Los Angeles is an unreliable narrator. The very cityscape is an illusion, albeit on the grand scale—streets and buildings, the human design of it, erected on a bed of sand and tar. If you want to know what it is about the place, you need only visit my favorite local site, the La Brea Tar Pits, where the kitsch of Fiberglas mammoths comes face to face (literally and figuratively) with the existential reality of the tar lake, which are the existential realities of Los Angeles itself. The tar, after all, is where the city emerged from, and it is the tar to which we will eventually return—a sinister coeval to the false cheer of the palm trees and the sun. As such, perhaps, the tar is the only reliable narrator, since everything that’s been constructed upon it will disappear. In the end, the truest thing about Los Angeles may be that we are all just making it up as we go along.

I wanted to play with signifiers of noir in my novel, Thirteen Question Method, which features its own unreliable narrator, a character hiding out from both his past and the larger present, in a bungalow court in Hollywood. Noir, I’ve long imagined, is an essential Southern California aesthetic, not only, or even mostly, because of all those glorious black and white movies of the 1940s and 1950s (Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, The Big Sleep, In a Lonely Place, Kiss Me Deadly), but rather because of what the late Mike Davis characterized in his touchstone work City of Quartz as “the master dialectic of sunshine /and noir.”

For Davis, sunshine/noir was a defining dichotomy, a conundrum that arose from the city’s status as aspirational—a place both to succeed and fail. That’s a cliché of Los Angeles, although that doesn’t mean it is untrue. If our sense of this place and its essence has densified and broadened since Davis introduced the idea in 1990—less a city of transplants than a complex mix of communities and cultures, many of which have been here for millennia—the essential relevance remains. What happens when you aspire to something and it doesn’t happen? What happens when you take the risk and it fails? That could mean moving to California to pursue a dream that turns into a nightmare, which is where the story of noir begins. “The real city,” the narrator of Thirteen Question Method observes, “unfolds in apartment complexes and bungalow complexes, in the sprawl of neighborhoods over crests and flatlands, in 4 million people trying to make it through the day.”

Part of what the Tar Pits conceal are the real stories of some of those people: I’m reminded of La Brea Woman, the first known homicide in what is now Los Angeles, who was beaten to death, her body discarded in the Tar Pits, until 9,000 years afterward, her fossilized remains were recovered and preserved.

Who was La Brea Woman? We’ll never know the answer; in that sense, she is another vivid emblem of the city’s unreliability. It is we who impose the burden of story on her. It is we who assert significance. “What did it matter where you lay once you were dead?” Raymond Chandler writes near the end of The Big Sleep. “In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill.  You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell.  Me, I was part of the nastiness now.”

Chandler is saying that it is easy to get lost here, that it is easy to be erased. This is what happens, after a fashion, in Thirteen Question Method, which is built around a narrator who wants nothing more than to get out from under his history, to live in a never-ending present tense. In that regard, he is a quintessential sort of Angeleno, rootless, disconnected, adrift in an ever-deepening state of dissolution—noir after the sunshine is eclipsed.

I wanted to tell this story because I am drawn to the unreliable. I have long found myself surrounded by unreliable narrators, both in Los Angeles and everywhere else. I began writing the novel in 2015, but I hit a wall and set the book aside for a number of years. The reason was simple: the necessities of narrative. As an essayist, I’m used to living the story before I write it. As a novelist, I don’t have that luxury. Luxury? Yes, the ability to know where it is going, although in the unreliable city, how much can we ever truly know?

When I returned to the book in the summer of 2020, I was as isolated as the central character; locked down in the early days of COVID, experiencing Los Angeles as a scrim, a stage set, something to be viewed in two dimensions through a window, except during the long walks I took every morning, before anyone else was out. I was beset by the lies of the Administration, the president’s insistence that the pandemic was some sort of ruse. “Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous—whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light,” he wondered at an April White House briefing. “… [S]upposing you brought the light inside the body, either through the skin or some other way.”

Then, there was the insurrection of January 6.

Could there be a more unreliable narrator than the author of that fiction? There’s a reason my narrator, when he needs to leave the bungalow court, puts on a blue suit and a long red tie.

Also important was the matter of my own unreliability, all the things about the character, about this narrative, that I did not (want to) know. I was compelled by these ambiguities, much as I have long been when it comes to Los Angeles. My narrator had been married at one point, but where his spouse might be now was an open question. He had the money to support himself, but I couldn’t say how. As the novel progressed, he began to go mad, in the 19th century sense of the word. I found I didn’t want to assume too much—or perhaps the better word is: control. Instead, I wanted to observe, to discover what would happen; I wanted to see where he might go. Because he was living in a willful twilight, drinking too much and devoted to forgetting, it seemed useful for me not to possess too much foreknowledge, not to understand much more than the character did himself.

Such amnesia, let’s call it, has long been a hallmark of Los Angeles; it is a city that erases itself. “The most photographed and least remembered city in the world,” the urbanist Norman M. Klein has written, referring to the countless times it has appeared on television or in the movies, often “playing” somewhere else. That’s the case as well for those who, like the narrator of Thirteen Question Method, wash up here with nowhere else to go. Sunshine/noir, the mammoths and the tar lake—what we’re getting at, really, is artifice and authenticity.

This is less a divide than a sliding scale: a circularity. What is true about the city is equally untrue about the city. Something similar might be said of noir, which is the quintessential form of Los Angeles narrative because it reflects the city’s starkest polarities. What is authentic here is unreliability. What is authentic here is all we do not know as we live it day to day, moment to moment, caught between the darkness and the light.