Off-Ramp literary commentator Marc Haefele says, in general, it's another case of outsiders not getting it.

Look, there's no theoretical reason why a book 80-percent of whose contributors hail from as far outside LA as the north of England, can't deal with our sprawling literary heritage. But, considering how the field of LA history now flourishes here, that doesn't seem the easiest way to go about it, and the results in this Cambridge Companion are a mixed bag.

It opens well with Rosaura Sanchez and Beatrice Pita's appreciation our early Spanish-language literature, and the subsequent downfall of the Californio culture. Then we are running on familiar ground -- Helen Hunt Jackson to Raymond Chandler to James N. Cain. But then comes the jumble.

We have, for instance, impossibly arbitrary pairings. "British Exiles and German Exiles, 1930-1940." But the one group -- the Brits -- came over to make a buck in the movies. The other fled for their lives. As a topic, they mix like chardonnay and gasoline. Or "Asian American and Latino literature." What's the connection? On the other hand, there's nothing about Gay and Lesbian LA, the fertile and influential milieu that gave us the epochal works of Christopher Isherwood and James Rechy along with much of the shape and substance of American film.

We also have what you might call missing attribution: an essay on LA in Film covers the territory of Thom Anderson's mighty documentary "LA Plays Itself" without mentioning it. And the missing citation: How can one now write about Raymond Chandler's Phil Marlowe novels without evoking their connections with real-life LA crimes and injustice disclosed in Richard Rayner's 2008 "A Bright and Guilt Place?"

And there's this outsiderish fixation on infinite Freedom of the Freeways in the `60s classics: "The Graduate" and "Play it as it Lays."
Which will strike modern Angelinos as wanton nostalgia. Inevitably, if appropriately, "The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Los Angeles" includes the usual suspects of contemporary LA Lit -- Joan Didion; Mike Davis, James Elroy. But we've heard their stories too often.

The best of the book -- which include Charles Scruggs' brilliantly researched and written "Los Angeles and the African American Imagination" and Charles Mohr's "Scenes and Movements in Southern California Poetry" -- seduces us with Southland writing that is as unfamiliar as it is innovative. Here, the guidebook really functions as a guide -- telling us what we don't already know.

Charles Scruggs says, "The artists who would dare to represent Los Angeles must connect the multiple voices of the streets, films, songs, and other forms of mass culture to reveal the palimpsest, the utopian city within." That goes for scholars, too -- and there's just not enough connection here.

Meanwhile, if you want really to know more about LA's Lit, pick up David Ulin's classic "Writing LA" anthology. And, while you're at it, Lilian Faderman and Stuart Timmon's exhaustive "Gay LA" -- to remedy "The Cambridge Guide's" biggest single omission.

For Off-Ramp, this is Marc Haefele.