Like Dick, Angel, a thirty-something albino who lives in a one-bedroom apartment “on an unpopular cul-de-sac off Hollywood Boulevard,” also dabbles with drugs. Angel’s medicine cabinet is a virtual cornucopia of mind and mood altering pharmaceuticals: Valium, Librium, Centrax, Atrivan, Xanax, Ludiomil, Ambien, Restoril and a “mainstream drug, the one that never seemed to have an effect” called Reality.

Angel isn’t crazy about leaving the confines of his apartment. Like Dick, he is mildly agoraphobic. It’s lonely, but safer inside, where he has the comfort of Jack Daniels and his big-screen television constantly playing a DVD of Ridley Scott’s classic, ‘Blade Runner’ (adapted from Dick’s wonderful novel, ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’) ‘Blade Runner’ scenes quickly emerge as a sort of leitmotif that enigmatically weaves Moore’s book more tightly.

Angel’s life may not be a standard melody of normalcy, but, like many Americans, he is mostly content with his prescription drugs, television, and regular visits to a Freudian psychiatrist. Also, alone he has ample time to contemplate his fixation with the idiosyncrasies of light. Admits Angel, “I have become obsessed over the years with the poetry of Los Angeles light, how it glimmers off the moving traffic and glows through the smog, how it ignites the fires that periodically burn entire sections of our city to their asphalt foundations.”

But things radically change after a mysterious woman named Angela knocks on Angel’s door late one night and hands him a casserole of scrumptious lamb stew. Angela, with her dark cinnamon skin, uncanny cobalt eyes, and Guns N’ Roses T-shirt, possesses a hypnotic quality that Angel can’t shake. Soon Angel is convinced that he is in love with her, or is it something more than love?

Angela is a woman of few words, but erotic actions. She is a femme fatale most appropriate for the present. She is intelligent, independent, and drips sensuality. Angel can’t resist her allure. Angela works in a roadside strip club called the Velvet Mask that Japanese businessmen and “ad guys from New York” frequent. She performs lap dances accompanied by “disco for psychos,” alongside other dancers who have “eyes like Egyptian hieroglyphs.”Sometimes, for variety, the club’s DJ spins tunes by an up-and-coming rock band called ImmanuelKantLearn.

After Angela abruptly disappears, Angel’s topsy-turvy world becomes all the more convoluted. He embarks on a labyrinthine urban adventure to find her. But the more he searches, the more he begins to doubt that she ever truly existed. Eventually, he suspects that she may be far more than he ever considered; that possibly she may be the very source of his many peculiarities.

Smith captures the slippery essence of Los Angeles like no writer before him (maybe it helps that his sister is actor Julianne Moore), and he’s able to do it with deceptively brilliant sentences:“The sun…blazed angrily through a hazy sky like the eye of an Old Testament God.” His first-person narration, through the eyes of Angel, is sharp and luminescent, bestowing a dreamlike urgency to the story. Smith’s first novel, ‘Raveling,’ was a mesmerizing read that I found near impossible to put down, except for the fact that I didn’t want it to end. ‘Los Angeles’ is similar in some regards, but also very different. When it ends, one can’t help thinking it was a great story, but that maybe something was missed in the hast to reach its compelling conclusion; perhaps something quite important, something lost in the shifting light, that merits discovery through a second reading.

H.P. Albarelli Jr. divides his time between Florida, Vermont and London. His first novel, ‘The Heap,’ will be published this month.

© 2005 Laura Hird All rights reserved.