Few things are as conspicuously absent in contemporary fiction as pleasure for pleasure’s sake. Gratification, when it comes, is surrounded by guilt and bitterness; consumption is anxious; sex mostly seems like a vehicle for some highly determined thematic point.

In this atmosphere of neurotic disquietude, Eve Babitz, an It girl of nineteen-sixties Los Angeles, has experienced a renaissance. On the page, Babitz is pure pleasure—a perpetual-motion machine of no-stakes elation and champagne fizz. In the eight-page dedication to her 1974 début, “Eve’s Hollywood,” Babitz pays manic, tossed-off tribute “to the Didion-Dunnes for having to be who I’m not,” “to time immemorial and the suspension of disbelief,” to prescription speed, to various whipped-cream dishes in L.A. restaurants, and “to the one whose wife would get furious if I so much as put his initials in.” The cover of the volume, which was recently reissued by N.Y.R.B. Classics, is a black-and-white photograph by Annie Leibovitz, in which Babitz tilts her head in profile, wearing a showgirl’s boa and a noncommittal black bra.

Babitz was not yet thirty when “Eve’s Hollywood” was published. She was conscious of having a terrific origin story, one she could turn into a localized myth. “I looked like Brigitte Bardot and I was Stravinsky’s goddaughter,” she writes, after a digression about losing her virginity to the taste of a certain beer. Babitz’s mother was an artist; her dad was a violinist in the orchestra at Twentieth Century Fox. She once sent Joseph Heller a fan letter that read, in its entirety, “Dear Joseph Heller, I am a stacked eighteen-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard. I am also a writer. Eve Babitz.” She received a reply. In her twenties, she dated Jim Morrison, Ed Ruscha, and Harrison Ford. (“The thing about Harrison was Harrison could fuck,” she told Vanity Fair, in 2014, in a rare interview.) She appears in Julian Wasser’s 1963 photograph “Duchamp Playing Chess with a Nude”—Babitz being the nude, and having agreed to the whole thing in an attempt to get back at her married boyfriend, who was the curator of Duchamp’s retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum but had declined to invite Babitz to the party on opening night.

The best writing about pleasure deals in temporality—it acknowledges, in one way or another, the inevitability of degradation and decay. The most faithful chroniclers of pleasure, then, aren’t spooked by the comedown; they’re galvanized by it—freed, even. At one point in “Slow Days, Fast Company,” her essay collection from 1977—also recently reissued—Babitz stops by the Chateau Marmont for a drink. Mid-conversation, she starts tripping. “ ‘But Mary’ll never . . .’ I began. My mouth tasted rusty like blood and I felt a wave of invisible elation cresting in white foam. It couldn’t have been the coke.” About a day later, she leaves the hotel, dry from laughing, bleak and ghostly, still able to remember the glow that preceded the void. She thinks about the Garden of Allah, a long-demolished hotel, writing, “It must have been marvelous when the century was young and things impressed themselves in such blatant vivid brilliance . . . there was nothing to be wanted from material things, nothing to be saved.” In “Eve’s Hollywood,” she calls L.A. a “realm of the self-enchanted which was once, briefly, more devastating than Caesar’s.” Emptiness, for Babitz, is moving, in its own way.

But, in any life that’s exclusively organized around pleasure, monotony and treachery can’t be outrun forever—not even by a writer with such a surfeit of style. In “Sex and Rage,” Babitz’s novel from 1979, reissued this month by Counterpoint, the protagonist is a Babitz double named Jacaranda Leven. Jacaranda grows up by the ocean (“When the surf was hot, everything reached a state of hurling glory”) and instinctively believes that good things are infinite. Someone tells her that she’ll run into a brick wall eventually. “Like what?” she asks. “Snow?”

Named after the cotton-candy flower, Jacaranda is lucky, and she knows it, and she knows that “luck is like beauty or diamond earrings: people who have it cannot simply stay home.” So she spends her nights “in those mansions above Hollywood and Beverly Hills where ambulances once lost their way and where handsome devils sat around on their amps trying to outdo each other in songs, blondes, and downers.” She would be “the only unpassed-out woman extant” at 2 or 3 A.M. Her friends are Max, who “smelled like a birthday party for small children,” and Etienne, a wealthy fiftysomething with a mercurial temperament. Babitz writes, “Along with the opium, champagne, brandy, and cocaine, Jacaranda and Etienne would clash by night, sometimes till dawn, when they’d walk along the dewy lawns (she never knew whether he owned or rented this paradise) towards the view and watch L.A. turn blush-pink, then yellow, then smog.”

Jacaranda falls in with Max and Etienne’s crowd of stylish monsters, people who are “perfectly ready to talk about airports for hours and not be bored.” (At one party, Jacaranda observes the host’s art collection and notes that everyone’s attention keeps alighting on a photo of Duchamp playing chess with a nude, young “Rubenesque” girl.) She starts imagining that she and her new friends all live on a “drifting, opulent barge.” One night, she has fourteen of “some cocktail called a White Lady” and starts to feel like she might be doomed. “So many of the ones like her, the ones who were brought aboard to amuse the barge, disappeared,” Babitz writes. “They O.D.’d on Quaaludes or Tuinals or got hepatitis and had to retire forever, or they became like Marianne, a zombie girl she’d known, who would drop her purse in public and have to spend an hour finding the things and putting them back in.”

Like Babitz, Jacaranda is a writer whose material comes almost entirely from her social life. Jacaranda develops a drinking problem right around the time that she gets a famous New York agent named Janet Wilton, who connects her to magazine editors and commands her to write a book. She’s immediately afraid of having to take herself seriously. “New York was so public,” she thinks, pondering the state of her alcoholism. “Everyone would look at her and know.” Then, after a burst of clarity induced by a motel coke binge with a former teen groupie named Sunrise Honey, Jacaranda gets sober. She boards a plane and meets her publisher, and Babitz, wonderfully, transfers her descriptive facilities to Manhattan: “Jacaranda and Janet stood on the sidewalk as the people crackled past them with intense grips on themselves to keep from leaping into the spring air. The afternoon was even more shameless than the morning.”

Though “Sex and Rage” came out only half a decade after “Eve’s Hollywood,” the cultural hangover that would send Babitz out of print had already begun. “Predictably, and now a bit tiresomely,” a Kirkus review observed, the novel was about California, and “Babitz’s L.A. weltschmerz has gotten rather clotty and overdone.” And still, Jacaranda was a few steps ahead of Babitz. According to that Vanity Fair piece from 2014, the author’s habits got worse in the eighties. Paul Ruscha, a former boyfriend, describes going over to Babitz’s house then to find that she’d snorted up her book advance: “There wasn’t an inch of floor not covered in bloody Kleenex. The cats were running around high.”

And then, in 1997, Babitz almost died in a freak accident: her skirt caught on fire via cigarette ash, and she was covered in third-degree burns—“I’m a mermaid now, half my body,” she told Vanity Fair. “Sex and Rage” isn’t as sharp as the books Babitz made her name on—she’s really a memoirist—but it’s nonetheless a mesmerizing account of a young woman trying to decide what to do about her own premonitions. The barely audible beat of an unlucky future may have been part of what made Babitz immortalize herself with passages like this one, in which Jacaranda imagines how Max sees her: “a rare enough thing—a native-born Angeleno grown up at the edge of America with her feet in the ocean and her head in the breaking waves.” She has a full bookcase, “no sense of ‘sin’ and no manners.” At the end of the book, Jacaranda flies back from New York to Los Angeles, thinking, “She had seen the very words of the Old World seduction and had even drunk its bad waters, which were supposed to be fatal to innocent virgins, but here she still was. She’d lived to tell the tale.”