Looking without seeing

For as long as there has been a Los Angeles, writers have arrived from elsewhere to tell us what it means. They fly or drive or take the train in, then spend a few weeks marveling at the local customs before returning to Baltimore, London or New York to report on what they’ve found. In the 1920s, such writers were named H.L. Mencken and Aldous Huxley (although Huxley later became a born-again Southern Californian, living here from 1937 until his death in 1963); in the 1930s, Edmund Wilson; in the 1940s, Evelyn Waugh and Simone de Beauvoir; and in the 1950s, Norman Mailer, whose Hollywood novel “The Deer Park” remains one of the most scabrous portraits of the Southland ever penned. Since then, the trend has (at least partially) abated, as L.A. has produced its own commentators, who write less from a perspective of exoticism than an enduring sense of place. Still, every now and again, we find ourselves in the presence of yet another outsider who has come to Los Angeles with the idea of explaining it, as if no one had ever passed this way before.

The latest author to fall prey to this illusion is the New York novelist A.M. Homes, whose “Los Angeles: People, Places, and the Castle on the Hill” recalls a visit to Southern California in the winter of 2001. I say “fall prey” because “Los Angeles” is less a book about the city than an example of how not to write a book about the city, a recycling of cliches, superficialities and prejudgments dressed up to look like a loose travelogue. It’s odd, because in her fiction, Homes has always been an astute observer, piercing the hypocrisies of middle-class life with a penetrating eye. Here, however, she can’t get out from under her own preconceptions, as if L.A. were less a physical landscape than an elaborately amorphous fantasy.

“I chose Los Angeles,” she writes in a brief preface, “because it feels like one of the most American cities in America right now. Simultaneously a city of the future and the past, the American Dream continues to thrive here and the city remains a mythological mecca, an epicenter for visionaries, romantics, and dreamers. And Los Angeles is perhaps the most surreal place in America. In fact and fiction, its landscapes, hills, and valleys are the backdrop against which our postmodern lifestyle plays itself out and our national anxieties and influences are thrown into relief.”

These are big claims, but throughout “Los Angeles” Homes’ vision is too narrow to address them on any but the most facile terms. The difficulties begin with her opening sentence: “The problem with Los Angeles is that it’s not in New York.” Although we soon discover that she is talking about distance and her fear of flying, the statement sets an unfortunate tone of provincialism that permeates the book. For Homes, it’s impossible to imagine that anyone -- anyone outside a certain rarefied realm, that is -- inhabits the dreamscape of Los Angeles or that the city might have an identity of its own. Instead, her L.A. is defined by friends like John Waters, Griffin Dunne and Jennifer Beals, and locations such as the Chateau Marmont (the Castle on the Hill of the book’s subtitle), where she stays because “[a]mong the guests, there are always people from New York.” As “Los Angeles” progresses, in fact, the Chateau becomes increasingly the filter through which Homes views the city, until she barely makes the pretense of leaving the hotel.

Were this a different kind of book, Homes’ reticence might not be such a problem; writers from Kay Thompson to Arthur Hailey have written vividly about hotel life. Yet where she gets into trouble is in assuming that the Chateau is somehow representative, that what she finds there can be applied to Los Angeles at large. As such, she misses out on any opportunity the city offers to connect with its wide array of people and communities, from Koreatown to the Valley, Silver Lake to East L.A. This, in turn, gives her observations the quality of faded photographs left too long in the sun. Rather than riding a bus down Wilshire Boulevard (the most traveled public transportation corridor in the United States), she tells us, somewhat sniffily, “From the moment you arrive in Los Angeles, it is about the car.” Instead of visiting the Bradbury Building or immersing herself in the collections at the Huntington, she writes off L.A. life as “steeped in twelve-step culture -- everything is just for today.” When, toward the end of the book, she declares that “[w]ith the exception of a few lizardy old ladies discreetly tucked into the booths of the Hotel Bel Air at lunch time -- faces tight as a drum, hands now gnarly claws -- it is as if old people are banned from the city of Los Angeles,” I have to wonder how she could have missed the Fairfax District, which is, after all, just a mile or so downhill from the Chateau. And then there’s this, my personal favorite observation: “In Los Angeles, ... I am that dark and mystical thing, a woman from the East, an ‘intellectual’ ” -- as if L.A., by definition, had no intellectual life of its own.

Such a conceit strikes me as uncomfortably self-serving, reflecting less Los Angeles than the myths by which Homes frames herself. To be fair, this comes with the territory, for travel literature often relies on the tension between sensibility and place. Yet in “Los Angeles,” tension arises not from Homes’ engagement but her disconnection, her inability to immerse herself in the city at large. Even when she ventures out of the Chateau, she keeps her distance, relying on a series of interviews -- with, among others, the director of the Southern California Earthquake Center, four residents of the Motion Picture & Television Fund Retirement Community and the artist Mark Bennett, who also works as a Beverly Hills mailman -- presented in a Q&A; style as if she couldn’t be bothered to develop three-dimensional scenes.

“[R]ather than processing their words and making them my own, I wanted these voices to be represented,” she writes by way of explanation, but ultimately that seems a cop-out, for the interviews are flat, distracted, as if conducted out of obligation, not desire. In the middle of the book, for instance, Homes visits Dr. Fred Kogen, the “mohel of Beverly Hills,” who declares, “Oh, I can tell you stories, funny stories about that. How many stories do you want?” It’s a perfect opening, but she fails to capitalize, announcing, as if there were a meter running, that she’s “almost out of time.” Worse, when Kogen asks her to accompany him to a circumcision, she lets the invitation drop without response.

On the one hand, all this represents a lost opportunity, a chapter left unwritten, an experience undone. Even more, though, it becomes a metaphor for the entire volume, which never evokes its subject in any satisfying sense. That may or may not have to do with Homes’ status as an outsider, but surely it suggests a lack of absorption, of curiosity, in the city and its life. The best travel literature, after all, involves authors learning something, whether about the world or themselves. They land in a place and explore it, taking away something (a bit of insight, or information) they didn’t already know. Yet in “Los Angeles,” such a process is strangely absent, almost as if Homes had never left New York.