Set in the coke-dusted canyons and smoke-filled bars of Hollywood with stops in Cannes, Cuernavaca, and the Caribbean, Bender's L.A. follows writer David Bender as he attempts to rewrite his life romantically, professionally and spiritually, after his wife leaves him with a single sentence and a suitcase.
While Hollywood dazzles and distracts, the Vietnam War casts its shadow over Bender’s Los Angels, shaping marriages, politics, friendships, and sex, Bender plays tennis with a fugitive Abbie Hoffman, runs afoul of Nixon’s FBI, arms himself against a homicidal producer, and slips backward in time to fall in love with a young Marilyn Monroe. Guided by a Sun-Tzu-quoting uber-agent Neil Navitz, and a best friend suspiciously like Eve Babitz, Bender navigates a city where radical politics and extraordinary privilege uneasily coexist.
Wry, elegiac, and sharply observed, Bender’s L.A. captures a man who must decide whether success has cost him the things that mattered, or whether he ever truly possessed them at all. winks to Nathaniel West, Scott Fitzgerald, and Philip Roth. Elias offers a bittersweet mediation on love, memory, and the Hollywood machine along with the misfits it mangles along the way. In this tragicomedy about heartbreak and recovery, his hero Bender prevails.
Praise for Bender's LA
“From the co-writer of The Jerk comes a surprisingly poignant novel—an elegy for lost loves and lost cities, and a love letter to 1970s Los Angeles. Eve Babitz meets Raymond Chandler.” —PATRICK McGILLIGAN, author of Young Orson
“I think this is wonderful. A kind of Bellowesque Bech—but better. Better by far. I applaud you.” —ANDREW ROSENHEIM, The Spectator
“This has the wry humor of Scott Fitzgerald’s Pat Hobby stories, refracted through the cracked lens of L.A. Confidential. Sublime.” —JOHN BAXTER, author of A Year in Paris
“I love the insider Hollywood stuff—the grumpy director in Aspen, flattered into submission; Bender’s weed infused night with Sterling Hayden, jogging with Julius Epstein and Burt Lancaster, the artists, the writers, and the contradiction in Bender’s left politics as he experiences Hollywood in a tumultuous decade of the Vietnam war and revolution. I love how he sees and falls in love with smart women, and the constant self-reflection and analysis. And that Hollywood is never far from any moment internal or external in Bender’s life makes it all even more interesting. I love it all. —JESSICA ANYA BLAU, author of Mary Jane
“I lived in Bender’s L.A. in the late ’70s. (I think I dated Bender.) This is accurate, funny, and a wonderful read.” —IRIS RAINER DART, author of Beaches
“In the last few years, Michael Elias has become one of my favorite writers. And Bender's L.A. is, as far as I'm concerned, the best work he has ever done. I was in heaven reading it." —LILI ANOLIK, author of Didion and Babitz
"There is a seductive matter-of-fact quality to this novel that combines with liquid clarity. With these people there is no doubt you know your onions.” —PHILLIP DAVISON, author of The Crooked Man