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Jackie Collins, who wrote flashy, sex-filled Hollywood thrillers, isn’t often thought of as a canonical Los Angeles novelist. I didn’t regard her as one, at least—until I read Sophie Gilbert’s essay about Collins, the latest entry in The Atlantic’s series “The Writer’s Way.” Collins wrote shiny 1980s “bonkbusters,” as one critic called them; in her novels, including her breakthrough, Hollywood Wives, she turned gossip about scheming producers and backbiting socialites into gripping, soapy dramas long before reality shows made such stories commonplace. Until I learned more about these works, they felt to me like a surface treatment of the complex city best captured by Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion, Octavia Butler, and Eve Babitz. It didn’t help that they were set in Beverly Hills, which, in my nearly five years living in L.A., I knew mostly as a nexus of unaffordable baubles and posh podiatrists’ offices. But Gilbert’s exploration of the writer and the enclave made me realize that her novels fit right into the city’s long literary tradition.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:
- The sadness of being the “Last Man”
- Cereal has strayed too far.
- The novel that looks death in the eye
- “Abstract,” a poem by Jane Hirshfield
In addition to creating steely characters who advanced the idea of middle age as a woman’s powerful prime, Collins was a “devoted” fan of Mickey Spillane, the hardest of hard-boiled-detective novelists, and the influence of noir comes through in her treatment of Beverly Hills: “Jackie genuinely loved the neighborhood for its clean white lines and endless sky,” Gilbert writes, “but she was also drawn to everything it contained beneath the surface: its roiling currents of fame, power, and degradation.” Beneath the shimmering surfaces, dark shadows always lurked.
“Sunshine or Noir?” Mike Davis asked in his nonfiction masterpiece about Los Angeles, City of Quartz. The binary of light and dark is ingrained in the L.A. canon; it animates not only Chandler’s literary potboilers, but also Babitz’s sad-girl stories, Butler’s numinous dystopias, and Didion’s alienated meditations. Collins was, like these writers, an insider with an outsider’s soul. “I don’t live the Hollywood lifestyle,” she told an interviewer (while sitting poolside at her stark-white mansion, mind you). “I move in it. I’m an observer.”
Gilbert does some observing of her own as she roams Jackie’s neighborhood—she refers to her by first name, like a friend—and she discovers that the city has changed a great deal since Collins’s time. The author captured a different Hollywood, before it was supplanted by “brand-activation opportunities and AI-drafted emails,” before celebrity became “its own art form.” L.A. in the 2020s requires a new kind of best seller, and the city still produces them. This summer in The Atlantic, Carolyn Kellogg wrote about the work of Angeleno Jordan Harper, whose latest novel, A Violent Masterpiece, concerns a TMZ-style celebrity videographer and a plotline ripped from the Epstein files. Steph Cha, Gary Phillips, and Ivy Pochoda “are also bringing today’s Los Angeles, in all its awful, beautiful chaos, to life on the page,” Kellogg notes. Their books don’t repudiate the existence or value of Collins’s 1980s spectacle: They’re proof that L.A. is constantly evolving, and also that it is perennially, insistently itself.
Jackie Collins Wrote Her Own Revolution
By Sophie Gilbert
The novelist imagined women enjoying equality in the bedroom and the boardroom. Are we any closer to living in that world?
What to Read
Guilty Pleasures, by Arielle Zibrak
The smutty hockey romance Heated Rivalry is passionately beloved, yet many of its fans admit to being embarrassed by their obsession with the TV series and novels that inspired it. (Ardent and committed lovers of other things—such as, say, hockey teams—tend not to feel the same way.) But Zibrak, an English professor at the University of Wyoming, insists that no novel, film, or show is more shameful, or less worth consuming, than any other is—and that even art dismissed as lowbrow has “much to tell us about ourselves and the world.” In this short, snappy tract, she confidently surveys the landscape of “guilty pleasures”—usually those written by, about, or for women—and unearths newfound complexity. She manages to cover the obscure 1850 best seller The Wide, Wide World as well as Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, along with critical essays from thinkers such as Hilton Als and Saidiya Hartman; each volume mentioned is worth tracking down. So are other volumes in the series this belongs to, NYU Press’s Avidly Reads. — Sophia Stewart
From our list: What to read to wake up your brain
Out Next Week
📚 Profiles in Cowardice, by Jacob Weisberg
📚 Exit Party, by Emily St. John Mandel
📚 The Perilous Fight, by Colin Kaepernick
Your Weekend Read
A Great Novel Becomes a Bad Show
By Jeremy Gordon
For many readers, the career of the novelist Bret Easton Ellis is the standard for mainstream literary stardom. The biopic writes itself: While still a college undergraduate, Ellis strikes it big with his debut novel, 1985’s Less Than Zero, an unsentimental stenography of disaffected, privileged young adults in swanky Los Angeles. It’s soon adapted into a movie starring Robert Downey Jr. and James Spader, which itself bears little resemblance to the book. Nevertheless, Ellis’s renown skyrockets. By the time he turns 30, he’s seemingly done it all: published multiple best sellers (American Psycho, The Rules of Attraction) filled with materialistic ennui, cheap sex, and lurid death; been mythologized as part of a literary “Brat Pack” alongside writers including Jay McInerney and Tama Janowitz; rubbed elbows with celebrities of the music and film worlds; made lots of money (for a writer, at least); and become addicted to drugs.
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