WHEN writers visit Los Angeles, they often find Something Very Wrong here. It's a noir something. A darkness-hiding-in-the-sunlight something. A vapid-facade, tragic-narcissistic, dystopic-unease sort of problem. We Angelenos failed to create paradise, and we must pay the price. Too much wealth and too much poverty lurk behind those bright lawns and giddy hibiscus, so our town's bound to see trouble.
Occasionally, the SVW manifests itself in biblical fashion with an earthquake, a fire or a flood. Sometimes, it merely surfaces with a brief, perilous flash in the life of a Sharon Tate, an O.J. Simpson, or a Phil Spector.
Whatever the SVW may be exactly -- fate or hubris or just something in the air -- it has grown into a recognized discipline, like cosmology or anthropology. And along with distinguished researchers like Nathanael West, Raymond Chandler and Joan Didion, it attracts many lesser poets, novelists, filmmakers and commentators. Some, like social critic Mike Davis, have built entire careers on the SVW: proving its existence, discovering its habits and demonstrating its power. Just last year, an SVW flick named "Crash" won the Academy Award for best picture.
With "I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen," journalist Amy Wilentz makes a lively, if modest, contribution to the field. She doesn't much like L.A., and she claims that California "has a dark heart," but that only places her in the mainstream of the SVW tradition. She sets out to update us on the improbabilities of life in the pueblo since her arrival in early 2002, she takes us inside L.A.'s salon culture and she deftly chronicles one of our most successful commercial products: Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Wilentz is a seasoned traveler. She's covered Haiti and the Mideast for the New Yorker and the Nation. Still, she asks us to picture her as a wide-eyed everywoman, another innocent Manhattanite tossed up, however reluctantly, on our shores: "I didn't want to be in a place where -- according to the tropes, cliches, and stereotypes that I'd absorbed as a proper New Yorker -- everyone was blond, tan, cute, strong-jawed, empty-headed, and athletic, and possibly spiritually inclined. I was dark, bespectacled, bookish, and both physically and mentally not tan. I did not belong in L.A."
