Beyond Unreality

THE NOWHERE CITY by Alison Lurie. 276 pages. Coward-McCann. $4.50.

Los Angeles is a fiction whose accepted public image carries the impact of heightened reality, like Disneyland or a dream. Even the displaced outlanders who now make Los Angeles their home accept as fact such ephemeral entities as Venice West, rats in palm trees, eternal sunshine, Hollywood and Vine, schools of pink Cadillacs, and tawny, ubiquitous beauties in spike heels and white sharkskin lax slacks.

Despite a great body of belief, and much effort, no novelist has ever fully succeeded in making Los Angeles seem real. Alison Lurie, the author of this novel about Los Angeles, does not succeed in bringing it off either. But she fails so charmingly that the reader at least can understand why all those migrants went West.

Comical Fun. In Love and Friend ship, her first novel, Miss Lurie, the wife of a Cornell University professor, vamped with considerable effect on the ! shopworn theme of infidelity. She treated sex not as something to leer about, sneer about or pontificate about, but as innocent and sightly comical fun. This attitude is readymade for Los Angeles, where the sun is said to remove inhibitions even faster than it reduces skin pallor. But Miss Lurie is less concerned with proving for the umpteenth time that Los Aneeles is phony than she is in the possibility that phoniness is just another form of reality.

All the characters in The Nowhere City are so improbable that they could have been spawned by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. Dr. Isidore Einsam is introduced as a veritable carica ture, who with his spade beard and Mittel-European manner looks like "an advertisement for a psychiatrist." He gives dictation in the nude and has a rule about his Westwood apartment: any woman who ventures there can expect, willy-nilly, to be relieved of her virtue.

Einsam is married to Glory Green, a Hollywood starlet who trowels her beauty on before breakfast and speaks in four-letter words. To believe in such characters is nothing short of preposterous. Or is it? In Miss Lurie's sly and sympathetic hands, Glory and Iz, like nearly everyone else in the book, radiate the appeal of children whose very ingenuousness disarms the observer. Most Hollywood starlets would rather be dead than bred. But Glory, contemplating pregnancy at the hands of Einsam, goes all starletty-eyed. "I think I'd really like to get knocked up," she says.

Warning: Curves. The less said about Nowhere's plot the better. It sprawls like Los Angeles itself and winds as relentlessly as Mulholland Drive. After two books, Miss Lurie's sense of direction lags well behind her sense of character. But the latter is sure enough and engaging enough to compensate for the deficiency. If the trip through Nowhere is not particularly compelling, the characterization at least suggests where Miss Lurie's proper direction lies.

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