Backlist Book #01: Slow Days, Fast Company by Eve Babitz
An introduction to Backlist Book of the Week and the book that started it all
SOMETIMES YOU PICK up a book and it immediately grabs you. Something about the voice, the plot, the language—almost against your will, you’re drawn in. Like an addict, I read book after book, looking for a story that will take me out of myself and into a world that I can not only see and hear in my mind but smell, taste, and touch.
Unfortunately, discovering that kind of book happens less frequently than I’d like to admit. Once in a while I give up on a book, usually around the fifty-page mark, but most of the time I eventually clip in, and I end up liking it well enough, or even liking it a whole lot. But rarely do I love a book wholeheartedly—especially new releases. I look forward to the “most anticipated books of the year” as much as the next person, but so often they fall short of their promises.
I can tell when I’ve been reading too many new releases because I start to get tired of reading, period. Premises start to sound the same; plots fall apart somewhere in the messy middle; endings don’t quite land. That’s when I go back to the backlist, books that are at least a year old (though I prefer to go back at least five years to see what’s stood the test of time).
I’m sure I’m not the only one in this predicament—hence this newsletter, where I’ll share my favorite books from the past, mostly in literary fiction and literary nonfiction. Older books can disappoint too, of course, but the odds of striking gold are much, much higher, and sometimes you hit the mother lode.
Like Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and LA by Eve Babitz (Knopf, 1977, 178 pages), the book that started my backlist quest.
I came across Babitz like many modern readers, via Lili Anolik’s 2014 article in Vanity Fair. The first thing you see when the piece loads is the infamous photo of a nude Babitz playing chess with Marcel Duchamp, as shocking and playful as Babitz herself. She was an It girl and a muse, captivating lovers from Jim Morrison to Steve Martin, but she was so much more than that, and somehow I’d never heard of her. I have a particular fondness for LA books, so I decided to read the 2016 rerelease of Slow Days, Fast Company (thanks for all you do for backlist books, NYRB!).
First of all, that title. Hello! I was hooked before even opening the book. Luckily, the writing lived up to the promise of the title, heady yet tangible, evoking LA as a full-blown sensory experience in ten interconnected pieces. It’d been a long while since I’d met such intriguing characters and unexpected insights. Best of all, reading the book was just plain fun, a trait I prize highly in literary works because it’s so hard to find.
When I finished, I wondered why I wasn’t reading more backlist treasures, and like any reader who’s blown away by a book, I immediately looked up Babitz’s other work. Unfortunately, nothing else lived up to Slow Days for me. Sex and Rage (another banger of a title) was chosen for Emma Roberts’s book club in 2017, but I found it to be a watery and at times tedious imitation of Slow Days. The rest of her essays and novels were equally mixed for me—some were great, some meh, and I didn’t have the heart (or let’s be real, the time) to sort the wheat from the chaff. But Slow Days did ultimately send me down the rabbit hole of older books that remain beloved long after the ink has dried, and she has my eternal gratitude for that.
Babitz died in 2021 at the age of 78, and by all accounts (including her own), she had a complicated relationship with her youthful adventures and the challenges she faced later in life. Her death hit me harder than I thought it would, considering my disappointment in the rest of her oeuvre. But when you love a book as much as I love Slow Days, it’s hard not to want more work from the artist and to grieve the official closing of that door.
None of that context changes the fact that this is one of my favorite books, and I can’t recommend it enough, especially if you’re in a rut and want to breathe new life into your TBR. Don’t read anything else about it or the author; just read the text itself. Let it take you on an irreverent, hedonistic, quick-witted ride through LA in the sixties and seventies, and don’t look back.