THE PERISHING

An immortal woman delivers a love letter to Los Angeles.

In Deón's lauded debut, Grace(2016), Naomi fled 19th-century Alabama slavery to hide in a Georgia brothel; in this new book, the author again channels the voice of a Black teenager on the run. Sarah Shipley, aka Louise Willard, washes up in a Los Angeles alley naked of memory and nearly all her clothes. It is 1930. “We’re all on the verge of somebody else’s violence,” Sarah states on the opening page, speaking from the year 2102. It may take 20 pages for readers to find their bearings, but the dislocation is worth it. Deón dots her text with some superb phrasing and the knowledge that “Los Angeles has always been brown.” A social worker places Lou with a seemingly kind foster family in Boyle Heights, the kind of neighborhood that prompted W.E.B. Du Bois to declare that Black Angelenos were “without a doubt the most beautifully housed group of colored people in the United States.” Lou comes of age amid Prohibition and grows close to Esther Lee, an aspiring actress whose Chinese American family runs a legendary boxing gym—until Route 66 construction plows it under. Lou secures a desk in the basement of the Los Angeles Timesand a job writing features on dead folks, a juxtaposition that lets her riff on mortality even as she struggles to understand her place among the Immortals. Some of this is intriguing; other parts are a muddle. Deón has a weakness for aphorism, which can wobble into sermonettes, including the entirety of Chapter 9. She is on better footing in Mr. Lee’s boxing gym, where the details are vivid. There, Lou meets a fire captain from Alabama whose face she has been drawing compulsively. This novel is sexy even if its love story breaks no ground. More memorable is Metal Wally, a bigoted student from Lou’s high school who dogs her LA life. The scene at his funeral is riveting; so is a section on the catastrophic 1928 failure of the St. Francis dam. Deón, a criminal attorney, has a nose for corruption and a knack for cinematic scenes. “Passengers and beasts, it seems, we all are," she writes, "on our way to some other destination.”

The story of a strong woman in an unruly place is marred by a jumbled plot.