This amusing memoir ought to become part of the welcome package New Yorkers receive if they relocate to Los Angeles. It's not just that Jersey native Amy Wilentz has captured the texture and feel of life in LA. It's that no one has registered the big-top flavor of California politics this well since Joan Didion.
Wilentz found herself out west because her husband was offered a job at The Los Angeles Times. But as she takes in her surroundings, she looks for clues about why she is really there. "This is where it all begins," Wilentz says, eyeing a to-scale replica of the World Trade Center in the Mojave desert. "It's why I ever agreed to be in such a place ... the people of New York couldn't, but the people of California City could put it together again."
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Wilentz was in New York on September 11, and she moved west with a distinct vibration of fear (hence the book's title). That fear is hardly assuaged by the earthquakes, the wildfires, the private security forces that patrol upscale neighborhoods. Then, like a godsend, Arnold Schwarzenegger runs for governor in the recall of 2003.
At first Wilentz is excited. "Schwarzenegger would be reliably present, not the kind of leader to disappear in a crisis." But as she examines the phenomenon of the celebrity governor, she begins to turn on him. It's not just the rumors and reports of his womanizing, but the way he warps the whole dialogue of politics in a state already cravenly beholden to star wattage.
Wilentz takes readers on a fascinating tour of Southern California's power elite—their dinner parties and wonky discussion groups, the way personal spiritual advisors seem to overlap any social lines.
Most of all, she registers what happens when the world is reduced from three dimensions to two. "Oliver Stone is building the World Trade Center in Los Angeles," she writes in the book's final scene, which unfolds on the set of a new 9/11 movie. "It's what we all saw on the television news," she says with admiration. Yet—and here's the important part—something essential is missing.