My Face for the World to See

A jaded Hollywood screenwriter watches a young woman walk deliberately into the Pacific, pulls her out, and finds that the rescue has bound him to her in ways he never agreed to. Hayes writes mid-century Los Angeles as a place of transactions rather than dreams, and his narrator’s detachment is the point: he can describe his own callousness with perfect clarity and change none of it. Long out of print and steadily rediscovered, it is a short, cold, expertly made novel about the damage careless people do.