Sex and Rage: A Novel
By Eve Babitz
4/5
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Currently unavailable
About this ebook
> The Eve Babitz resurgence remains in high gear with tons of media coverage for the reissue of her classic Eve’s Hollywood and Slow Days, Fast Company
> With the recent reissue of Eve Babitz’s via the New York Review of Books, there has been an immense amount of coverage on the author from publications such as New York Magazine’s The Cut, Vanity Fair, The Paris Review, and more
Eve Babitz
Eve Babitz was born and grew up in Hollywood. She began to write in 1972 after designing album covers for such artists as Linda Ronstadt, Buffalo Springfield, The Byrds, and Lord Buckley. Her articles and short stories have appeared in Vogue, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and The New York Times Book Review. Her books include Eve’s Hollywood, Slow Days, Fast Company, Two by Two, and Sex and Rage. She died in 2021.
Read more from Eve Babitz
L.A.WOMAN Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Two by Two: Tango, Two-Step, and the L.A. Night Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
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Reviews for Sex and Rage
30 ratings5 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I was introduced to Babitz recently via a recent article about her in Vanity Fair. The idea of an intellectual good-time girl intrigued me as it should, and I was dismayed to find that her work is not only largely unknown but also out of print. I was able to get a first edition copy o fSex and Rage via interlibrary loan to read and boy, am I ever glad I did. Babitz is glorious as a writer, the work hums with the fastness of the era, of the good time unapologetic choices that Jacaranda makes, doing so with such easy going nature you are desperate for the drugs she’s on.
The book has several main characters, two of them cities (LA and NYC), who are plumped up in their finery to show you what they are really like. Make no mistake, this is very much a roman à cléf of Babitz’s life and I don’t think this book would have been successful any other way. The only way to capture the essence of the era and the city would have been to live it as wildly and as fully as Babitz. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Surprising! I was put off for chapters waiting for any of it to speak to me at all, I’m so sick of stories of rich white girls burning their bras in the 60s and 70s while black girls were getting lynched and beaten to death and raped. But it didn’t matter in the end because our narrator is a failure and remains one, and it isn’t so joyous when you’re a drunk and the d.t.s are so bad you cant focus on the meeting at the publisher that is supposed to change your life. The author posed nude playing chess with Marcel Duchamp when she was a teen. Becoming a pretty, stupid drunk isn’t the worst that could have happened.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This was a very interesting book. Eve Babitz seems to perfectly capture the culture of late 60s southern California/L.A./Hollywood/surfer life in a way that makes me glad I never lived there myself (that's a compliment, trust me). Jacaranda Leven is a born and bred California surfer girl who gets caught up in the late-night, drinking and drugs with beautiful people culture that young ladies seem to be so susceptible to (the subtitle for this book - "ADVICE to YOUNG LADIES EAGER for a GOOD TIME - is peak Babitz toungue-in-cheek irony). But Jacaranda is more than a doomed plaything for the rich and famous; she actually has potential as a writer, which is reason enough for those who claim to love her to abandon her to her high and mighty ways. The tragedy here is that Jacaranda was caught up in the scene for so long that she believes she is less than, only good for a laugh when she's 14 cocktails in. It takes a literary agent and trip to New York for Jacaranda to begin to put the pieces of her life back together. Eve Babitz is a fantastic writer. Her sentences jump around like thoughts in a self-conscious alcoholic's head, poetic ruminations on the sights and sounds of the L.A. scene. It is a tale told by a woman, full of sex & rage, signifying everything.
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- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I was introduced to Babitz recently via a recent article about her in Vanity Fair. The idea of an intellectual good-time girl intrigued me as it should, and I was dismayed to find that her work is not only largely unknown but also out of print. I was able to get a first edition copy o fSex and Rage via interlibrary loan to read and boy, am I ever glad I did. Babitz is glorious as a writer, the work hums with the fastness of the era, of the good time unapologetic choices that Jacaranda makes, doing so with such easy going nature you are desperate for the drugs she’s on.
The book has several main characters, two of them cities (LA and NYC), who are plumped up in their finery to show you what they are really like. Make no mistake, this is very much a roman à cléf of Babitz’s life and I don’t think this book would have been successful any other way. The only way to capture the essence of the era and the city would have been to live it as wildly and as fully as Babitz. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I'd actually barely heard of Eve Babitz before picking this one up, and I've got to admit that the big, bold colors on the cover helped make my decision to buy it easier. In a lot of ways, the story inside, which involves a surfer girl called Jacaranda who takes up with and is later dropped by a crowd of fabulously wealthy pseudo-sophisticates is about as subtle as the cover. But Babitz seems to be writing directly against New York ideas about California and pulls of a gorgeous trick by wholeheartedly embracing its most shallow aspects. Jacaranda herself, and some of her friends, are beautiful and likable, but it's hard to say, at the end of the novel, that we know very much about what goes on inside of them. We know even less about Jacaranda's writing, which is what finally rescues her from a life of alcoholism and shallow cliquishness, but that's less of a bug than a feature here. Babitz herself embraces glossy surfaces here and makes it pretty clear that she's not here to amuse the crowd at the "New Yorker" by finding lots of deep meaning in West Coast locales where it might not exist anyway. In to its last scenes, "Sex and Rage," she seems to be arguing that the shallow and thrilling also has something to say.This may or may not sound terrible to you, but "Sex and Rage" succeeds mostly because the author doesn't miss a note. Her writing's vibrant and her observations are sharp; I agree with the reviewer that described Jacaranda not as written but "sculpted." It also helps that the novel has the relentless momentum of an amphetamine binge and that Babitz seems to have a preternatural understanding of the tribal rites that govern the interractions pointlessly rich. This isn't to say that "Sex and Rage" is some sort of underhanded criticism or satire -- I honestly don't think that it is. But I think it's possible that a lot of midcentury American life felt easy and fun and a bit superfical to a fair number of lucky people, and the fact that Babitz picked up on this while it was mostly still going on means that she might have possessed insight on the level of such generational prophets as, say, Tom Wolfe. If she did, it's a further credit to her that she seems to have no intention of judging her subjects, fictional though they may be. Anyway, I don't know if I'll read Babitz again, but I've got to admit that "Sex and Rage" is really something special: a novel reads as well on a beach blanket as it does in an artsy café. That's not a trick that just any writer could pull off.