This time from Mothers, Daughters (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1977 [and what an amazing name for a publishing company]).

“A patio slanting and slanting, off to the edge of a jagged sandstone cliff. . . . The sun, every morning, coming up at a slightly different point on the ridge across the canyon from her living room. The sun, every evening, going down against an infinitesimally different wedge of green . . . . Ruth went into the kitchen, put water on for coffee, bent over the oven to light it, slammed the broiler door, shivered, ran for her robe and slippers, put on a record. The kids were asleep in the living room, where she usually slept; they had colds and the nights in their basement rooms were freezing” (1-2).

I don’t know why Ruth gets involved with the horrible Marc Mandell. She knows about him from high school, from friends of hers who went out with him. He’s handsome, and has nice clothes: “His immense, tall, shambling, rangy form was covered as it always had been by the very best. And much the same best as they had in Marshall High: soft blue shirt, soft, thick gray cashmere sweater, soft gray slacks.” (39)

But Eve Babitz clued me in about Marshall High. That place is bad news for real California girls:

Gabrielle is chewing

(Slow Days, Fast Company [New York: Knopf, 1977], 155-7).

It’s only in putting this post together that I realize the two books came out the same year. I’m pretty sure I read Babitz first, by several years (probably I first read both between 1985 and 1995). In many ways, Mothers, Daughters is the kind of “literary fiction” I categorize as “people ruining their lives by making stupid decisions” (just as much a genre as mystery or romance, if you ask me), and I don’t like it nearly as much as Golden Days. But if you focus on setting, the contrast between LA and British Columbia (where Ruth goes with Marc) is brilliantly done. The landscape, Ruth’s house, Marc’s hotel, other buildings and views, support the characters and plot. And by the end of the book, Ruth is back in the Topanga Canyon house. Her life isn’t ruined, it just took a detour for awhile.

If you belong in Topanga, beware of people who went to Marshall. As for standing in for a Midwestern high school, I’m sorry, but movie people have no clue about the midwest.