This first novel, set in Los Angeles in the early 1980's, focuses on the occupants of a housing complex populated largely by drifting single mothers and their undernourished, scabby-kneed children, members of an "other" L.A. that is placed in implied contrast to the louche, glamorous world of the city's film industry.

For nine-year old Hannah, her mother, Elaine, and her younger sister, Daisy, Sunset Terrace is the most recent in a series of stops on a disorderly cross-country tour begun after Hannah's father's suicide. His death has pushed the family to the economic margins -- Elaine makes a slender living as a waitress -- and an atmosphere of straitened circumstances and diminishing hope pervades. Engrossed in her inner drama but aware of the damage being done to her children, Hannah's mother tries to invest the family's flight with a sense of adventure and possibility, but Hannah isn't fooled for a second; Sunset Terrace is a place where nothing good is likely to happen. In the figure of Elaine, whose unshakeable ennui has brought the children to this sad place, we find the solipsism of failure.

Into Hannah's lonely, itinerant life comes Bridget, a miscreant formed in Sunset Terrace's crucible of chaos and neglect. Though initially cautious, Hannah is attracted by Bridget's energy and reckless conviction. Bridget observes no limitations and never turns down a dare, and she succeeds in goading Hannah into ever more-dangerous games. Like all bad influences, Bridget taps a latent unconscious capacity for violence that is both the thing feared and the thing most desired. In the moral economy of childhood it is possible for Hannah to see Bridget as the heroine that the reader fears she never can be as an adult; it is from our anticipation of the life that lies ahead for her that Bridget's special poignancy stems.

A wan, introspective child who lacks Bridget's gambler's instinct, Hannah nonetheless possesses intelligence and a resilience that we suspect ultimately will carry her away from Sunset Terrace. Thus, while Bridget is the more vivid character, it is Hannah whose fate the novel seeks to resolve. Donner succeeds in convincing us that what happens to Hannah next may make all the difference, and it is this sense that Hannah is poised on the precipice that gives "Sunset Terrace" much of its suspense.

The torpid environment Donner creates for her characters make almost any action seem heroic, a middle-finger salute to indifferent gods. Under these circumstances, plot almost seems beside the point. Suffice it to say that an atmosphere of menace builds convincingly to an act of violence that is both authentically shocking and true to the inner logic of the story.

Donner's relatively flat, uninflected tone is reminiscent of another Californian, Joan Didion, and though in "Sunset Terrace" Hollywood is merely background, Donner's novel can be said to descend from Didion's "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" and, ultimately, from the ur-fable of L.A. failure and decline, West's "Day of the Locust". Yet in its painful examination of the poor, white childhood, "Sunset Terrace" is perhaps most reminiscent of Dorothy Allison's celebrated "Bastard Out of Carolina". Within the peculiar pathology of race and class in America, to be poor and black is, at least in the eyes of some sentimentalists, to be poetic, while to be poor and white is only ever a disgrace. While the real abuse that haunts Ruth Ann in "Bastard" is truly only spectral in "Sunset Terrace", we sense that Donner's characters, like Allison's, have drifted beyond the range of politics. They are no longer anyone's constituents.

This is a novel of close observation, and "Sunset Terrace" is at its best when Donner is at her most restrained, letting events, and characters, speak for themselves. An epilogue, in which an older Hannah returns to Sunset Terrace seeking "some sort of conclusion", feels tacked-on.

Serious fiction dealing with the inner lives of children presents a challenge for both writer and reader. But Donner does her young characters the service of taking them seriously, investing them with emotional intelligence and the capacity for complex motivations, while writing with both the necessary compassion and an asperity that keeps her clear of the maudlin and the trite. "Sunset Terrace" is a promising debut.

SSN Interviews Rebecca Donner

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