In the coke-dusted canyons and deal-making rooms of 1970s Los Angeles, Bender's L.A. follows writer David Bender as he sets out to remake his life — romantically, professionally, and spiritually — after his wife walks out in Puerto Vallarta with a single sentence and a suitcase.
While the Vietnam War casts its shadow, Bender runs afoul of Nixon's FBI, plays tennis with fugitive Abbie Hoffman, arms himself against a homicidal producer, and goes back in time to fall in love with a young Marilyn Monroe. Bender weaves through a world of players, radicals, writers and artists including a woman suspiciously like Eve Babitz.
Haunted by his New York past and guided by his Sun Tzu-quoting agent Neil Navitz, Bender begins to wonder whether success has cost him the things that mattered — or whether he ever truly possessed them.
With a comic edge, Elias offers a bittersweet meditation on love, memory, and the moral compromise of the Hollywood illusion machine and the misfits it often mangles along the way. In this tragicomedy of nostalgia and recovery, Bender prevails.
It’s a great read — an elegy for lost loves and lost cities, and a love letter to L.A. Cynical, social satire and emotional truth. Eve Babitz meets Raymond Chandler.
Patrick McGilligan
Michael Elias grew up in the Catskill Mountains, a Red Diaper Borscht Belt Baby in a world of blacklisted artists, intellectuals, tummlers, folk singers, boxers, and Jewish gangsters, (some of whom sleep at the bottom of Loch Sheldrake). His childhood heroes were Jerry Lewis, Harry Belafonte, Rocky Marciano, and Abe ‘Kid Twist’ Reles. Educated in the classics at St. John’s College, Elias took his knowledge of ancient Greek and mathematics to New York, trained at the Actors Studio and acted in The Living Theatre, La MaMa, and the Judson Poets Theatre. From there he dove into stand-up comedy, playing coffee shops, night clubs and The Tonight Show. Fired from Ed Sullivan, he abandoned the act, moved to Hollywood where he wrote sit-coms, variety shows, screenplays, and participated in the anti-Vietnam War movement, earning a subpoena to a Nixon grand jury. Elias continues to write novels and screenplays in Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife Bianca Roberts and their dachshund Mabel. His website is here.
