Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World

The author turns his critical eye to the City of Angels, discussing L.A.'s gridlocked freeways, immigrant neighborhoods, posh Beverly Hills, popular culture, health consciousness, and more, and speculates on the city's future

Angelenos speak in catchphrases and take pride in the length of their commute. Los Angeles is a city where "people and their things are hard to tell apart," where mobile pleasure-seekers find the prospect of raising kids "just a little bit of a drag." While its middle class gets "sucked into . . . upscale consumption," its masses of largely poor Asian and Hispanic immigrants, many of them illegal, are not being assimilated, according to Rieff ( Going to Miami ). Drive-by shootings are nightly occurrences in black slums, and thousands of homeless ply the beaches of Venice and Santa Monica. A devastating, wonderful, witty send-up of L.A.--and CA--as crucibles of the 21st century, this disquieting report delineates a city with an ethos of unchecked growth, sprawl and possibility that "decontextualizes" its residents from reality. First serial to Los Angeles Times; author tour.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Ambitious in both style and substance, Rieff's second major book on a US metropolis (Going to Miami, 1987) attempts to resolve the contradictions of L.A. by proclaiming it the Third World's capital. It's a hard sell, but Rieff does create a memorable sermon on the myopia afflicting the middle and upper classes in southern California, who seem desperately unaware of their city's decline. This is a book about gardeners, real estate, and cars: in other words, about immigration, diminishing expectations, and social and cultural gridlock. The author, a full-blown intellectual of the New York-Paris axis, has his cosmopolitan way with that most rigorous and decadent of places. He seems to mean his book to be both serious and droll, as well as a stylistic tour de force, and he comes close on all three aims. But this is also an exercise in aggravation. There's Rieff's overdependence on his ``good friend Allegra,'' a BMW-driving Everywoman, plus his unfortunate penchant of condescending to the Third World help (``...when the conversation turned, as it did so often in bourgeois America in 1989 and 1990, to the collapse of the Soviet empire, I would slip into the kitchen and talk to the maid...[where] the Rosa or Maria...in question would tell me stories about home''). Lapsing into a faux-L.A. tone, at times the author achieves the very banality he seeks to parody. Another flaw is an indistinct focus-- he makes sweeping statements about the City of Los Angeles (where ``most whites had long ago abandoned the public schools'') that simply aren't true of the much larger Los Angeles County. Yet there's much to be grateful for as well: an ambitious prose style, a thorough historical buildup that does justice to L.A.'s elusive yet crucial spirit, and a knack for the telling statistic or detail. A big book that justifies the attention Rieff has drawn, without quite earning the laurels predicted of him. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.