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Review

"Epic in scope... astonishing, sensual, wise and often humorous," Bodies and Souls is set in Los Angeles. Its diverse cast includes: the most famous actress in pornographic films; a Chicano teenager who wanders into the punk world; a male stripper for women who faces himself during a make-believe "slave auction"; the doomed family of a prominent judge; a Mister Universe contender who discovers what his physical perfection conceals; a Skid Row woman obsessed with conflicting memories of roses; two teen-aged male hustlers who fall in love amid the violence of the city's sexual streets and alleys; a news anchorwoman researching both in her sex life and for a television series on "vice"--what she calls "the lower depths"; and sister Woman, a mesmerizing, powerful evangelist whose Gothic background suggests incest, suicide. Winding through these portraits are three recurrent characters--Orin, Lisa and "Jesse James." They have inherited what the author sees as dominant strains in the dark psyche of America--Orin the sexual repression of the Salem witchburnings; Lisa, the falsely "romantic" and masochistic attitudes of the 1940's cinema heroines; Jesse, the melancholy glory of the outlaw. These three roam the vast city of "Lost Angeles." Using an innovative, smoothly integrated style, Bodies and Souls is written in a rich prose which deliberately evokes classic Hollywood movies and in a sometimes somber, inventive style that alludes to the dark views of contemporary European cinema. Through it all a vision of Los Angeles never before depicted emerges.