Who invited her to the party?

When Amy Wilentz moved with her family from New York to Los Angeles after 9/11, she believed they would find a more peaceful and less agitating place. What she found, of course, was that L.A. is no less complicated, no less conflicted -- and not just because of impending natural disasters. Her new book, "I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger," will be published next week, and woven into its ruminations on California's landscape, history and politics is a "radical chic"-style critique of Los Angeles' dinner-partying power brokers and their quest to be considered politically and intellectually serious.

It was at the homes of these pooh-bahs -- prominent democratic fundraisers Stewart and Lynda Resnick, pundit Arianna Huffington, even actress Carrie Fisher -- that Wilentz gathered material, and the book is bound to sting many of them. "I'm the bad guest; I'm the nightmare guest," Wilentz said as she sat in the garden of her Hancock Park home recently.

"But people knew that I was writing a book about Los Angeles," she continued. "I hate to take the virtuous high road .... I just saw something that was interesting and I wrote about it."

Beyond the tantalizing gossip, however, is a larger message: There is plenty of high-power intellectual life in Los Angeles, and it's time for the largely hidden world where it takes place -- the Hollywood political fundraisers, the Westside dinner parties where the quirks and embarrassing foibles of its billionaire wannabes are on display -- to be fair game.

And so Wilentz, a journalist and author of two books -- a novel set in Israel and a nonfiction book about Haiti -- tried to part the veil. Warren Beatty and other A-list celebrities on the fundraiser circuit take their licks, as does the Governator, whom Wilentz pursues but never manages to meet. There's a scathing glimpse of the Resnicks' gaudy lifestyle in a Sunset Boulevard mansion, as well as the relentless self-promotion and excess of Huffington.

But even at its most over-the-top, it's a scene that displays what Wilentz calls a hunger for knowledge. "In New York you go to a party with a group of intellectuals and they talk about their shoes, their clothes and the caterer; they gossip about literary agents, but they don't talk about issues," Wilentz said. "If you want to talk about what it's like being under fire during the intifada, the reaction is: 'Oh, please. What's the next dinner course?' "