L.A.

L.A. is more than a point of arrival or departure in the novel: it is a place where family ties, the entertainment industry, and political history repeatedly meet. Its airports carry Zoyd Wheeler toward a failing marriage and Frenesi Gates toward a secret rendezvous; its studios preserve the labor conflicts that shaped Hubbell Gates; and its modern office developments turn an old landscape of cinematic illusion into a world of finance and surveillance. Across these different periods, the city offers routes toward reunion and reinvention, but rarely the reconciliation its travelers hope to find.

Family journeys and partings

At Zoyd and Frenesi’s wedding, L.A. enters the scene through Renée, Frenesi’s cousin, who has recently broken up with her boyfriend and comes from the city hoping that the celebration might help her. Zoyd remembers her among the bride’s relatives: a large young woman wearing a minidress printed with Frank Zappa’s image. Her arrival places the family gathering within reach of L.A., even as the scene’s focus remains on the newlyweds beneath a fig tree. For Zoyd, the city is part of the wider social world surrounding the marriage he will later struggle to preserve.

Years afterward, the direction of travel reverses. When Prairie Wheeler leaves with Billy Barf and the Vomitones, Zoyd and Prairie have agreed to keep in touch through Sasha Gates, who lives in L.A. The arrangement gives the departure a fragile practical link to home: Prairie is leaving, but her father has a connection through which they can remain in contact. The morning is marked by the band’s elaborately decorated van and its loud music; as it carries Prairie away, the vehicle disappears up the narrow drive beneath the clouds. L.A., the place where the agreed intermediary lives, is not a guarantee that the separation will be easy to bear, but it gives their promise a destination.

The city is also a waypoint in Zoyd’s most desperate attempt to reach Frenesi. During the last turbulent days of their marriage, he takes a charter flight from the East Imperial Terminal in L.A. to Honolulu, hoping to salvage their relationship. He understands the journey as an effort to help them both; Frenesi regards it as another intrusion into her private life. At the airport, Sasha joins the farewells, and she and Zoyd take turns holding the half-asleep Prairie. Their awkward cooperation briefly resembles a rehearsal for an arrangement in which they might share responsibility for the child, even though their encounter is uncomfortable.

Zoyd’s employment on Kahuna Airlines flights across the Pacific grows out of this same period. During stops in L.A., he has time for telephone calls that Frenesi never answers and short visits to Prairie at her grandmother’s. Frenesi herself remains absent. The contrast is pointed: L.A. lets Zoyd reach his daughter, while it repeatedly fails to bring him into contact with his wife. His work aboard the flights continues as the marriage unravels, turning the city into the point to which he returns between journeys that cannot restore what he has lost.

The city’s changing landscapes

Prairie’s later approach to Takeshi Fumimota’s office gives L.A. a different character. His suite occupies a modern office-and-retail complex built on land that once belonged to a film studio. The passage contrasts two uses of the same ground. Where Westerns once staged wagon trains and arriving cavalry, stockbrokers now speak quietly about preferred shares and futures through tiny telephone microphones. Elegant visitors shop and lunch on tiled patios; high business is conducted in law offices described as not invariably legal. The old production landscape has not simply vanished: it has been overlaid by another kind of performance, where transactions and appearances share the former studios’ territory.

Inside the Fumimota suite, the equipment also unsettles Prairie’s initial impression of Takeshi as a charlatan. Computer terminals, copiers, radios, circuit boards, laser units, batteries, and spare parts fill the office. She does not yet understand karmic correction, but the setting makes it plausible that Takeshi is more than he first appeared to be. The scene locates a new, technical kind of work in a city whose ground has already shifted from making film images to arranging financial deals. L.A.’s transformation is material as well as symbolic: the studio site persists, but the activities conducted there have changed.

Studios, unions, and political memory

Hubbell Gates’s account of his early working life gives the L.A. studio system a history of labor conflict. On his first visit to Warner Bros. studios, he discovers that a strike is underway and that the job for which he has been summoned would make him part of a group of strikebreakers recruited through IATSE. He turns away from the assignment and joins the picket line, although he does not work at the studio. A bolt thrown from a soundstage roof hits him on the head. The blow is both a physical injury and, in his recollection, confirmation that he has chosen the side he believes is right.

The conflict described in his memories reaches beyond one studio gate. IATSE, portrayed as aligned with studio owners, confronts the CSU, associated with Herb Sorrell. The disputes are presented not as a simple quarrel between two unions but as part of a broader anti-labor tradition and a system in which the blacklist makes workers’ choices consequential. For technicians, reestablishing their prospects could mean leaving the CSU for IATSE. Hubbell remains with the losing side for a time, convinced that others ought to see the political stakes as clearly as he does; his outspoken views can instead be recorded in files and used against him. The studios are workplaces, but they are also institutions in which political allegiance can shape a person’s ability to work.

The memory of L.A. before that break is warmer and more unsettled. Hubbell and Sasha drive toward Hollywood with young Frenesi between them, singing while he plays a Hawaiian ukulele. They live in the garage of Wade and Dotty during a housing shortage and spend evenings at the Finale Club in San Pedro, listening to bebop musicians in a neighborhood whose Japanese residents had been forced into wartime internment camps. Hubbell’s later account ties his solidarity with workers to a time when he stood on picket lines and Sasha sometimes had to get him out of jail. That earlier companionship makes his later compromise more painful: he eventually joins IATSE, retires as soon as he can, and understands his retreat as having traded away his anger. The studios that once seemed to offer work and a future become, in his account, part of a world of manufactured shadows backed by real financial power.

Routes through entertainment and power

L.A.’s entertainment economy also appears through Mucho Maas’s rise as a record producer. After working as a disc jockey, he enters the growing record business and establishes himself at Indolent Records near Sunset Boulevard. His arrival in a chauffeur-driven Bentley, dressed as Count Drugula and distributing LSD to fans, makes the company’s office a spectacle as well as a place of business. The label gains attention for its unusual choices of artists and repertory. Mucho’s story adds another version of the city’s capacity to turn performance into commerce, though his later cocaine dependence marks the personal cost that accompanies his success.

The city’s routes can also be interrupted by state power. When Brock Vond learns that Frenesi has escaped from PREP, he immediately flies to L.A. and enters the Westwood stronghold in a state of agitation. The 24fps files, including Frenesi’s dossier, are temporarily elsewhere; the case has been removed from Vond, and he cannot discover who now controls it. His search yields no recovery of the records or of his former authority. The movement from PREP to L.A. therefore does not restore his control: he arrives in the city only to find that the information and institutional access on which he depends have slipped away. In its recurring roles as home, workplace, departure point, and site of pursuit, L.A. gathers the novel’s different histories without making them converge into a settled resolution.