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Slow days, fast company
178 pages
A sun-drenched, martini-soaked love letter to the glamorous decay of 1970s Los Angeles.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like lounging by a kidney-shaped pool in 1970s Los Angeles, a cold drink in hand, listening to the smartest, most glamorous person at the party spill everyone's secrets. The pace is delightfully meandering, drifting from drug-fueled socialite binges to sun-baked afternoons in Palm Springs with an effortless, languid grace. The prose is sharp, witty, and unapologetically hedonistic, capturing the hazy, Santa Ana wind-swept atmosphere of Southern California with aphoristic brilliance. It is a book steeped in a mood of glamorous decay and restless yearning, perfectly balancing cynical observation with a deep, romantic love for the city. This will absolutely delight readers who crave atmospheric, character-driven vignettes about messy, beautiful people navigating the intoxicating intersection of art, celebrity, and fleeting romance.
- Mood
- sun-baked
- hazy
- languid
- nostalgic
- Tone
- wry
- glamorous
- observant
- witty
- hedonistic
- Pace
- meandering
- Themes
- the allure of Los Angeles · fleeting romance · female desire · bohemian hedonism · glamour and decay
- The writing
- Effortlessly cool, sharp, and aphoristic, drenched in the sensory details of 1970s Southern California.
- The arc
- Moves from a state of restless, sun-drenched yearning through various fleeting encounters, settling into a wry, self-aware acceptance of life's beautiful transience.
- Who it's for
- Readers who love glamorous, slightly cynical, and deeply atmospheric writing about messy, beautiful people living on the edge of Hollywood society.
Content notes
- drug use
- alcohol consumption
- sexual content
- toxic relationships
About the book
"There was a time when no one burned hotter than Eve Babitz. Possessing skin that radiated "its own kind of moral laws," spectacular teeth, and a figure that was the stuff of legend, she seduced seemingly everyone who was anyone in Los Angeles for a long stretch of the 1960s and '70s. But there was one man who proved elusive, and so Babitz did what she did best, she wrote him a book. She also pulled off a remarkable sleight of hand: Slow Days, Fast Company far exceeds its mash-note premise. It is a full-fledged and full-bodied evocation of a bygone Southern California. In ten sun-baked, Santa Ana wind-swept sketches, Babitz re-creates a Los Angeles of movie stars distraught over their success; socialites on three-day drug binges, evading their East Coast banking husbands; soap-opera actors worried that tomorrow's script will kill them off; Italian femme fatales even more fatal than she is. And she even leaves L.A. sometimes, spending an afternoon at the house of flawless Orange County suburbanites, a day among the grape pickers of the Central Valley, a weekend in Palm Springs where her dreams of romance fizzle and her only solace is Virginia Woolf. In the end it doesn't matter if Babitz ever gets the guy--she seduces us"--
Description from Open Library.
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