Punctuated Equilibrium

Abstract

Punctuated Equilibrium Larry Fondation (bio) La Medusa. Vanessa Place. FC2. http://fc2.org. 488 pages; paper, $22.00. Punctuated equilibrium is a theory of evolutionary change. Long periods of stasis are broken by bursts of rapid transformation, leading to the development of new species. This is also an apt metaphor for life as it is lived in Los Angeles—right here, right now. Life here is discontinuous; change comes in sudden explosions—sometimes predictably, often out of nowhere. Both human acts and acts of nature erupt seemingly ex nihilo and jolt us from our rest. The homeless sleep in downtown doorways; the police cruise in and roust them. Suddenly, Skid Row is rife with unwanted activity. The housing bust has been extreme here. The High Desert belongs again to the cacti and the jackrabbits, the builders' bulldozers silent and rusting. The fragile calm of Los Angeles cracked open in flaring violence when riots roiled the city in 1965 and 1992. Unlike hurricanes and snow storms, earthquakes cannot be foreseen. No scientist can yet tell us when the earth will shake and shudder. Los Angeles is a city of disruption. That is why gang life so epitomizes the city in many ways: the ennui of hanging out on the corner is suddenly interrupted by the sound of gunfire. The stillness is gone; the action begins. Vanessa Place aims to take on the cacophony that is present-day Los Angeles. La Medusa is a sprawling and many-layered book that pokes its nose into crevices and cubbyholes all over the city—from Venice to Hollywood, from Beverly Hills to South Central Los Angeles. The characters too come from multiple casting couches: a nine-year-old sax player, her closet-voodoo grandmother, a soon-dead doctor, big rig truckers, a vato ice cream vendor, and the human brain itself. Their stories pop up, trail off, and then pick up again, mirroring the snapshots and vignettes that truly define our lives. Myles and Stella drive a big truck painted pink. On the side, Stella has another woman, her lover Ricki. The passions of the two women light up their trucking journeys along the freeways that dissect and divide Southern California. Place plays the snake-head/freeway metaphor lightly and well. Feena is a precocious woodwind player. Her grandmother (Grandmere) has a larger-than-life influence over Feena and her mother, Athalie. Grandmere wears real diamonds drilled into her long fingernails. Jorge sells his wares amidst the gang-infested streets of the infamous Oakwood area of Venice Beach. There are many others, whose narratives run in sections, short and long, throughout the book. The brain has its own chorus, with speaking parts reserved for the regions of its anatomy—Cerebellum, Medulla, Thalamus, etc. La Medusa is described as a "conceptual" (or "post-conceptual") novel. I struggle with the term. The label evokes lost cachet in the visual arts, and, to me, it does not fit fiction very well. Barton Zwiebach's A First Course in String Theory (2004) is a conceptual book. It is a physics text. I have not taken calculus in twenty years. The book is difficult, cerebral. As I try to read it—in its language of mathematics equations—only my brain is engaged. In my view, fiction—like all other art forms—must provide primarily an emotional experience. At its best, art is a gut punch. When I confront great art, I yearn to be short of breath. Not as stricken with the flu, but as breathless as after sex. Los Angeles poses a mind-body problem of its own: the locus of sex and chiseled bodies also has more book buyers than any other city in the nation. LA is classically the body, but truly the mind. To her credit, Place tries to navigate both—the cerebral and the emotional. But the book vacillates on the issue. It becomes both a strength and a weakness of the novel. Place describes in an email exchange the origins of her novel: "The book began as a procedural piece: to write down everything that occurred to me for 41 consecutive days, in 15 minute installments. As I was reading in cognitive science at...