Photo Daniel Riley Credit Fred Woodward

FLY ME By Daniel Riley 392 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $27.

At first, the pace of Fly Me, Daniel Rileys debut novel, is as laid back as its setting, the LAX-adjacent beach town of Sela del Mar. Its 1972. We tour Sela atop the skateboard of Suzy Whitman, a recent transplant from upstate New York, one of the Vassar girls that last class to miss the liberation parade of a coed Yale. Suzy has shrugged off her academic promise to join her older, less brainy sister Grace as a stew for Grand Pacific Airlines.

Danger glimmers here and there as Suzy bombs toward the beach on her board, scoping out the tan, gently debauched Fourth of July scene, the toasted girls alight with their gumminess, the boys with their counterhandsome peeling noses and white eyelashes. She zips across an avenue on her skateboard, barrels through with a quick prayer to the intersection. The intoxicating view of Sela del Mar and the sea beyond threatens to bleach her judgment. At a beach volleyball tournament, keg buried in the sand nearby, Suzy meets Billy Zar, a local fixture with a surfers torso, swimmers shoulders the color of the grilled hot dogs on the Weber who rocks a leafy-green JanSport nice and bulky. But despite these portentous accessories, the most dramatic event in the first 50 pages of Fly Me occurs when Graces husband, Mike, a Columbia grad and wannabe novelist who cant seem to get on the West Coast wavelength, takes a borrowed beach cruiser on a beer run and crashes, gashing his leg, offstage.

Eventually, Suzy finds herself tangled up in Billys drug-smuggling operation and Riley is off to the races. Suzy raced cars as a kid, and her need for speed guides this plot through its otherwise improbable turns. Racing provides Riley an extended metaphor to explore and explicate Suzys thoughts on true freedom of choice, a gearheads feminist awakening. This metaphor threatens to become overdetermined she wants to be in the drivers seat, you dig? but scenes of Suzy racing or flying are written with undeniable zest. Riley skillfully fuels Suzys desire for self-determination with the indignities heaped upon her and her fellow stews weigh-ins, height requirements, makeup checks. Stewardesses are required to be single, so Grace and Mike have two phone lines installed, one for the airline and one for everyone else a historical detail that might have had more narrative consequence.

Theres a familiar bicoastal rivalry in these pages. Held against New York, Rileys California is a dumb pretty, a physical space with its back turned on the news, balmy and happening but also a provincial, apolitical la-la land where no one reads except Mike, who at his lowest moment quotes Gravitys Rainbow. While the regional binary feels familiar, Riley has a stylish grasp of setting as the axis of place and time, writing about the era with captivating authority, palpable texture and a sure-footed knack for rebuilding a moment out of its pop detritus. Enthusiasts of 70s music and literature will tumble into delightful pockets of nostalgia.

Celebrity cameos in fiction are often too winky for my taste, but they are striking and darkly resonant in Fly Me. A Manson Family member s house is the newest Sela landmark, disciples of Jim Jones proselytize on the glittering beach and the perfectly preened stews must perform their corporate femininity even during a hijacking. Ultimately, Rileys vividly realized setting and Suzys firecracker spirit collide in a surprising whiplash climax.

What do we do when we run out of continent? Fly Me hazards an answer to Joan Didions predicament: We take to the skies.

Claire Vaye Watkins is the author of a story collection, Battleborn, and a novel, Gold Fame Citrus.

A version of this review appears in print on June 25, 2017, on Page BR11 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Coast to Coast.

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Skaters, Beaches and a Drug-Smuggling Stewardess in a Novel of the '70s - New York Times