Probation officer gives office BJ to boot-camp teen
Bill Guttentag's Boulevard: Runaways, Murder and Survival on the Unseemly Side of Hollywood
Monday, February 1, 2010 at 6:50 am
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Boulevard
By Bill Guttentag
304 pages, Pegasus
The Deal: Casey has fled her rather unconcerned parents in Washington for the even less concerned underbelly of Hollywood. She's kidnapped by a pimp only moments after she arrives via bus, then systematically raped over a week of cruel training for prostitution.
When she eventually escapes, she falls in with a group of runaways whose lives consist of begging, turning tricks and dumpster diving for survival. But when things go bad for Casey's best friend, a male prostitute for LA's moneyed pedophiles, her life of minor league crime escalates to murder.
The Upside: Though this is somewhere around book No. 276,529 in the cautionary canon of Hollywood's darker side, Guttentag brings a freshness to the subject by digging deeper. These aren't the usual Kansas farm girls done in by casting couches. His teenage characters are already damaged before they arrive, only to be further ground down by lives bordering on Third World.
The brutality of basic survival is so constant it almost comes off as mundane. Yet while the kids may be violent or oblivious to turning tricks, there's a certain humanity here, a kinship and kindness that raises them above LA's thin selection of characters.
Throw in a detective with a runaway son of his own, a partner whose marriage is slipping away -- in addition to orbiting pimps, self-important lawyers and small-time freaks aplenty -- and you have a tale that gets major points for freshness and ambition.
Reality Check: Give Guttentag his props. It's not easy for a middle-aged man on the Stanford faculty to write about people and places so far from his world. But there's a natural casualty to such adventure: The dialogue has a tendency to sound like a middle-aged man imagining how kids talk.
In his attempt to make teenage runaways multi-dimensional, there's also a rather large thread of sentimentality that runs through the kids. Instead of mental illness, violence for violence's sake, and unchecked backstabbing -- the staples of modern street life -- he provides them with a one-for-all-and-all-for-one quality that seems a little too close to the street urchins in black and white movies.
Closing Arguments: But these, alas, are the inane things pointy-headed writers quibble about. Your more important question: Is this novel worth a ride? The answer is a definitive yes. It may have a tad too much middle-aged sensibility to be truly riveting, but it's engrossing, original, and comes with the Official True Crime Report Seal of Freshness.
Grade: B+
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