Smog is a Los Angeles society-crime novel built around the Menendez murders, narrated by Hugo Byrne, an elderly celebrity journalist whose voice is clearly meant to sound elegant, damaged, acid, and morally dangerous. It wants to be a noir, a true-crime reckoning, a social novel about Beverly Hills wealth, a late-life confession, a media satire, a gay Catholic guilt memoir, and a study of how stories deform the dead. Mostly, it is a heavy, name-dropping, over-perfumed novel that mistakes atmosphere for insight and gossip for moral depth.
The novel begins in 1989, when Hugo is in New York watching the news and reading papers about the latest American catastrophes: savings-and-loan failures, Exxon Valdez, Pete Rose, and finally the murders of Jose and Kitty Menendez in their Beverly Hills mansion. Liv Ellis, Hugo’s beautiful younger socialite friend in Los Angeles, calls him with gossip. Kitty, the murdered wife, was supposedly lonely, drugged, bruised, surgically anxious, humiliated by Jose’s affair, and trapped in a house everyone knew about but no one really entered. Jose was rich, Cuban-born, ambitious, frightening, and tacky in the precise way Beverly Hills pretends to despise while secretly feeding on it. Hugo immediately senses that this is his kind of case: a mansion, money, mutilation, family secrecy, and society people eager to talk.
Hugo returns to Los Angeles and installs himself at the Chateau, where old staff know him and where he can pretend to be both insider and exile. His persona is pure performance: old suits, notebooks, Pellegrino, ulcer, television appearances, a great ruined past, and a cultivated hatred of vulgarity that does not stop him from depending on it. The early chapters introduce his social universe: Liv Ellis and her husband Tanner, heir to a vast real-estate and hotel fortune; Tanner’s monstrous old-money mother Diana; Shelley Vanier, damaged bohemian Los Angeles wild child and Liv’s oldest friend; Buck, Shelley’s beautiful young husband and sometime hotel worker; defense attorney Jean Jones; Beverly Hills detective Gus Krakowski; and the entire grotesque buffet of Los Angeles money, addiction, art collecting, therapy cults, and celebrity decay.
