Plats: A Novel

The first novel by American writer, John Trefry, 'Plats' is a meditation on life in Los Angeles. In the tradition of the prose form-making of Michel Butor, 'Plats' is a masonry text built of modular narrative elements and settings, a textual city to be explored by the reader, where in a single breathe coexist dusty apartments and vacant beaches, reinvention and suicide, haunting and hiding, endless labor and crippling idleness, mint tea and storm waters. The city changes secretly, behind layers of paint and pelts of mildew. Against this stagnant backdrop, inhabitants struggle to observe the passage of their lives. With the hypnotic action of a rising and falling tide, the reader floats through a suite of interchangeable women looking for escape in place-names, in the changing minutiae of their skin and clothing, in the hydrological cycle of a seaside desert, and in the possibilities apparent in one another's lives. They steal each other's shoes, mail, apartments, and identities with the hope of getting one step closer to distinguishing themselves from the refuse of the unchanging city.