Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles
By Rosecrans Baldwin
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021

“Anyone can knock off a dystopia,” historian Mike Davis tells Rosecrans Baldwin in Baldwin’s terrific new book Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles, “especially if they’re in L.A.” 

Davis, whose own City of Quartz is likewise a terrific book about Los Angeles, was here referring specifically to the predictive genius of Octavia Butler, but his comment is generally applicable to the City of Angels, which was founded as a Spanish pueblo called El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora le Reina de los Ángeles in 1781, became a regional capital of Alta California under Mexican rule, boomed in size and wealth as a western nexus of the burgeoning United States, and is now a bewildering cynosure of dreams, delusions, and stark social contradictions. For almost all of its history, LA has been a city colluded into existence out of stories told about itself; it’s what happens if you take the old saying “there’s no there there” and try to give it sidewalks and postal codes. 

As the subject of a book like this - part history, part travelogue, part epic pub-crawl - it presents endless opportunities for an enterprising writer, and Baldwin has written the best book on the subject since City of Quartz. He helicopters his broader narrative down at carefully-chosen points in the city’s history, telling the stories of the corrupt politicians, desperate gangsters, fraudulent dreamers, and all the other assorted weirdos who’ve lived versions of the place over the years (and, of course, there’s the requisite gushing over LA-centric seedy hack Charles Bukowski). This kind of kaleidoscopic approach is a risk, since it forfeits most narrative cohesion in its quest for momentum, but Baldwin makes it pay off.

It certainly conveys the persistent strangeness of the place, and this is hugely helped by Baldwin’s uncanny ability to get the best quotes out of the endless people he interviews over endless drinks in endless tacky bars. He’s amassed so many of these choice quotes that he can deploy them as punch lines:

Rarely simple itself, Los Angeles often would be summoned to express another: a midwestern suburb; a Pacific Rim metropole; a heteropolis - suggesting a land full of love for difference and all things weird: sideways skyscrapers, pluralization, chicken shawarma burritos. For some it was simpler. “It’s Houston plus porn,” one journalist told me in a Spring Street bar.

If you’re not already under the odd spell that LA so often casts on even people who’ve never visited it, you’ll feel the light brushing of that spell while reading these pages; if you find the whole idea of Los Angeles vaguely, indefinably revolting, Baldwin’s anecdotes will make you seethe delectably with vicarious disapproval; and if you are indeed already bewitched by LA, you now have a new piece of required reading. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.