Labyrinth

by David L. Ulin

A middle-aged man, now living in Los Angeles, returns on a business trip to San Francisco, where he lived when he was much younger and less conventionality attached. In the course of three days in the city, he confronts the echoes of his history, both in the patterns of the streets he obsessively wanders and in a strange interaction with a couple of old friends, who bring him face-to-face with this own unfinished past. Seeking solace, he ends up at Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill, where he walks the labyrinth. This leads him to reflect on who he is and who he used to be, on the relationship between distance and belonging, and between memory and identity.

76 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

David L. Ulin is book critic, and former book editor, of the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time, Labyrinth, and The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith, selected as a best book of 2004 by the Chicago Tribune and the San Francisco Chronicle.

He is also the editor of three anthologies: Another City: Writing from Los Angeles, Cape Cod Noir, and the Library of America's Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a 2002 California Book Award. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Black Clock, Columbia Journalism Review, and on National Public Radio's All Things Considered.

Ulin teaches at USC, and in the low residency MFA in creative writing program at the University of California, Riverside’s Palm Desert Graduate Center. In 2010, he was awarded a Southern California Independent Booksellers Association/Glenn Goldman Book Award for his work on Los Angeles: Portrait of a City.

Reviews

[Karrie Higgins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Labyrinth is space-time psychogeography in the age of Facebook, where our personal digital archaeology--all those high school friends and past lovers we thought long since banished, all the places we ever lived--threaten to bury the present. I had this impression all the way through it of lost times, lost friends, lost loves, and lost places as invisible ruins. The way the narrator fights them off with BE HERE NOW feels urgent and valiant, but also perhaps futile. I think it's easy to underestimate a "little" book like this one, but David Ulin has done something incredibly profound and beautiful and heartbreaking here. I haven't read any other book like it, and I have returned to it several times, each time experiencing it differently.

Full disclosure: David Ulin was my favorite writing teacher ever, so take my review however you will, but there's a reason he's such a great teacher. Read it. And then unplug and take a walk.

[Kate Abbott · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novella is for anyone who can appreciate walking a city, and wondering what might happen if you meet up with an old flame while you're there. I thought the details of San Francisco were especially vivid and lovely in this book. (I don't think it was a coincidence I visited the city soon after reading.)

[Stephen Williams · Rating 1 out of 5]

The blurb on the back cover tells the whole story. There's no reason to read the entire book.