In Which We Come Back To Life As A Tricycle

Death Tire

by SARAH LABRIE

Rubber
dir. Quentin Dupieux
85 minutes

Quentin Dupieux’s Rubber is a movie about a psychokinetic tire that kills people with its mind. We know the tire — listed in the credits as “Robert” — is about to blow someone up when his rubber tubing vibrates and the film score swells. This happens mostly when people stop Robert from doing the things he likes to do, like taking a shower, or watching television or stalking a beautiful French girl named Sheila. After he wipes out a California desert town, Robert is shot to death by the police and comes back to life as a tricycle. Tricycle Robert advances on Hollywood, an army of reanimated tires in his wake.

“But, why?” is a question Dupieux was smart enough to answer before we could ask it. In Rubber’s opening scene, a character named Lt. Chad (Stephen Spinella) delivers a resolutely nonsensical monologue on the absence of reason. “In the Steven Spielberg movie E.T., why is the alien brown? No reason. In the movie Love Story, why do these two characters fall madly in love? No reason.” Chad goes on like this for a beat too long — “Why are we always thinking? No reason” — and then climbs into the trunk of a rusted Cadillac DeVille. The scene is an explanation and a warning — if pseudo-philosophical absurdity isn’t your thing, now would be a good time to see if you can swap out your seats for tickets to Hop.

The rest of the movie will infuriate a certain type of person, and delight that person’s exact opposite. The dialogue is wooden, the acting, weird, the plot one the Aqua Teen Hunger Force writers would have rejected for being too stupid. But Dupieux never wavers, and it’s his unswerving earnestness that makes the whole thing work. Without it, Rubber would be an irritating experiment in cinematic dada. Instead, it turns into a loving send-up of vintage American road movies, a surrealist spoof that’s just sincere enough to be clever.

Dupieux keeps the homicidal tire conceit from getting old by adding a meta-layer in the form of an audience within the film, a motley assortment of teenaged girls, film nerds and middle-aged moviegoers who comment on the action as it unfolds. We watch them watch as Robert rises from the sand to roll through the desert like a demonic Shel Silverstein creation. First he crushes a water bottle, then a scorpion, then he blows up a rabbit by vibrating at it. The film’s careful camera angles and taut score allow us to revel in Robert’s glee as he discovers the breadth of his destructive powers. It’s strange to come away from a movie realizing you’ve spent the past hour and a half empathizing with a wayward piece of mechanical equipment, but such is the power of Rubber.

Eventually, Robert’s travels lead him to a pretty French tourist (Roxane Mesquida) in a VW rabbit with shag-covered seats. He follows her to a seamy motel and installs himself in the room next to hers. When the cleaning lady tosses him out, Robert, as is his wont, explodes her head. It’s around this point that things start to get weird. The third act is a beautiful, gnarled mess during which each separate element of the plot converges and absolutely nothing gets resolved.

Critics have described the film as a metaphor for everything from mindless consumerism to the disintegration of American film, and probably they’re right, but whatever. It’s a movie about a tire. Too, the amount of effort Dupieux puts into it — a palette so saturated with color that every still looks like a William Eggleston print, a pitch-perfect score that gives Robert his own personality-defining theme song — makes it strong enough to stand up on its own, with or without symbolism.

Either you want to see a metafictional movie about a serial killer tire directed by a french electronic musician (Quentin Dupieux is the real name of French techno producer Mr. Oizo) or you don’t. If you don’t, well then look: Life, as we’ve all figured out by now, is a series of choices. Maybe it’s time for you to start making better ones. Watching Rubber won’t fix all your problems, but it can’t hurt. The experience should leave you feeling reassured. If a movie like this one managed to get distribution, things can’t be all that bad.

Sarah LaBrie is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Los Angeles. She last wrote in these pages about her favorite novels. She tumbls here.

"Everything You're Not Supposed To Be" - Damien Rice & Melanie Laurent (mp3)

"Uncomfortable" - Damien Rice & Melanie Laurent (mp3)

"Kiss" - Melanie Laurent (mp3)

In Which We Develop A Radiant New Love For Literature

Our Novels, Ourselves

This Thursday, This Recording unveils our list of the 100 Greatest Novels. This will likely be the final word on the subject, and a key to the city will be presented to us in the shape of a novel. In order to broaden our horizons, we asked a group of talented young writers and artists to name their favorite novels. This is the first in a three part series.

Part One (Tess Lynch, Karina Wolf, Elizabeth Gumport, Sarah LaBrie, Isaac Scarborough, Daniel D'Addario, Elisabeth Donnelly, Lydia Brotherton, Brian DeLeeuw)

Part Two (Alice Gregory, Jason Zuzga, Andrew Zornoza, Morgan Clendaniel, Jane Hu, Ben Yaster, Barbara Galletly, Elena Schilder, Almie Rose)

Part Three (Alexis Okeowo, Benjamin Hale, Robert Rutherford, Kara VanderBijl, Damian Weber, Jessica Ferri, Britt Julious, Letizia Rossi, Will Hubbard, Durga Chew-Bose, Rachel Syme, Amanda McCleod, Yvonne Georgina Puig)

Tess Lynch

In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O'Brien

This is a book about Vietnam. Please, sit down. Come on, it isn't really about Vietnam, it's about – just sit down for one second – the clashing of public and private life, when the demon-like personifications of every horrible thing you've ever done wage war with whatever good parts of you still exist; the plot consciously implodes on itself, leaving you feeling psychologically fractured and with nightmares about killing your houseplants with boiling water while screaming "Kill Jesus," just like you've always wanted.

Chilly Scenes of Winter by Ann Beattie

Ignore the movie please. This was Beattie's first novel, and my favorite of hers, not only because there's a character in it who spends all of her time in the bathtub like I do, and not only because Sam is the fictional hot best friend I projected any and all fantasies onto during my formative years, but because it's a quiet study of the electrically-charged feeling of being in love operative-word-hopelessly. The desserts she cooked that you miss, the radio songs, the happy hour beers spent bumming. Too true, Ann, too true.

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

You know what? Fuck Lolita. I take that back, don't fuck Lolita, she's too young, plus I loved that book. I loved this one more, though. The poem makes me disintegrate with feelings. I'd get all 999 lines tattooed on my face, but then I'd never be able to work in corporate America. John Shade's poem can be a bit of a downer ("how many more/Free calendars shall grace the kitchen door?"), so fictional editor Charles Kinbote comes in to offer up some zippy commentary from the imaginary land of Zembla. I thought Kinbote was supposed to make me feel better, that that was his purpose, but apparently Nabokov, in an interview, mentioned that Kinbote killed himself after publishing the manuscript. God, what a downer. I wish I'd never heard that bit of imaginary news; maybe there's no point to anything and I should go ahead and get that tat, do you think it would be pretty sickkk?

The Stand by Stephen King

This is my favorite Stephen King novel, and that's saying a lot, since I never leave the bookstore without some SK representation. The Stand is so long that if you get the uncut edition, you can step up onto it and get the bird's nests off your roof; even still, you feel depressed when you turn the last page. There's nothing like a story that begins with the end of most of humanity and then continues for about 1100 pages, peppered with the lyrically satisfying name Trashcan Man and lots of details about stomachs exploding. Life is gross. Books can be gross. You didn't want to finish those nachos anyway.

Tess Lynch is a writer living in Los Angeles. You can find her website here.

Karina Wolf

Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin

These days, Melmoth the Wanderer is more an allusion than a perused text. Nabokov named Humbert Humbert’s automobile after the damned nomad; Oscar Wilde took "Melmoth" as a pseudonym, perhaps because of his shared status as eternal outsider. Maturin’s 1820 gothic novel begins with a bequest – a young Trinity student inherits his uncle’s estate and a manuscript, which relates the tale of his ancestor Melmoth, who extended his life by 150 years, presumably by selling his soul to the Devil. The only out from damnation is to find someone to take over the pact. The novel consists of a rococo series of nested vignettes, wherein characters encounter the cursed wanderer, sometimes peripherally. The pleasure (and challenge) of the text is in its stylish excesses.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

I re-visited Wuthering Heights when I taught at hokwan, a Korean cram school that aimed to stuff as many five dollar words possible into the minds of the foreign-born students. The odd task of reading Brontë’s novel aloud to a teenage boy (who loved it) made me appreciate its ingenious storytelling along with its elemental feelings. As a child, Brontë endured the deaths of two sisters and in response created Gondal, a detailed imaginary world that she sustained in letters and stories from adolescence to adulthood. Wuthering Heights retains a similarly corrective power; the novel is less a romance than a psychic outcry and self-assertion.

The Witches by Roald Dahl

The best children’s books are clever rejoinders to the early onset of life, primers for how to deal. Roald Dahl’s The Witches retains the violent menace of early fairy tales while offering readers a wry (and controversial) antidote to vanquishing the enemy, a kind of mass witch transformation and cat-led genocide. Dahl retains his spiky humor and incorrectness – also, his irresistibly charming prose. With lovely line drawings by Quentin Blake.

Karina Wolf is a writer living in New York. Her book The Insomniacs is forthcoming from Penguin. You can find her website here.

Elizabeth Gumport

I am too adrift from myself to know what my favorite novels are. If I could tell you that, I could tell you so many things! But like rats fleeing a sinking ship, my former selves keep escaping me. One of the few things I am sure of these days is that I am twenty-five years old, and so like a child I go around insisting on my age. But we can forgive a child for identifying herself by how old she is, since what else would she have done with those months and years except live them? I, on the other hand, ought to have more and deeper moorings. Instead, the first page of D.H. Lawrence’s St. Mawr looks like a mirror: "Lou Witt had had her own way so long, that by the age of twenty-five she didn't know where she was. Having one's own way landed one completely at sea."

Reading St. Mawr, the feeling I had was not of identifying with the character but of being identified by them. I did not “find”myself. I was found, as if by a carrier pigeon bearing a note. A few months later, it was The Wings of the Dove that saw me: James writes that Kate Croy “had reached a great age for it quite seemed to her that at twenty-five it was late to reconsider, and her most general sense was a shade of regret that she hadn't known earlier. The world was different--whether for worse or for better – from her rudimentary readings, and it gave her the feeling of a wasted past. If she had only known sooner she might have arranged herself more to meet it.”

My sense of being “found”by these books was heightened by how I happened to read them: St. Mawr did in fact arrive for me by air, in a package from Amazon. It was a gift from a friend – the same friend who several months later would be the one to recommend The Wings of the Dove. A truly personal recommendation shows you something you don't often see, which is the way you hold yourself out to the world. That is what Lord Mark offers Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove, when he shows her “the beautiful” Bronzino portrait “that’s so like” her. What matters is not merely what you are like, but that you are like something – that the world knows what you look like, even when you don’t. When shown the portrait, Milly admits she doesn’t see the resemblance.

Knowing that a book exists is one thing, being made to recognize its existence by someone else another. It is the fact of Lord Mark’s showing her the portrait, and not the portrait itself, that so topples Milly: “It was perhaps as a good a moment as she should have with any one, or have in any connexion whatever.”A personal recommendation is not the same as one cast out to anonymous strangers on the internet.

I will try, therefore, to be as specific as possible: if you are my age, self-absorbed, and aimless but not hopeless, you should read these books immediately. Perhaps the figure sketched in them will impress you as your own, and perhaps it will resolve something for you. Sometimes books enter your life at exactly the right moment. It doesn't happen as often as you'd think: like people, they tend to appear too early, when you are too foolish to appreciate them, or too late, when they have been claimed by someone else.

Elizabeth Gumport is a writer living in New York.

Isaac Scarborough

Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay

Amongst all of the fantasy novels I devoured as an adolescent, Tigana is the only that holds up through the prism of passed years and moderate maturity – going back and rereading it remains the same mind-bending pleasure that it was when I was fifteen. Not only is it – a rarity in the subgenre – genuinely well written, but it does what fantastical writing is truly meant to: it comments on our world today, in a way that would otherwise be impossible. The power of names and naming stuck with me, and if there’s a reason why I today refuse to spell Ashkhabad “Ashgabat” Kay may very well have something to do with it.

Making Scenes by Adrienne Eisen

The basic willingness to describe modern life’s brutality – from lists of food consumed and bulimiacally purged, to the absurdity of what passes today for courtship – sets Eisen apart; her willingness to describe without going somewhere is also laudable. Reading Making Scenes is an experience closest to voyeuristically watching that cute neighbor across the hallway, except that she has begun to leave audiotapes on your doorstep of her – just as you suspected – far too aware and intelligent inner monologue. This voice sticks around.

Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

By and large, Dostoyevsky doesn’t do plot: throughout his works, there are simply long periods of hysterics and contemplation, generally circling around a heinous crime committed in the very beginning of the work. Demons is no different in this respect, but here the hysterics come first, and then the crimes – a set-up that avoids the disappointment with which both Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment end, and one that provides much more space for the author to develop his characters’ private insanities. And when it comes to madness, Dostoyevsky simply has no equivalent.

Isaac Scarborough is a writer living in Kazakhstan.

Sarah LaBrie

The Quick and the Dead by Joy Williams

A manifesto for young women destined to spend adulthood in a dimension just to the left of reality, the result of not having solidified quite correctly as children. The three teenaged orphans who guide us through Williams’ strange desert are peculiar but not precious, compelling in their very anti-Amelieness. It’s okay to be a genuine girl wacko, Williams tells us: if you’re smart enough to own it, you still get to win.

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

Fiction writers who start out as poets have an edge when it comes to building faultless sentences. Carson, a Classicist by trade, applies her skills as a translator of Greek verse to a novel about a monster named Geryon and his arrogant sometimes-boyfriend, Herakles. Building loosely on fragments of a poem by Stesichorus, Carson winds together scholarship and brutal wit to build a discomfitingly relatable love story.

The Counterlife by Philip Roth

In the autobiographical note that begins Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin discusses coming to the conclusion that, before he could produce anything else of substance, he had to write about what it meant to be black. Through the lens of Nathan Zuckerman, Roth offers a metafictional take on the same question as it relates to Judaism while experimenting with perspective, structure, time and form. Probably the most skillfully written examination out there on the bond between fiction writing and the desire for control.

Sarah LaBrie is a writer living in Los Angeles. You can find her website here.

Daniel D'Addario

England, England by Julian Barnes

In college, one of my mistakes was taking a class on comparative literature, after which I was left thinking that Britain or America could never produce a homegrown “national allegory.” Was I ever wrong! England’s image of itself is grist for this bizarre novel of ideas in which the nation is reassembled as a giant theme park for tourists—with a false king and queen and every famous Briton brought back to life. The novel questions the value of history and of myth—and despite its scorched-earth ending and brilliant dissection of the corporate profit motive, it does so with a bit of affection.

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

Including Kazuo Ishiguro’s cloistered-England novel The Remains of the Day in my three favorites here felt a little unfair; it’s like being asked to choose among your children, when one is an ultra-sensitive genius. Instead I chose to include the instance in which Ian McEwan, predominantly a creator of tight narrative schemes, most closely approaches Ishiguro’s sensitivity to context (a past era’s very Britishness) and to character. For not the first but the most exhilarating time, McEwan’s games have real consequence: the fate of a young marriage.

Morvern Callar by Alan Warner

Novels with inert protagonists slay me, like Mary Gaitskill’s books, or Updike’s Rabbit series: watching things happen around characters is somehow more exciting and lifelike than watching characters conquer situations themselves (with the author’s help). The protagonist, the amoral Scottish girl Morvern, is glamorously inert; things happen around her as she observes and calculates. The scene in which Morvern, unmoved, lights a Silk Cut cigarette while staring at her boyfriend’s corpse is choked with an ennui Camus would envy.

Daniel D'Addario is a writer for The New York Observer. You can find his website here.

Elisabeth Donnelly

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn

Nick Flynn was a poet, and a good one, before he was a memoirist (shades of Denis Johnson), which is why his raw recounting of a fragile family stings with moments of sharp beauty and heartbreaking empathy. The plotline is relatively simple; when Flynn was 27 and working at the Pine Street Inn, a homeless shelter in Boston, he comes into contact with his long lost father. The book is elliptical and non-linear, echoing Flynn’s memory, diving into blood and family legacy, Flynn’s father’s delusions of grandeur and his mother’s suicide, homelessness, forgotten people, the way cities and vice can chew you up, and the burden of the past on Flynn’s own life. It will knock you on your ass.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

The thing that sticks in my mind about Ralph Ellison’s masterpiece is that it’s so… weird. The imagery that he uses to describe the cruelty of this world is unforgettable: the nameless protagonist in his basement with 1,369 lightbulbs, the Black youths forced to fight for gold coins on an electrocuted rug, the riot (and spear) that rips through Harlem thanks to the Invisible Man’s gift of speech. While the book is ostensibly a record of growing up Black in a divided America, Ellison defies expectations at every turn, putting his character through scenes that are consistently strange and always feeling new (which left a legacy extending from John Cheever’s short stories to Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle); and this surprise means that Ellison can cut sharply with the anger, satire, and moody magnificence that’s fueling his work.

The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy

In the category of smart-girl-coming-of-age novels, Elaine Dundy’s American girl in Paris farce is particularly delicious. You’re in good hands with Dundy, after all, her biography was called Life Itself! (yes, with the exclamation point). The semi-autobiographical adventures of Sally Jay Gorce follow her as she dates, fucks, quips, and somehow makes a bad art film in the French countryside. It’s hilarious, and by the story’s end, proto-feminist Sally Jay is like a friend you don’t want to leave.

Elisabeth Donnelly is a writer living in New York. You can find her website here.

Lydia Brotherton

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

I was late to the Brideshead party – I only read it a couple years ago — but now I’m one of those people who owns the entire Granada miniseries and sort of goes on about gillyflowers and plover’s eggs too much. I can’t help it, and I’m not sure I can explain it without embarrassing myself: I really love this novel.

Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf

When I first read Orlando, I was confused by its weirdness and delighted by its casually historical imaginings (there is absolutely no way to read fiction involving Elizabeth I that isn’t tacky except for this). And although I haven’t reread it in a while, I remember and misremember it like a tricky, particularly good dream. Maybe if there were an umami taste of novels, Orlando would be it.

Chéri by Colette

One of the reasons I like reading Colette novels is that in addition to being evocative of summer holidays in France I’ve never had, they have the potential to read as little lyrical self-help books. To be honest, what actually happens in Chéri is less important than the life lessons I manage to project onto all that description of pale, beribboned wrists and afternoon weather: how to wear silk robes during the day and take up with younger men, why it’s nice to upholster your furniture in dove-gray velvet, and — maybe most importantly—how to grow older, and, in your increasing age, more glamorous, demanding.

Lydia Brotherton is a soprano living in Basel, Switzerland. You can find her website here.

Brian DeLeeuw

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

"Favorite novels" is a slippery idea. Favorite when? When I read it? Now, years later, in the memory of reading? I’m not sure I would even finish Danielewski’s novel today (this is saying something bad about me, not the novel), but its blending of pulpy horror and deconstructionist theory felt custom designed for where my head was at ten years ago, in the middle of college. I’ve never in my life been as consumed by the experience of reading a book. Probably I should try to read it again.

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

One of the ways a satire can be judged successful is if a lot of people don’t understand that it’s satire. Another is if a lot of these same people get very exercised and moved to protest and write angry and self-righteous ad hominem reviews. American Psycho passes both tests. If there remain any doubters (after talking to some of my friends, I know they’re out there), the fact that Mary Harron directed the movie adaptation should be proof enough. This is the funniest book I’ve ever read, which makes it puzzling why much of Ellis’s other work is so unfunny and sometimes plain bad.

Veronica by Mary Gaitskill

Mary Gaitskill writes about complicated and uncomfortable emotional states with more precision and cold elegance than anybody else I have read. She’s most known for doing this in her short stories, and in some structural ways Veronica feels like a very long story rather than a novel. But those sort of classifications are irrelevant here. The book spares no one, least of all the reader. The prose itself is a representation of one of the novel’s central ideas: beauty is cruel, but no less beautiful because of it.

Brian DeLeeuw is a writer living in New York. He is the associate editor of Tin House and the author of the novel In This Way I Was Saved. You can find his website here.

Our Novels, Ourselves

Part One (Tess Lynch, Karina Wolf, Elizabeth Gumport, Sarah LaBrie, Isaac Scarborough, Daniel D'Addario, Elisabeth Donnelly, Lydia Brotherton, Brian DeLeeuw)

Part Two (Alice Gregory, Jason Zuzga, Andrew Zornoza, Morgan Clendaniel, Jane Hu, Ben Yaster, Barbara Galletly, Elena Schilder, Almie Rose)

Part Three (Alexis Okeowo, Benjamin Hale, Robert Rutherford, Kara VanderBijl, Damian Weber, Jessica Ferri, Britt Julious, Letizia Rossi, Will Hubbard, Durga Chew-Bose, Rachel Syme, Amanda McCleod, Yvonne Georgina Puig)

The 100 Greatest Novels

If You're Not Reading You Should Be Writing And Vice Versa, Here Is How

Part One (Joyce Carol Oates, Gene Wolfe, Philip Levine, Thomas Pynchon, Gertrude Stein, Eudora Welty, Don DeLillo, Anton Chekhov, Mavis Gallant, Stanley Elkin)

Part Two (James Baldwin, Henry Miller, Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Margaret Atwood, Gertrude Stein, Vladimir Nabokov)

Part Three (W. Somerset Maugham, Langston Hughes, Marguerite Duras, George Orwell, John Ashbery, Susan Sontag, Robert Creeley, John Steinbeck)

Part Four (Flannery O'Connor, Charles Baxter, Joan Didion, William Butler Yeats, Lyn Hejinian, Jean Cocteau, Francine du Plessix Gray, Roberto Bolano)

In Which There's Nothing Like Looking At A Picture of A Haircut

On (Not) Leaving Los Angeles

by SARAH LABRIE

Hollywood sweeps into your life in the form of Shelley Steinburger, a forty-year-old costume designer from the San Fernando Valley who sits next to you in Intro Spanish at the Amigos del Sol language school. She looks like your friends’ moms — bosomy and pear-shaped with a careless silver haircut — but she says "like" and "fuck" and does impressions of the pudgy tourists and retired old ladies in your class. You are eighteen and from Texas, studying in Mexico over winter break because someday you want to get a Ph.D. Shelley is here on a lark, the first woman over thirty you have met with no husband or kids. In your eyes, she is a unicorn.

Over coffee, Shelley complains about Los Angeles and drops hints about her resume, something you will find out later is an essential Hollywood skill. Shelley designed the costumes for The Virgin Suicides. That’s Shelley’s voice on the phone with Bill Murray in the bathtub scene in Lost in Translation. Shelley knows Kirsten Dunst. Knowing Shelley basically means you know Kirsten Dunst. You buzz around Shelley like a manic fruit fly, hoping when the two week class is over she will take you home with her. Your new life will start in a mystical place called Silver Lake. You, Kirsten and Shelley dancing around a big, light-filled kitchen making pancakes in your underwear: it is only a matter of time.

Over the next four years, you will think about Shelley every time Hollywood intersects with your existence, first via a fraught long-term relationship with a boy from Beverly Hills, then thanks to a University of Colorado drop-out turned American Apparel model who whistles at you on Brown's campus one day where he is visiting a friend. Later, you visit him in Los Angeles, where he spends a whole afternoon showing you pictures of his haircuts and snorting oxycontin. You convince yourself you are in love. You neglect to tell him about your relationship, but you do tell him you plan to move to California after you graduate. He offers you a room in his manse. He doesn't believe you are serious. You are serious.

In May of your senior year, when everyone sobers up and starts frantically searching the Internet for something to fill the abyss that will be the rest of their lives, you send out emails to everybody you know on the West Coast. You wind up with interviews for assistant jobs at three big entertainment agencies and you're surprised, but not that surprised, because it is 2007 and things like that still happen. You buy a blazer from Banana Republic and tell Human Resources at Major Entertainment Agency One that yes, you majored in Comparative Literature, but you’re also very business-minded. You're looking for a way to combine your two loves, books and business, business-minded person that you are. You are still young enough not to recognize how damaging such a lie can be, especially when it is believed.

"Yes, but what Important Book Agent really needs is an assistant he can look at every day," says Human Resources, whose name is Paul. You nod thoughtfully, as though you know exactly what he means. Paul seems satisfied. You are very good at this interviewing thing. Paul bares his teeth at you.

Waiting for your interview at Major Entertainment Agency Two, you hover by the reception desk trying not to stare at the girl behind it. The bones of her face are thin and lovely. You want to run your hands through her hair. A wiry blonde boy with thick-framed glasses walks out of the office next to hers. Together, they look like models in an advertisement for the future.

A thin older woman with poreless skin comes out to collect you. She introduces herself as Helene. Helene shakes your hand and looks you up and down and then says "she's so pretty" to the receptionist, as if you’re not there. She doesn't make "pretty" sound like a good thing.

"You don't want this job," Helene tells you in her office. "The pay is bad. The hours are long. Think about what you’re doing here." Because you have been taught to recognize tests when they present themselves to you, you tell Helene that all you want, all you have ever wanted, is to work at a Major Entertainment Agency. Truthfully, you’re still not sure what  the job you’re applying for entails. This is not something anyone has been able to explain, not even your friend who helped you get the interview and who already works there. Everyone keeps telling you to watch Entourage. Basically, you’re going to be Lloyd, they say. You do not want to be Lloyd.

What you want is to go back home to Texas and cry. Your fraught relationship has ended, in part because of the American Apparel model, and it is affecting you more than you ever thought it could. At night you cry, you wake up crying, you spend far too long on the phone yelling at your ex-boyfriend and crying. You are 22 and love isn't yet the warm distraction it will become later, when you are fully human. This love is something hard lodged in your chest. It feeds on pain. You feel it every time you breathe. You haven’t learned yet that the universe doesn’t revolve around your mood swings.

So you aren’t prepared when Paul calls and exclaims "You got the job!" The way he says it, you look up at the ceiling expecting balloons and confetti to fall down on your head. "Important Book Agent is very excited to work with you. And oh, would you mind coming in today for training? Like, right now?"

The building Major Entertainment Agency One owns is a cluster of busy right angles and glass that looks ready to shoot off into space. Inside, you feel compelled to whisper, as though you are in Notre Dame. You train for four hours, over the course of which you consume two diet cokes and one iced coffee. The assistant you will replace never stops moving and she never smiles.

"I’m leaving to work for Very Successful Screenwriter," she tells you in the kind of clipped English accent you thought only existed in movies with Hugh Grant in them. "It's imperative that I start tomorrow so pay attention. You won’t be able to call me for help after I'm gone." When she says Very Successful Screenwriter's name, she makes eye contact with you and pauses, the way people do after they tell you they went to Harvard. The name means nothing to you, and you will find out later this is also common in Hollywood, dropping production company titles and names of executives the way unattainable hipster boys in college referenced obscure literary theorists.

At the end of the day, you still have no idea what your new job actually is. You know it has something to do with answering phones, something you attempted once, and failed at. (You were supposed to pick up and say "Very Important Book Agent’s Office" but instead you said "Hello?")

Back at home, you call your mother at work and tell her the good news. She is thrilled. After you hang up, you crawl into bed and sob. You dial his number. He answers. You cry into the phone, he cries back, and then you get angry and he hangs up and then you fall asleep.

The next morning, you call the office number at Major Entertainment Agency One and connect to the extension that will soon belong to you. The whole idea of work, of having a career, seems so abstract and poorly thought out. I was looking for a job and then I found a job, Morrissey whispers in your brain, and heaven knows I’m miserable now. What you need, what everyone needs really, is a long nap.

A temp answers on the second ring. He has been waiting for you to arrive.

"I'm not coming in after all," you say. "I don't think I can do this."

"I completely understand," he answers, his voice cracking with envy. You hang up. Immediately the phone rings again. It is Paul.

"I thought you had it more together than that," he yells. You have no idea what gave him that idea. When you try to explain, he actually hangs up on you. It is a good thing. You didn’t have anything to say.

You are appalled at what you have done, but not as appalled as your mother. Luckily, Major Entertainment Agency Two calls you back, and you find yourself with a job starting at the end of the summer. Hollywood is a roiling anthropological experiment, and you set about learning the customs of the natives. You say "slammed" instead of busy and "batshit" instead of crazy. You don't get annoyed when waiters mess up your order because you get that they are sleepy from open calls. You learn to recognize plastic surgery without looking twice. You pick up the language of the rich, inserting the names of very expensive pizza restaurants into casual conversation. You pretend you went to the Barney’s Warehouse Sale. You brunch. You discover no amount of money will ever be enough.

After a while you find yourself folded into the city, lulled into a kind of daze. You stop reading books and talk about box office grosses instead. There's no need for philosophy in a place where the weather is this nice. Still, voices from the outside reach you every once in a while, make it hard for you to sleep. The people you went to college with are editorial assistants, non-profit coordinators, teachers, medical students.

One night, your friend Jesse tells you a story about leaving his own birthday dinner to remove a bullet from someone’s skull. At work, you write script coverage for a comedy about Abraham Lincoln's ghost.  You play on the Internet. You blog. You read magazines in search of ideas for movies the agency's clients might want to write. You begin to feel certain you will die there, in your swivel chair, typing out summaries of the next Miley Cyrus oeuvre.

Meanwhile, the boy from Beverly Hills stops picking up your drunk dials. The American Apparel model has, against all odds, established a film career. His face peers out from magazine covers and billboards. In music videos, he caresses faceless blonde girls. You saw him once after you moved to L.A. He played you his reel and you accidentally laughed out loud at his turn as a gay teen boxer in the made-for-TV movie Rope Burns. He looked at you, plaintive, and asked "Why can’t you just be nice to me?" Now he is in a movie with Beyoncé. Soon you will see his head every day, floating in space over the 10 freeway. You accept the sign for what it is: it’s time for you to go.

You take the money you’ve been saving, buy a ticket to Europe and quit your job. You visit friends in graduate school overseas, people who made better life choices than you. You leave L.A. feeling proud of yourself for doing something so many people say they will do, and then don't. When you come back to find yourself broke and jobless, it occurs to you that the reason they don’t do it is because it is a terrible idea.

You scramble and manage to get part time work at a tiny literary agency that sells the film rights for novels to studios. This one doesn't own a building, but you like its small, cozy offices and cultivated bookshelves. Your boss, the company's founder, is an elderly hustler stuck in an old-timey Los Angeles, when packages were delivered by messengers on bikes with one big wheel on the front. He is the first fundamentally dishonest adult you have ever met.

From him, you learn that fiction doesn’t sell, but neither does non-fiction, and neither do hard covers. Ebooks are the future, or maybe they aren’t. Nobody reads anymore, or people only read the Internet, or people will always read books, or they won’t. Nobody wants to read your memoir unless you are already famous. No one wants to read your screenplay, even if you are already famous, unless you are famous for being a screenwriter. No one who is not already a screenwriter should aspire to be one because, look, it is too late.  Also: everybody is over vampires. Don't even think about werewolves. The next big thing is children’s books, or it is true crime, or it is fantasy or it is none of these things.

You read terrible thrillers by the dime store novelists who are the agency's only real source of income. You spend a tremendous amount of time feeling sorry for yourself. Once you had dreams of translating Spanish poetry in a dusty university library. Here you translate schlock into the only language your boss understands, which is money.

"How is it?" he asks, watching you page dismally through a new manuscript.

"It's. Well. I think the pregnant coke-addicted black prostitute might put some people off. And later, when the angel comes down to smite all the gays... it's like, there’s just a lot going on here."

"Pretty impressive right? He wrote that whole thing in two weeks. You think I can sell it?"

"Probably."

"Good. Get me Random House on the phone. Who’s the editor at that imprint we like?"

You eye the ever-growing slush pile on your desk with disgust. When your boss leaves for the day, you recycle the manuscripts and make up fake synopses. Later, you start doing it while he is in the office. By this time, you’ve been working at the company for almost a year and you can feel bits of your soul drifting away. Still, you don’t look for a new job. Probably for the same reason your friends who swear they’re moving to New York never make it. The same reason everybody takes the same route to Beverly Hills each morning, even though they know they’ll hit mind-bending traffic. Something about living in a place where it is almost always summer inspires a comfortable inertia. The sun shines in January. In March, you spend whole weekends at the beach.

And then there is Mark, the merry, red-haired assistant/office manager who sits one desk over from yours. You love him with the fierce passion reserved for depressed women and their gay best friends. He trained to be an actor at SUNY Buffalo and when he senses you about to fall into a spiral of self-loathing, he slips into character as Mabel Lee, fading Southern belle. "Why as I live and breathe," he says when your hands start to shake. "Did you see what Beverly Jones wore to church the other day? I do declare. She looked just like a duck in a pillbox hat." The Old South by way of Manhasset, Long Island. Once a week, he visits his therapist over lunch and comes back armed with new survival tactics. "Every time something makes us sad, let's give each other compliments," he says one afternoon.

"What’s that?" Your boss peeks his giant bald head out of his office. Wisps of white hair cling to it desperately. "Did the First-Class mail come yet?" Mail time is your boss’s favorite. He sniffs out royalty checks in the piles of doomed query letters like a police dog sniffing for weed.

"Not yet,” You answer. “By the way, I love that scarf,” you say to Mark.

"Thank you. Your hair is very buoyant today,” he answers.

Your e-mail alert buzzes and you turn back to your computer. 

      Dear Agent,

      Attached please find a proposal for a novel based on Facebook status updates written by my cat. Enclosed also are pictures of my cat. If you would like to see the full manuscript please reply. I also have a screenplay. 

      Thank you,

      George 
 

      Dear George,

      While we read your query with great interest, we are not enthusiastic enough about it to represent it for commercial sale. Best of luck finding a home for it elsewhere.

      Best regards,

      Agent

 
You spend the rest of the day editing a manuscript by a bestselling YA fantasy author no one will admit is a pedophile. On your way out the door, you overhear your boss on the phone with Ashley Bulgaz, the company’s bookkeeper.

"Cut back on flower deliveries for the lobby? Sure, I guess. That saves us how much? Two hundred dollars? I'm spending four hundred dollars a week on flowers? What the fuck. Fine.  Do what you need to do. Just keep twelve-thousand five a month in my account. I can’t live on less."

$12,500.00 is more than half of what you will make for the year after taxes. You don’t have health insurance. Right now you subsist on a box of frozen burritos your roommate bought from Trader Joe’s and then abandoned.

Mark is gone for the day so you speak to his empty desk chair. "Hey Mark?" You say to it. "That tie you were wearing today? So chic."

Not all the query letters that come in are terrible. Some are even quite good, which, in a way, is even worse. Each morning, your boss dictates responses to promising ones, requesting e-mailed copies of novels from bright-eyed writers with freshly minted MFAs. In the afternoon you enter his office with a pile of manuscripts. He skims the first few pages and sighs.

"Who do these people think they are? Wasting my time with this crap. Tell them to go fuck themselves." You take them back to your desk and type out another form rejection. You hate to admit it, but you know he is right. Too many people who want to write don't read. Too many people who want to write should be gardeners or dentists or waiters or chemists or actuaries. You wonder, often, if too many people includes you.

Because though you have spent the past three years working actively against it, the only thing you ever wanted to do is write. Now you leave work every day with the truth heavy in your soul: no one deserves that kind of life. For every story about the acceptance that came after 100 rejections, there are millions about people who wrote for eighty years and died humiliated, poor, hungry and alone. You should have gone into banking, you should have been pre-med, you should have joined a cult.

Perhaps it is not too late to join a cult.

And yet, you keep working on your stupid short stories. Because you can’t help it, because it isn’t a choice, because if you decide to do a thing, why not keep doing it until you get better at it? Because in this shiny, impossible city, it is the only thing keeping you sane. The boy from Beverly Hills has moved in with the girl he will probably marry. Variety tells you the American Apparel model will star opposite one of the actresses from Mean Girls in her next feature. But if you can figure out how to build fictional characters who live and breathe and move around in space, then none of that will matter. Or at least, it will matter less.

Ages ago, when he interviewed you for the assistant job, your boss demanded to know your college major. "Comparative Literature and Literary Arts," you answered.  Five words that never get any less embarrassing. He winced. "You're not going to be, like, writing stuff while you're at work, right? I don't want to see that." You laughed, kind of, and changed the subject.

A year and a half later, when you tell him you're applying to graduate school he asks you with his customary tact, "What in the hell are you doing that for?" It’s a question you put to yourself often, and you want to answer him honestly. Working your way down the corporate ladder, you have come face to face with the fact that your only real skill, if you can call it that, is reading obscure literary fiction, talking about it and trying to imitate people who write it. Instead you answer in the only words he can understand. 

"Well."  You turn your voice into a question. "The classes will be free? Because. I mean. The University is going to pay me a…" You almost say the word “stipend” but then you catch yourself. "Money? To teach?"

He grunts at you but you don’t care because you’re feeling oddly confident. Lately, your life has been falling into place along a strange Los Angeles logic. That morning you got a $50 parking ticket, but last night you went to a party at Bret Easton Ellis’ house. The party was exactly what you expected, down to the minimalist monochrome décor, the celebrities famous for reasons no one could define. In an apartment overlooking Beverly Hills, you lived out the wildest dream of the college sophomore version of yourself. A gleam hovered over the fading film stars, the impeccable bartender, the party guests caught up in Bret's orbit as he circled the room, glass in hand, imitating perfectly the person everyone assumes he is.

To break the spell, you were tempted to light a cigarette even though you don’t smoke, or drop your glass over the balcony to the concrete below. But in the past few years, you’ve transformed from the type of person who destroys delicate things on purpose to the type of person who thinks about destroying them and then doesn't. Out over the city, fireworks flowered. The friend you came with lifted his glass and you clinked yours against it. Beneath you, Los Angeles shimmered like something jeweled and alive and you wondered for a moment so brief it was almost invisible how you could possibly live anywhere else.

Sarah LaBrie is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Los Angeles. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about Animal Kingdom. You can e-mail her here.

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