Sex and Rage: A Novel

By Eve Babitz

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

"This novel is studded with sharp observations . . . Babitz’s talent for the brilliant line, honed to a point, never interferes with her feel for languid pleasures." —The New York Times Book Review

The popular rediscovery of Eve Babitz continues with this very special reissue of her novel, originally published in 1979, about a dreamy young girl moving between the planets of Los Angeles and New York City.

We first meet Jacaranda in Los Angeles. She’s a beach bum, a part–time painter of surfboards, sun–kissed and beautiful. Jacaranda has an on–again, off–again relationship with a married man and glitters among the city’s pretty creatures, blithely drinking White Ladies with any number of tycoons, unattached and unworried in the pleasurable mania of California. Yet she lacks a purpose—so at twenty–eight, jobless, she moves to New York to start a new life and career, eager to make it big in the world of New York City.

Sex and Rage delights in its sensuous, dreamlike narrative and its spontaneous embrace of fate, and work, and of certain meetings and chances. Jacaranda moves beyond the tango of sex and rage into the open challenge of a defined and more fulfilling expressive life. Sex and Rage further solidifies Eve Babitz's place as a singularly important voice in Los Angeles literature—haunting, alluring, and alive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jul 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781619029859

Eve Babitz

Eve Babitz was born and grew up in Hollywood. She began to write in 1972 after designing album covers for such artists as Linda Ronstadt, Buffalo Springfield, The Byrds, and Lord Buckley. Her articles and short stories have appeared in Vogue, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and The New York Times Book Review. Her books include Eve’s Hollywood, Slow Days, Fast Company, Two by Two, and Sex and Rage. She died in 2021. 

Reviews for Sex and Rage

[kaylaraeintheway · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was a very interesting book. Eve Babitz seems to perfectly capture the culture of late 60s southern California/L.A./Hollywood/surfer life in a way that makes me glad I never lived there myself (that's a compliment, trust me). Jacaranda Leven is a born and bred California surfer girl who gets caught up in the late-night, drinking and drugs with beautiful people culture that young ladies seem to be so susceptible to (the subtitle for this book - "ADVICE to YOUNG LADIES EAGER for a GOOD TIME - is peak Babitz toungue-in-cheek irony). But Jacaranda is more than a doomed plaything for the rich and famous; she actually has potential as a writer, which is reason enough for those who claim to love her to abandon her to her high and mighty ways. The tragedy here is that Jacaranda was caught up in the scene for so long that she believes she is less than, only good for a laugh when she's 14 cocktails in. It takes a literary agent and trip to New York for Jacaranda to begin to put the pieces of her life back together. Eve Babitz is a fantastic writer. Her sentences jump around like thoughts in a self-conscious alcoholic's head, poetic ruminations on the sights and sounds of the L.A. scene. It is a tale told by a woman, full of sex & rage, signifying everything.

[heroineinabook · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I was introduced to Babitz recently via a recent article about her in Vanity Fair. The idea of an intellectual good-time girl intrigued me as it should, and I was dismayed to find that her work is not only largely unknown but also out of print. I was able to get a first edition copy o fSex and Rage via interlibrary loan to read and boy, am I ever glad I did. Babitz is glorious as a writer, the work hums with the fastness of the era, of the good time unapologetic choices that Jacaranda makes, doing so with such easy going nature you are desperate for the drugs she’s on.

The book has several main characters, two of them cities (LA and NYC), who are plumped up in their finery to show you what they are really like. Make no mistake, this is very much a roman à cléf of Babitz’s life and I don’t think this book would have been successful any other way. The only way to capture the essence of the era and the city would have been to live it as wildly and as fully as Babitz.

[adaorhell · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Surprising! I was put off for chapters waiting for any of it to speak to me at all, I’m so sick of stories of rich white girls burning their bras in the 60s and 70s while black girls were getting lynched and beaten to death and raped. But it didn’t matter in the end because our narrator is a failure and remains one, and it isn’t so joyous when you’re a drunk and the d.t.s are so bad you cant focus on the meeting at the publisher that is supposed to change your life. The author posed nude playing chess with Marcel Duchamp when she was a teen. Becoming a pretty, stupid drunk isn’t the worst that could have happened.