Not a few novels set in Southern California feel local to natives and longtime residents. They try, and sometimes succeed, to capture the feeling of “L.A.” (“The Big Sleep,” “Play It as It Lays”). Other novels are what city editors used to call “local-local” stories – Naomi Hirahara’s “Summer of the Big Bachi” set in Altadena and other Japanese American neighborhoods of the Southland, Kem Nunn’s surf-noir “Huntington Beach.”
But in his second novel set in Pasadena and adjacent La Cañada Flintridge, Pasadena author Chip Jacobs goes what newsroom sages called “local-local-local” – there and (almost) only there, deep in the weeds of one particular small part of our neck of the woods.
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“Arroyo” of 2019 was a mostly historical, though occasionally time-traveling, novel surrounding the legends past and present created by the 112-year-old, 1,500-foot Colorado Street Bridge – “Suicide Bridge,” as it sometimes was and is known.
“Later Days,” published Sept. 16 by L.A. literary press Rare Bird Books, is of a particular time – the late 1970s and early 1980s – and a particular place, an elite Flintridge prep school transitioning from an all-boys, jock-centric campus to a co-ed one.
While the author himself is a graduate of Flintridge Prep School, and while other fancy local prep schools are called out in his book by real names – Polytechnic, Westridge, Sacred Heart, Mayfield – the fictional school is dubbed Stone Canyon Prep.
I recently sat down with Jacobs on the patio of our local Pasadena branch library, Linda Vista, to discuss “Later Days” and asked him why he opted for a fictional school name in what he acknowledges is a semi-autobiographical story.
“I wanted to come up with a name different than Flintridge,” he said. “I love that school. My daughters went there, as did I. But I wanted to create another story. I wanted Thaddeus Lowe” – the hallowed and eccentric Pasadena entrepreneur and inventor – “to have founded it. I wanted to have the real estate where I could make up the names of teachers. I also wanted to create incidents and timelines different than we had at Prep.”
My own mother was the librarian at Prep when Jacobs was a student there, and a Marka Hibbs-like Boss of the Books makes a cameo in “Later Days.” But I was a public-school kid. Was the prep-school bullying by entitled rich thugs really as bad as presented in an opening scene of his book?
Not every day, he said. But the small group of boys in an entire class was an insular world with unavoidable conflicts. “The whole job when you go to a prep school is to survive to the next day,” Jacobs said. “You just try your best not to let somebody kick the crap out of you or give them your full name or any other way to get at you and let them make fun of you. We had a very defined universe – there were 38 guys in the class, all puppies, with nobody coming to adopt us. The grapevine burned hot. This little fenced-in campus was all we knew.”
And there were other burdens that come with an elite education. “Many of us had fathers who were great men,” he said. Jacobs’ own father was a Caltech graduate. “There was a palpable but invisible hand of judgment – are you going to be as good as your father? The Geragos family was at Prep. The Jorgensen family, as in steel.” Nobel Prize-winning physicist “Murray Gell-Mann’s son Nick attended Prep.”
“I do start the book with a bully, but I did not want it to be about bullying,” he says. And it’s not.
“Later Days” is a book about California boys and girls at a time when sexual roles were changing. It’s about the early days of the internet, with protagonist Luke Burnett’s best friend Denny Drummond going on to pioneer cloud computing as a colleague of Bill Gates – who also has a cameo. It’s about the freedom that is first cars, about commandeering your own table at the local Bob’s Big Boy now that you can drive, about worrying about scoring high enough on the SAT to get into your college of choice, about careers that can go south even after a private-school education.
Great men – Caltech’s Richard Feynman, a surprisingly affable mentor after being surprised by smart kids coming up out of the campus’s famous underground steam tunnels – and great women – Swiss psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, developer of the five stages of grief – play significant roles in the novel.
“There was something very defining about being at a prep school,” Jacobs says. “We were the Flintridge Prep Rebels in the most non-Confederate sense.” (Now the school mascot is the Wolves.)
“We liked to be the guys playing tricks and embracing our juvenile energy. We were like the little brother of Poly, and wanted to get under their skin. I wanted to make this a valentine to a brotherhood, now that we are getting older. Every class thinks they are special, but if you have four or five close friends from your high school years, you have succeeded. A diamond is formed through tectonic pressure, and I have felt that, whether it was homework or a test, or later in life death, divorce, accidents. I wanted to write a story of that brotherhood, a somewhat dark one – my little posse has lived up to what we started.”
Chip Jacobs in conversation with Sandra Tsing-Loh
When: 7 p.m., Sept. 18
Where: Vroman’s Bookstore, 695 E. Colorado Blvd, Pasadena
Information: https://vromansbookstore.com/event/2025-09-18/chip-jacobs