I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger

Amy Wilentz moves to Los Angeles and finds it no more alike her hometown of Perth Amboy that she found her earlier stops in Port au Prince and in Jerusalem. She cannot identify with the healthful, absent-minded blondes. She prefers to think of herself as most like the ancient woman found in the La brea Tarpits. The focal point of her alienation stems from the pull of the orbit surrounding Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. I like this book. Its a book made up solely of the imagination of a wandering observer. She drives to California City and contemplates what the original settlers of the state sought. She wants to understand the feeling of nature and the attention to bodies, so she goes to Esalen. She has a minor car accident and the experience forces her to think about race and class and the disparate communities within the city. She meets celebrities, but can't grasp their power within the culture. I love the idea of asking someone to tell you who they are by telling you what magazine would represent their personality. Of course, this is California, so Wilentz wonders what magazine would be her car. She decides her used minivan is Parade -- out of step with the Prius' driven by celebs, the Escalades by the record promoters, and even a step from the secondhand Corollas favored by recent immigrants. I suppose this is two books, and so far I've focused more on the place it concerns. Schwarzenegger is the lead figure, no doubt. I learned a lot about him. I suppose it is a virtue to bring a new voice to a one party community, but a lot of the rest seems less of virtue and more about self. Well, I would encourage people to read this book. It is more reflective than most non-fiction. I think it would leave a lot of room for book clubs or any group that wants to talk about a book.

From the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Aug. 13, 2006 Entitled, "Barbarians at the Beach" 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 surfaces with a perilous flash in the life of a Sharon Tate, an O.J. Simpson, a Phil Spector or a Robert Blake. 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, clichés, 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." Still, her husband, Nick Goldberg, lands a job at the L.A. Times, (he is editor of the op-ed page and the Current section) and she hopes to escape the anxiety of New York after 9/11 -- where she had actually bought an inflatable boat in case she had to escape across the Hudson. Not surprisingly, she finds an equal, even expanded sense of "catastrophism" along the Pacific. Wilentz feels few earthquakes and sees no riots, but she does get close to fires and floods. And she reliably -- if rather traditionally -- conjures up the SVW while viewing prehistoric bones at the La Brea Tar Pits, while shopping t

It's a treat to snuggle up for 300-plus pages with Amy Wilentz's voice: reportorial and confiding, contentious and confessional, a hint of Didion and a pinch of Ephron, simultaneously neurotic and level-headed, paranoid and wise. What a balancing act - and the writing gains in richness, momentum and authority in chapter after chapter. After I'd finished, I recalled that when my wife and I moved to Los Angeles in '85 (Manhattan refugees like Wilentz), we coined an acronym for anything grotesque, ostentatious or just plain silly that had a distinctly SoCal vibe: "OILA". Which stood for Only In Los Angeles. Nearly every day, we'd turn to each other and say it. Several years ago we realized that, somewhere along the line, we'd stopped saying it. Because we'd stopped noticing; we were natives now. Well, after reading IFEMOTTH, I feel re-sensitized. Reborn, almost. Okay, not reborn - but amused, enlightened, informed ... and terrified to realize the extent to which we East-to-West Coast transplants have become what we beheld. Thank you Ms. Wilentz for that insight, and so many more.

Amy Wilentz is a Jersey girl who moved from Manhattan to LA after 9-11 -- and discovered, not a sunny laid-back paradise, but a whole new set of apocalyptic Mike Davis-like threats: forest fires, floods and landslides, and of course the earthquakes of the title. The seismic shifts include the rise of Arnold Schwarzenegger, which she covers brilliantly. The Governator, she observes, is never worried or troubled or embarrassed. That makes him the opposite of our author, who was praised by John Leonard in Harper's for her "luminous anxieties." My favorite part of the book is the prologue, which ends with the author in a tiny desert town that has a scale model of the Twin Towers, five feet tall. "At this size," she writes, "we could have cupped our hands and broken their fall."