Non-Stop to New York

My idea behind having a blog for us is simply to find an easy way to discuss what we are reading, either by raising questions or simply by recording our impressions.  In the process, we will also have the chance to practice writing.  In my personal experience, it usually happens that a good book (or a good movie) only begins to get truly interesting once you start thinking about it--but the challenge is to think clearly and to find the right point of entry.  But we will work toward these goals.  Writing and thinking are always "in process," and so we usually begin with messiness and confusion and gradually work toward clarity and understanding.

The first novel we will read is The Barbarian Nurseries by Héctor Tobar.  This is apparently a novel about twenty-first century Los Angeles, touted as a "West Coast Bonfire of the Vanities" (a novel by Tom Wolfe which I have never read).  The only novel that I have read about L.A. is Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust (published in 1939)--a weird book whose disturbing surrealism prefigures the films of David Lynch.  Of course, Los Angeles figures prominently in the celebrated crime fiction of Raymond Chandler (another famous novelist I haven't read), so let's see whether any elements of detective fiction appear in Tobar's story.  As a reader, I would expect some crime or mystery to drive the plot.

Do you have any expectations for this novel?  If so, what are they?  If not, what might you expect a novel about L.A. to be about?