‘L.A. Women’ review: Ella Berman revisits ’60s Laurel Canyon scene

Ella Berman’s third novel, “L.A. Women,” is set in Laurel Canyon between the mid-’60s and mid-’70s. It’s a perfect place and time for a novelist looking to establish a tense atmosphere: The dreamy, free-love atmosphere slowly curdled into hard drugs and the Manson murders. Sunshine turned to smog. Joni Mitchell’s sprightly “Ladies of the Canyon” album gave way to the melancholy “Blue.”

A scene early in the novel captures the dynamic, as locals assemble for a party in the home of Lane, an acclaimed novelist and journalist, while the bloom begins to fall off the rose: “They are here because their world was so vivid, so beautiful, that they are all somehow willing to settle for a ghost version of it.”

That line comes from Lane’s perspective, and she has reasons to be cynical: In 1975, her marriage is crumbling, her second novel has taken a beating with the critics, and her estranged friend and fellow writer, Gala, has gone missing. That last plot point is the novel’s drivetrain, because her disappearance exposes so many things about the culture of the time: flightiness, despair, drugs, loss and fear.

Before their split, Lane and Gala were at the same time friends and rivals. In the late ’60s, Lane was a nationally famous explainer of California culture, hard-edged but with a literary bent. (Think Joan Didion.) Gala was the free-spirit hanger-on in the city’s club scene, falling for a rock singer and happily dishing about her Southern California misadventures. (Think Eve Babitz, with a dash of Carrie Bradshaw.) Gala gave Lane some valuable tough-love advice about the draft of her first novel, which moved Lane to open some doors for Gala at big-ticket magazines. They covered different worlds. What would be the harm?

Over the course of Berman’s novel, it becomes clear the answer is plenty. As the narrative shuttles back and forth between 1965 and 1976, Berman shows how messily entangled the two women’s lives are, and that their influence on each other as writers is more porous than either wants to believe. “L.A. Women” is in part a mystery novel, as Lane investigates Gala’s disappearance. But she’s questioning the sincerity of her motivations along the way. After all, her next book is a roman à clef about Gala, and writing about a woman who might be in dire straits would be exploitative. Or, rather, more exploitative.

Gala’s disappearance also prompts Lane to wonder what kind of fiction about her old friend would be most accurate. Is she a fallen starlet or a woman reinventing herself? She observes that one version of Gala “would end up like so many L.A. women before her — violet and vomit-streaked in a stranger’s bed at the Chateau, or maybe she would buy a baby grand piano and move to the coast to start over, bright-eyed and sober with a new sense of wonder for the world.” Resolving that question is as key to the book as Gala’s location.

In the meantime, Berman sets plenty of scenes in some of L.A.’s most famous landmarks: the Magic Castle, Musso & Frank’s, the Chateau Marmont, and, hey, look, it’s painter Ed Ruscha driving down Wilshire Boulevard! Such cameos feel a little tacked-on and obligatory, candy-colored as a Hockney painting. But the novel’s truest setting is an emotional one, anyway; Berman’s gift is for revealing the ways that attachment warps into envy, and how we rationalize or ignore those emotions even while they consume us.

Berman suggests that, in some ways, the culture pushed both Gala and Lane into becoming adversaries. Though their writing styles are distinct, they’re framed by others as rivals, particularly by men: “Isn’t that what most men wanted — to flatten women not into individuals with needs and wants and requirements, but into a vague, out-of-focus mass?” Men who fail to follow the rules wind up in the city’s cultural thresher as well: The women’s mutual friend, Charlie, a high-powered music-industry power broker (think David Geffen) has his status threatened once his homosexuality becomes an open secret.

“L.A. Women” is in many ways a breezy book, gentle about its crises and suggesting early on that a happy ending is in the offing. But thematically it has teeth. Media culture, Laurel Canyon culture, gender culture all conspire to keep Lane and Gala from being what a writer needs most to be: honest. For all of her storied flintiness, Lane strains to keep her feelings about Gala at a distance, and Gala refuses to acknowledge that she needs Lane to anchor her recklessness. But admitting to that sort of need requires a decade of emotional work, and the novel’s strongest moments show how deep the struggle can run.

“Writers are always selling someone out,” the Lane-like journalist Janet Malcolm once famously wrote. The reasons for that are myriad: money, attention, a good story, status. “L.A. Women” captures that range with admirable sensitivity. But at its core it grasps that the challenge is more fundamental: How we can treat the people close to us more as human beings and less like commodities. Or, as Gala puts it: “It was infinitely more satisfying to be somebody rather than somebody’s plus-one.”

Athitakis is a writer in Phoenix and author of “The New Midwest.”