Other cities have taco addictions, but in Los Angeles — with far more Mexican restaurants than any other county in the U.S. — taco culture is on perpetual overdrive. There’s a soft-shell crab taco for $26 at the clubby Arts District roof bar Cha Cha Cha and a $24 caviar taco at Nobu Los Angeles, but also $2 paper-plate tacos just outside your favorite neighborhood gay bar, and everything in between. The city has given birth to Korean tacos, Black tacos, vegan tacos, halal tacos, kosher tacos, alongside an explosion in regional tacos from the farthest corners of Mexico, making L.A. arguably the most taco-diverse city in the world.
In Los Angeles, the taco is our avatar. It is who we are. How did we get here?
In truth, hasn’t reality become a little bit more tornadic in the past two decades? Thoughts and fantasies and projections and memes—in a world without privacy, of socially externalized selves lived online and offline—are all spliced together, projected and poorly hidden. And this leaking container/curated performance called the self? Surely it has several different identities and avatars, lurking all within it.
If this sounds at all straightforward to you, chances are you will feel that Venita Blackburn has written one of the first truly realistic novels of the 21st century. Dead in Long Beach, California, her sidewinding, immensely clever debut novel, moves like life—speedily, knowingly, metafictionally, and, still, devastatingly. It’s a book about how neither drowning in stories nor the ability to spin them can protect you when they happen to you, as its protagonist, Coral, finds out in the opening pages of the novel.
And so it is with this sequel to his debut, Heart, Be at Peace. Once again, he gives us a sequence of 21 voices; readers of the first book will be reunited with many of the folk they came to know – but never fear, this works just as well as a standalone. Ryan is always deeply engaged by the way the fortunes of 21st-century Ireland impact directly on his characters: the financial emergency that afflicted this small town may have faded, but new troubles – opportunities, to some – have arisen to take their place. Ryan deftly interweaves a larger sense of danger, and an understanding of Ireland’s history, with domestic concerns.
Dining Room
High Top
Even Higher Top