The Wilshire Sun

With his surreal and paranoid debut novella, Baldwin makes a solid contribution to the subset of literature that explores the Hollywood dream. Written in the first person and partially in an epistolary style, with a clearly unreliable narrator, the novella bears hallmarks of Nathanael West and seems to knowingly invite comparison. Surreal and paranoid, Jacob's story encapsulates the legend of Los Angeles as told by an outsider. Jacob, a young writer from Brooklyn, lives with his mother and aunt and aspires to move to Los Angeles with a work acquaintance to write screenplays. After a false start lands him back in New York, he finally makes it to L.A. for good. However, life in the city doesn't provide the fecund creative experience he'd anticipated, and his tenuous mental state declines rapidly. The ensuing narrative becomes ever more dreamlike, and the fictional letters he writes to and from imaginary people (that he "has a feeling" he'll meet in L.A. "so I may as well get to know them a little bit now") grow more nonsensical, treating readers to a tantalizing glimpse beyond the edge of sanity. (Sept.)