The Freeway Novel

Skijler Hutson considers how the Los Angeles freeway system has figured in fiction.

By Skijler HutsonApril 4, 2025

• Fiction

EVERY CITY THAT hosts the Olympics must answer for some blemish of home infrastructure. In 2016, Rio de Janeiro constructed large roadside barriers to hide its impoverished favelas. In 2020, Tokyo ignored concerns of nuclear radiation when events were held in Fukushima prefecture. Last year, Paris made triathletes swim in the polluted Seine despite a century-long prohibition. And in 2028, Los Angeles will have to speak for its infamous freeways. 

Many of former mayor Eric Garcetti’s “Twenty-eight by ’28” initiatives have already stalled, and current mayor Karen Bass’s hope for a “no-car” Olympics was quickly amended to “public-transit-first.” Evidently, the city’s vision for its future includes public transportation, but does it possess the will to move on from its past—not just the physical barriers of its existing infrastructure but also its luxurious self-image of postmodern sprawl? In the wake of the devastating fires this past winter, Los Angeles has only suffered increasing scrutiny for its infrastructural shortcomings, but most national outlets have misunderstood the local life of the city and, most importantly, its intricate self-mythology.

To speak of the character of Los Angeles, City of Quartz, is to speak of a long list of contradictory facts encompassing the city’s simultaneous wealth and poverty, promise and disappointment, beauty and desolation. The freeways, being the most defining part of daily life in Los Angeles, have long offered the simplest and most effective way to represent the manifest experience of these contradictions. The symbolic allure of the freeway comes from its overdetermined and easily imagined materiality—just as, no doubt, the physical pleasure of driving comes from its rich postmodern symbolism. The freeway novel does not figure the complete history of L.A. literature, but since its inception at midcentury, it has become a main source of its self-regard. Across the genre, one sees the evolution of Los Angeles’s image of itself, as well as the possibilities for its future.

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After World War II, the invention of the freeway—in conjunction with home air-conditioning, suburban development, and the aqueduct—made Southern California rapidly habitable. In no other region did Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex sink deeper investments, not only into aerospace armaments but into the peripheral infrastructure needed to serve such expansion as well. Whether through direct lines of finance or indirect logics of sprawl, the contours of postwar Los Angeles quickly embodied the front lines of the United States’ imperial architecture.

As early as Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), the thrill of freeway driving parallels a political disconnect with the surrounding world. “I sometimes think drivers don’t know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly,” observes the mysterious young Clarisse McClellan. “If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh yes! he’d say, that’s grass!” The uncomplicated but complete transformation of the land provides the nonobtrusive point of entry for early freeway novels, carrying on a tradition in the city’s literature. Where prior depictions of Los Angeles (by, for example, Nathanael West, John Fante, and Raymond Chandler) had subliminally noted the region’s physical transformation—its eerily natural prosperity made possible by William Mulholland’s aqueduct—later works made this transformation more explicit. Orange groves are replaced by freeway interchanges.

If the freeways only provided an opening for Bradbury’s allegory of McCarthyism, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) employs them as an entire paranoid system of American control. In the fictional suburb of San Narciso, all roads lead to the freeway and all inhabitants work for the aerospace manufacturer Yoyodyne. Unlike earlier L.A. noir, this Cold War mystery has no resolution, and just as the protagonist gradually becomes trapped in the book’s unending clues, so too does the background landscape of freeways become increasingly inescapable:

What the road really was, she fancied, was this hypodermic needle, inserted somewhere ahead into the vein of a freeway, a vein nourishing the mainliner L.A., keeping it happy, coherent, protected from pain, or whatever passes, with a city, for pain. But were Oedipa some single melted crystal of urban horse, L.A., really, would be no less turned on for her absence.

Pynchon’s example suggests the way novelists had begun to appropriate the popular sensorial language of freeways to express the daily alienation of American citizenship. Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man (1964) and Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays (1970) both describe nervous protagonists who drive the freeways in order to have some control over their uncontrollable lives. Through delicate programs of corporeal description, the reader is transported into the driver’s seat as the car becomes an extension of the body itself, inducing a calm trance in these otherwise paranoid narrators. This flow state temporarily mitigates feelings of social estrangement and political apathy, only to reveal itself as a balm for much greater neuroses.

The tragedy of these novels is not that Isherwood’s George and Didion’s Maria become victims of the era’s homophobia and misogyny, respectively, but rather that they overestimate their agency in the first place. Their happy “choice” to drive the freeways in a city defined by them gestures toward a system of increasingly distanced control. Midway through both novels, the magic of driving ceases to captivate the protagonists: George “keeps meeting other cars on blind corners and having to swerve sharply,” while for Maria “the traffic was heavy and the hot wind blew sand through the windows and the radio got on her nerves.” Without the freeways to distract them, both begin a slow mental descent.

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Neither of J. G. Ballard’s exemplary freeway novels, Crash (1973) and Concrete Island (1974), are explicitly set in Los Angeles, but the metropolis’s influence is written across his work—he called the city the Troy of the 20th century. Along with the experimental work of Kenneth Anger and Chris Burden, Ballard’s fiction captured our increasingly libidinal attachment to the automobile, the special genius of Crash lying in its avoidance of metaphor to extend that connection. When one grows up in L.A., sexual maturity is linked to one’s access to a car; into adulthood, one’s mental map of the city is still dotted by inconspicuous turnoffs and lookouts. The recent republication of Jack Skelley’s 1980s fantasia, The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker (2023), puts it one way: “I get in my penis-extension car and drive it straight into Hollywood … and Girlfriend.”

Los Angeles and its freeways, transformed by a matrix of desire, also become the source for inquiries into postmodern experience: the exoticization of Jean Baudrillard’s 1986 travel diary America; the foresight of Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City (1960), which finds L.A. to be unmappable; Reyner Banham’s 1971 encomium to the city’s “four ecologies”; the urban geographies of Edward Soja and Mike Davis; and, of course, Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), which locates its first site of interest in Bunker Hill. As early as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s “Culture Industry” chapter of The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Los Angeles is taken—and mistaken—as a theory of America writ large.

Just as history was declared dead in postmodern theory, so the freeway seemed to come from nowhere and go on to nowhere. The strange paradox of the freeway novel, in turn, lay in attempting to express this loss of temporal flow through a form dependent on narrative. In her essays, Didion writes that, by driving the freeways, she had come to find narrative “sentimental,” but in her novels, there is still always some storytelling element, no matter how fragmentary. Bret Easton Ellis’s Less than Zero (1985)—a lesser imitation of Play It as It Lays—captures the same apprehension of narrative inconsequence in a city where people are “afraid to merge,” but it fails to affect total detachment. As in Gavin Lambert’s The Goodby People (1971), California types are painted as cool and unimpressed, only to reveal some intense feeling of existential neurosis. Following Jameson’s formula, postmodernism proves itself not as the end of history but as a miasma of unhistorical thinking, itself a historical phenomenon. 

In L.A. mythology, a character’s fear is projected onto the landscape: earthquakes or wildfires, coyotes or mountain lions, Santa Ana winds or Pacific waves. To this day, the trope of a vengeful environment—the city’s “ecology of fear,” as Mike Davis put it—remains the most damaging misconception of Los Angeles. At least in the freeway novel, one is always reminded of the infrastructural reasons for the city’s precarity. After so many hysterical reactions, the unabashed pride of Eve Babitz always comes as a welcome respite: “Earthquakes are only earthquakes, but a good sunset …”

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Turn-of-the-21st-century novels reflect both changes in the city’s landscape and the evolving aesthetic and political feelings of the era. In the wake of the 1992 L.A. uprising, the freeways are no longer taken as postmodern novelty among the city’s increasingly diverse population but rather as exemplary of Los Angeles’s structural racism and environmental inequality. “Driving the San Bernardino is the closest I get to Mecca,” writes Gil Cuadros in City of God (1994). “I was born below this freeway, in a house with a picket fence now plowed under.” At the same time, the city persists in a cultural ambivalence that wavers between tragedy and farce. If the preceding decades were able to birth both the L.A. Rebellion films of Charles Burnett and the Blaxploitation features of Jack Hill, then the 1990s held the freeway pursuits of Rodney King and O. J. Simpson equally in its imagination.

Both Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997) imagine possibilities for racial and class repair through dystopian destruction of the city’s freeway system; by the end, both books transform the freeways into footpaths and shelter for the multicultural homeless. Far from offering perfect solutions, they transfer contemporary social feelings into a future in which (infra)structural inequality is literally leveled. Simultaneously, old moods of paranoia become flat and sentimental, as a nascent neoliberalism normalizes the globalized interconnection of daily life. In Parable, Lauren Olamina develops the ability to feel others’ pain due to her mother’s prenatal use of opiates, while in Tropic, a conspiracy of harvested organs reveals the biopolitical connections of transnational life. More than ever, feelings of political vertigo are described through bodily affects; twisting conspiracy theories are likened to the nausea of freeway cloverleafs.

In his comprehensive survey of L.A. disaster literature, Mike Davis points out a noticeable shift over the course of the 20th century from nativist narratives of the city’s destruction by foreign aliens to depictions of an increasingly diverse Los Angeles as the “alien itself” to be destroyed. Butler’s and Yamashita’s novels avoid both of these racist tropes, instead destroying the city in order to more justly rebuild its relationship with the land. On the cusp of the 21st century, infrastructural transformation becomes almost unanimously associated with issues of social and environmental justice. 

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In spite of earlier hopes and reimaginings, recent freeway novels have been remarkably ambivalent about the city’s future, if also further revealing of its present. Most notably, L.A. fiction has recommitted itself to a new order of sprawl, seeking to represent the contingency of daily life that stretches farther and farther outside of the urban center.

In Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room (2018), the reader follows a caravan of female inmates out of Los Angeles on the I-5 freeway as they prepare to enter a state correctional facility in the Central Valley. Looking out the grilled windows of their bus, the women notice a white substance floating in the air: the feathers of Thanksgiving turkeys stacked in a truck next to them. Similarly caged in the prison escort, many of the women, facing life sentences, are also making their final journeys. And just as some of those turkeys will likely perish in transit, so one woman slouches over and dies on the bus, neglected by the prison guards. 

Over the last 50 years, the landscapes of the San Joaquin and Coachella valleys surrounding Los Angeles have been systematically transformed into an architecture of prisons and industrial agriculture, forming sites of spatial fix for the city’s biopolitical surplus. It is fitting that, in Kushner’s novel, these systems should collide at the same locus that connects the entire region’s infrastructure—the freeway itself.

In the face of such unimaginably complex systems—indeed, in the face of those monumental interchanges that, with each passing year, seem more and more immutable—a certain level of farce and humor soothes political impasse. The 2016 film La La Land opens with a musical jubilee of motorists atop a traffic-jammed interchange, singing that “it’s another day of sun!” In Henry Hoke’s Open Throat (2023), the reader inhabits the charismatic mind of a genderqueer mountain lion who must contend with the “long death” of the freeway. And in Miranda July’s All Fours (2024), a perimenopausal woman sets out on a cross-country road trip after she is told by her husband that she is a “Parker,” dependable but boring. Instead of becoming an adventurous “Driver,” however, July’s protagonist only makes it as far as Monrovia, less than an hour from Downtown Los Angeles, trapped by herself and the vortex of the city’s freeways. The zooming scenes of adrenaline that filled earlier fiction are replaced by congestion and gridlock, forcing collisions but also unlikely new encounters. 

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Los Angeles holds an unusual tolerance for the unassimilated. Lacking the grit of New York or the overwhelming history of the South, the city still surprises with its ability to affect us—touched sentiments following the recent fires, invocations of the city’s decline as the embers still burned. When Nathanael West first described that class of people who come to California to die, he did not mean by natural disaster; he meant by disappointment. 

Los Angeles remains the most beautiful city in the world. As it prepares for the Olympics, the only inconveniences foreigners will encounter are those suffered by locals every day. The particular challenge for L.A., rather, will be a matter of self-esteem. A vanity that fails to produce pride—this has always been the city’s affliction.

The formal problems of the freeways, their overwhelming architecture and erotic majesty, will continue to challenge representation. An empty freeway still induces a feeling of movement and drive, as Ballard wrote in 1998:

The beauty of these vast motion sculptures, and their intimate involvement with our daily lives and dreams, may be one reason why the visual arts have faltered in the second half of the twentieth century. No painter or sculptor could hope to match the heroic significance of freeway interchanges. In many ways they also threaten the novel, their linear codes inscribing a graphic narrative across the landscapes of our lives that no fiction could rival.

Perhaps it is the mimetic impossibility of the freeways that has made them so enticing as a postmodern subject. Freed from the shackles of representation, freeway novels have offered other ways of imagining modern urban life. It would make sense, then, that in recent years novelists have turned toward a literature of ambivalence. If the freeways should one day fall, it will not be through the imagination of their collapse. The duty of artists, rather, will be to demonstrate other possibilities for navigating Los Angeles, to create another sort of mythology.

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Featured image: Catherine Opie. Untitled #1 (Freeways), 1994. Platinum print. Image Dimensions: 2 1/4 x 6 3/4 inches (5.7 x 17.1 cm). © Catherine Opie, Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles.