“That’s the trouble with Hollywood; the things that don’t exist are likely to kill you if you threaten them.” No one I’ve read describes California the way Eve Babitz can, except maybe Nathanael West: the dry weather, the heat, the lush sunsets, then the Hollywood obsessions, with money and love and appearance and work and drugs. Ostensibly fictional, her life in this book is a series of encounters with ordinary people who somehow appear extraordinary because of their surroundings, at Chateau Marmont or Palm Beach or even Bakersfield. The author lets herself be taken in enough to create a sense of the place as a hothouse full of exotic flowers. A delightful place to visit, but I can’t imagine who would live there.