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"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"--… (more)
User reviews
The style of that previous book was looser and much more scattered than Slow Days, Fast Company, which while still describing the excesses of the 1960s and 70s, is better written. Yet, while containing a more refined style of writing, I have to say that if I’d read this title first, I’m not sure I would have read more of her work, as I so loved the wildness of what she was living and writing. In a way, I miss some of the excesses and the pure chaos of the first book, but I still loved this book. She will be in the middle of describing and explaining a scene, when she will drop killer lines that are so clever, wild, and unexplained, but that fit the story perfectly. I’ll come back to this review after I reflect on the book some more.