“L.A. Woman” is written in a deliberately digressive, erratic, boisterous and whimsical style, a style like no other. There seems to be no time, no progression, no development – in other words, it happens all at once. Superimposed are the present of 1982 (when Babitz was thirty-nine) and many layers of time before that. If there is melancholy here as it must be, it is the negative imprint of a very demonstrative and irrepressible agency of claims and boasts and crushes and pet hates and curiosities and names, of drugs, of beaches and buses and places, of weird or adorable men and women, which all seem to light up simultaneously as elements in the proud, over the top exposure of a way of life, the way of life of the L.A. Woman, which on some level is a projection of Eve Babitz herself. “Jim” (we know which Jim), a man simultaneously adored and babied and worried over, works like an emblem kept half hidden and flashed only briefly; what she says about him, ‘no one else was allowed to capture imaginations but him,’ might apply to her as well. But the artifice of the text, its ornamental and playful slant, makes such conjecture rather dubious. In the foreword, Babitz writes that at the time she wrote L.A. woman, she thought that it was going to be the book that took over the world, and indeed it induces that boastful, brilliant sparkle that makes your heart beat faster. It strikes you as something you haven’t seen before, something you feel grateful for having encountered.