Slow Days, Fast Company (New York Review Books Classics): The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

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Tolentino, Jia. "The "Sex and Rage" of Eve Babitz". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on February 23, 2021 . Retrieved April 21, 2021. Her writing took multiple forms. . . . But in the center was always Babitz and her sensibility—fun and hot and smart, a Henry James–loving party girl.

Eve Babitz". Simon & Schuster. Archived from the original on April 21, 2021 . Retrieved April 21, 2021. Eve Babitz". New York Review Books. Archived from the original on April 21, 2021 . Retrieved April 21, 2021. What we now call a ‘fictive memoir’ comes in the form of ten extended anecdotes about Los Angeles, delivered with all the gossipy sprezzatura of the most desirable dinner guest. Food, drink, drugs, sex, sunsets and a surfeit of move stars soak these tales with colour, while the most colourful component of all is our narrator herself.”—Hermione Hoby, TLS

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In these ten cajoling tales, Los Angeles is the patient, the heroine, hero, victim, and aggressor: the tales a marvel of free-form madness. Like Renata Adler, Eve Babitz has fact, never telling too much. Babitz’s sentences—fluffy, golden, and spunky—which appear flippant…but like Marilyn Monroe infusing the ditz with closeted intellectualism, Babitz has a genius for revealing the depths of ostensibly shallow waters.

Babitz’ collection of essays, Slow Days, Fast Company, the best non-fiction written about the Joys of Sensuous LA, I have always thought right up there with Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem. When I was growing up, civilized friends of my parents’ and even my parents used to complain all the time about how the L.A. County Art Museum was a travesty unparalleled anywhere for dopiness. They’d really get angry each time they recalled how Stravinsky was never so much as nodded to by “the city.” I used to wonder, when I was little, how a city nodded to Stravinsky. City Hall was all the way downtown and Stravinsky lived in West Hollywood. These adults used to sigh and say, “If he lived anywhere else . . . any where else, they would have done something about him. But not Los Angeles.” I think that the truth was that Stravinsky lived in L.A. because when you’re in your studio, you don’t have to be a finished product all the time or make formal pronouncements. Work and love—the two best things—flourish in studios. It’s when you have to go outside and define everything that they often disappear. Eve Babitz (May 13, 1943 – December 17, 2021) was an American visual artist and author best known for her semi-fictionalized memoirs and her relationship to the cultural milieu of Los Angeles. And because we already know this is a love story with no expected ending, the reader is allowed to tumble into these worlds. Basically, we follow her — sometimes into a short story, sometimes a vignette or five. As a result Slow Days, Fast Company tumbles sometimes too, but almost always delightfully. I mean this word. Wonder is important. Sometimes I wanted to argue with her — her being Eve, being Eve-as-protagonist — but I never felt lost or bored. She wants and she is frustrated, which are sexy moves in a pseudo-autobiographical narrative, because you can’t always get what you want so writing it down anyway is brave, and comic. “I wanted,” writes Eve,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. One man proved elusive, however, and so Babitz did what she did best, she wrote him a book.