MISFITS

Harris’ story collection focuses on Los Angeles characters from all walks of life, shaken from their routines by startling chance encounters and unexpected relationships.

The author presents a collection of Los Angeles–centered short stories, typically involving a clash of personalities when characters come together (sometimes in a meaningful fashion, other times, well…). The title tale introduces Morris, a restless, middle-aged tax accountant who encounters Sofia, a rebellious teen from a privileged girls’ school, vandalizing luxury cars in retribution for climate change. Even though she considers him a class enemy, they somehow form a fragile bond (“Watching him leave, Sofia felt a hollow opening up inside her that she couldn’t explain. No other adults would let her speak to them the way she did to Morris”). Cary, the hard-luck protagonist of “The Cactus,” a washed-up athlete turned washed-up movie stuntman turned insurance man, finally meets his life mate in the person of an accident-case client, Sheila, who is particularly enchanted by an exotic flowering cactus he keeps. In “Doubles,” a divorced freelance writer and minor true-crime author is asked by a tennis partner for referrals on hoodlum types who can intervene in a sexual blackmail plot. Harris is not one for tidy endings in neat packages, leaving the reader hanging with tantalizing suggestions of what might happen next, as in “Mute,” in which a film director’s marriage disintegrates under the stress of raising an autistic child, or in “Chicken Soup,” with its battle of wills between an obstinate dowager and the undocumented Latinx woman hired as her caregiver. While the settings occasionally depict a Hollywood milieu of screenwriters, wannabe stars, and other creatives (the author is an established filmmaker), the material is not as arch as work by other chroniclers of Tinseltown, such as Bruce Wagner, Steve Martin, and Peter Lefcourt. Harris’ stories skew more broadly, recalling Raymond Carver’s and John Cheever’s vignettes of relatable people yearning for connection.

A bittersweet selection of well-told L.A. stories, spanning gang lockups to movie-director mansions.