—New York Review of Books

The Western Coast

OTHER BOOKS BY PAULA FOX

Poor George

Desperate Characters

The Widow’s Children

A Servant’s Tale

The God of Nightmares

Dedication

To the Memory of

Amos Elwood Corning,

and for Max Markowitz

and Sara Chermayeff

Epigraph

“…our existence is at every instant
and primarily the consciousness of what
is possible to us.”

ORTEGA Y GASSET

The Price You Pay

Introduction by Frederick Busch

Paula Fox’s third novel, The Western Coast, is about a place both mythic and actual: Hollywood, USA. It is the Sargasso Sea of the soul of the United States and has perhaps been considered the province of male authors. You might think of Tommy Wilhelm in Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day; to demonstrate that his protagonist is infected by dreaminess and a wish for instant success, Bellow has him forsake college to try to become an actor and, of course, fail. In Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, Tod Hacket is devoured by the dream. Monroe Stahr of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon dreams Fitzgerald’s dreams and chokes on his author’s rue. Norman Mailer’s The Deer Park manages to send the memories of Charley Eitel and their repository, Sergius O’Shaugnessy, off towards the “green light” of Fitzgerald’s American Dream. These are novels by men about men; even when they are among the supernatural beauty of Hollywood women—say Mailer’s Elena, whose glories prefigure Mailer’s obsession with Marilyn Monroe—their stories are male, men’s disappointments are expressed through women, and the women fail or betray the men who carry the narrative. But here comes Paula Fox, in 1972, with this large tale about the drift to the west in America. Her protagonist is not a man lured by a woman but a woman who, bruised and educated by the American Dream, expresses in her own way no man’s—but this brilliant author’s—sense of what Jean-Paul Sartre called nausée, a spiritual dismay, an abhorrence of oneself in the world.