As I promised last month, I secured a copy of The Other Side of Mulholland, the satirical novel by Stephen Randall, our deputy editor and lifelong resident of Los Angeles, to determine if it is indeed “fresh, witty and relentlessly funny.”
I’m happy to report that it fulfills all expectations. In fact, The Other Side of Mulholland is to L.A. what managing editor Jamie Malanowski’s The Coup is to Washington. I was invited to a wedding in Malibu over the Labor Day weekend, so I chose the occasion to dig in to the novel, which I began and finished poolside in Marina del Rey. The story follows twins Perry (straight) and Tim (gay) Newman. Perry is a game show writer who aspires to sitcoms and Tim a journalist for a website called Hollywood Today. Their father Syd manages a Honda dealership in the Valley; their mother Ann jumps from project to project, the latest of which is fighting for the Valley’s right to secede. There’s also Perry’s ambitious girlfriend Nancy, who is the personal assistant of a B-list celebrity. Nancy is not someone you want as a business partner, as Perry discovers the hard way. Syd, meanwhile, is trying to save the dealership from being consumed by a shady dot-com company that plans to buy it with newly issued stock.
As I read, I marked a number of passages in TOSOM that I found particularly entertaining. For example, here is Simon James, editor of Hollywood Today, explaining the city to Tim:
“Think of L.A. as an iceberg. There’s that tip that everyone can see. That’s Hollywood, and all the glitz and big houses and beautiful women and the BMWs. Upper Los Angeles. They mythologized Los Angeles. That’s the L.A. you and I write about…. Everyone comes out to be part of upper Los Angeles. A few make it and get to live that life…. You probably grew up in lower Los Angeles. That’s the better part. It’s not geographic. It’s more psychographic. It’s the part of Los Angeles that’s too dull to be the subject of a TV show or Joan Didion novel. It’s normal life. It’s people who came out here to be Cameron Diaz or Brad Pitt and ended up working for Allstate instead. At first they’re disappointed but you can adjust to almost any reality. Pretty soon you realize that lower Los Angeles is just like where you came from – families, homes, small businesses – but with better weather and less of those East Coast affectations and that Midwestern stuffiness…. You get to invent yourself. Or reinvent yourself, if your first attempt fizzles. That’s a good thing. That’s why people stay. It’s not stifling. You can grow.”
At another point, Syd recalls a convention he attended where he had been propositioned. “On the brink of what could have been a nicely frivolous one-night stand, Syd could only think of one thing: Ann would know the right thing to do. Not the right thing as in ‘Keep your pants zipped.’ But the right words, the proper way to invite her back to his room, what drinks to serve. Without Ann there to guide him, Syd felt too incompetent to have an affair. And calling her for advice didn’t seem practical.”
Speaking of which, my only disappointment with TOSUM is the lack of sex scenes. Also, I might have named the mom Nancy and girlfriend Ann, just so you could have Syd and Nancy. Ha! I should write a novel.
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Comments on this entry:
The Playboy short story with the same title (and characters, and plot) was one of my favorite reads of 2001. Glad to see it has made the long form! I'll ask my local bookseller for a copy.