s a by-the-way to all of
that: Novelist Janet Fitch’s new
book, “The Chimes of a Lost Cathe-
dral” (her follow-up to “The Revo-
lution of Marina M”), begins post-
Russian Civil War with the young
poet Marina Markova on her own,
sifting through the devastation of
the former St. Petersburg.
The author of “White Oleander”
and “Paint It Black”— both set in
her native Los Angeles — had set
out to write a third novel set in
1920s L.A. The backstory, Fitch ex-
plains, is that she first conceived of
Marina in a short story set in Los
Angeles in the early 1920s. Marina
was an immigrant from Russia
who was now working as a cham-
bermaid at the Alexandria Hotel —
where coincidentally D.W. Griffith
also first landed.
The story, “Room 721” was pub-
lished in the literary journal Black
Clock, and Fitch had hoped to de-
velop it into a novel, but Marina
eluded her. “I just didn’t know what
she was going to be, if I could inhab-
it her,” she said recently.
Fitch flipped the question: Who
was she? What had made her a per-
son who would have come to Los
Angeles? What would have enticed
or provoked her? She’d have to
reach back into Marina’s origin
story. “I had to really live her.”
Serendipity would lead her to
this leg of the journey, back to Rus-
sia and into two books she didn’t
intend to write but rather an-
nounced themselves. Might she re-
visit Marina in L.A. now knowing
more about her? “I wouldn’t rule it
out.”George is a Los Angeles writer. She
is the author of “After/Image: Los
Angeles Outside the Frame”
(Angel City Press) and won a 2018
Grammy for her liner notes for
“Otis Redding Live at the Whisky
A Go Go.”Dreamers of the city’s past
Stories of local visionaries, the Chateau Marmont and a fictional poet take flight
A PLANEsoars over the then-new Los Angeles City Hall in the book “The Mirage Factory.”USC Libraries / California Historical Society CollectionA POSTCARDfeatures an illustration of the Chateau Marmont.
The luxury hotel’s history is detailed in “The Castle on Sunset.”DoubledayBy Lynell George