While photographer Sam Glanzrock in Eve Babitz’s L.A. Woman overdoses in Paris, Leah’s admired big brother Lazar goes there ‘to study mime at the Sorbonne, and French, and write poetry sitting by the river Seine. He’d read all about the artists who did that, and he was to be one of them.’ But the visit is an immediate disaster: he’s doesn’t know any French and is far too unstable, in fact raving mad. ‘The square of cafés looked like an arena. Lazar felt he was in the center on his balcony. He knew he needed energy if he wanted to be in the arena. He took out his pill bottle and swallowed his medication. He waited a proper time until the recognizable wave of relief came over him. And then he jumped toward the painted Paris sky.’ Only, Lazar will not die like Sam. After that event, he is not only manic-psychotic but has also lost a leg and an arm, or even two legs and an arm, I don’t remember. When Leah, who has meanwhile gone through a Miami phase of being prostituted by a guy called Artie, getting pregnant, aborting, and touring as vocalist of an all-male band, eventually ventures to see Lazar again in some hotel room, he is a pathetic relic moving around somehow on a skateboard, still ordering everyone around. Hyperactive and delusional, he is convinced to be a rare genius, writing a novel and sending any number of weird letters to magazines and publishers. From the very first pages of the novel, Leah has to witness Lazar’s slow spiralling out of control. It starts with him being a precocious youth in love with his own excitement, lording over Leah and saying things like ‘You may sit at the very foot of my bed but you are not to touch me or feel sorry for me. Do you understand?’ Lazar is all exuberance, wildly in love with a girl who seems rather overwhelmed and suspicious of him. ‘“This is not just a feeling,” Lazar said to his sister. “It is a calling. I was meant to be a great lover.” (…) Leah would have been much more jealous of her brother’s distraction had he not included her in almost everything. (…) “We are engaged – the three of us.”’ He is very close to their mum, who has a drinking habit and suffers from manic depression. He dances with her (‘Leah had no idea that Lazar could move so well’), and, pretending to search for the right college, goes on extended travels with her. The father is a mostly absent business man. At some point Lazar even has sex with Leah. Leah feels remote: ‘She was going to be an extraterrestrial creature. A super-being. She didn’t know for sure, but she thought it would transform her from a regular, American girl to a creature who could communicate and mate with boys from other planets.’