The Displaced

D’Ebre (The Federal Informant) follows in this messy novel the displaced residents of a gentrifying neighborhood as they resort to violence. In the waning months of 1999, Culver City gangster Ruben “Lurch” Beltran notices an influx of white hipsters in his West Los Angeles neighborhood. Meanwhile, journalist Mikey Bustamante’s mother’s house in the neighborhood is in danger of being foreclosed. Egged on by a doctor who paid his way through school selling drugs and believing apocalyptic warnings about Y2K, Lurch decides the gangs need to band together to scare off the interlopers, and persuades Mikey to write about the story of the fight. After the city’s police begin a brutal crackdown against the gangs, a standoff between the gangs and police blows up into full-scale war. D’Ebre makes the recent white arrivals odious with their tone-deaf speech, and the hypermasculine protagonists unsympathetically aggressive, their only humanizing moments being brief grief over lost friends and lust-driven attachment to women who are, alas, stereotypically rendered. There’s also a surprisingly large body count. It’s a disappointingly shallow treatment of racial animosity and resistance. Agent: Holly Watson, HWPR. (Mar.)