Giovanni, a twenty-five year old Italian, arrives in Los Angeles in search of his future. Like the camera he carries around with him, the story takes reels of snapshots of the vacuous lives of the young Californians he meets. From struggling scriptwriter Ron and his ambitious girlfriend Tracy to Jill, the neurotic check-out girl at the Italian restaurant still mourning the departure of her Crooner boyfriend Ray, everyone is chasing the American dream of fame and money. Giovanni skirts through this surreal landscape, De Carlo’s camera-like narrative zooming in here and there to give the reader colour-sharp details and in fact before writing this novel De Carlo tried to express himself through photography.The plot is clinically narrated from the outside, although this detachment hints at an underlying layer of moral bankruptcy and despair.

‘Ron and Tracy were like two young sharks, insecure, quarrelsome, frantic every time the phone rang. They were always on their guard, wary of giving themselves away or of appearing naïve. They saw Los Angeles as an obstacle race, every jump as the latest of a series; they subdivided the endless series of jumps so as to come down to categories and sub-categories. They circled around in search of scraps of success to snap up so as to grow into bigger young sharks...At some moments of total frenzy the telephone numbers on their note-pads were insufficient to sate their craving for opportunities or cues for them to step into the limelight or make themselves known in some way.’ p25