L.A. is trite and, like, whatever

In a recent essay, Jonathan Selwood, author of “The Pinball Theory of Apocalypse,” glibly asserts that “Los Angeles has long had the reputation of being the most superficial city on the planet, largely because. . . well, it is the most superficial city on the planet.” If Los Angeles is the most anything, it’s the city most likely to be depicted through the warped lens of idées reçues, as Selwood’s debut aptly demonstrates.

The foundations of contemporary society are shifting as the novel opens -- no, wait, that’s just the aftershocks of a recent earthquake, interrupting existentially sulky heroine Isabel Raven’s preparations for the opening of her first solo art show.

Though technically proficient, Isabel was pronounced an artistic failure by her college professors and peers -- her senior show consisted of “David Hockney knockoffs.” She spent the next five years employed by a Beverly Hills interior designer as a “fine art facsimilist,” painting reproductions of lesser-known Impressionist works for arriviste Angelenos who “want to fill their atrocious McMansions with famous artwork they can’t actually afford.” When one of the designer’s projects -- the conversion of a faux-Southern Plantation house into a Tuscan villa for a gay couple obsessed with “The Da Vinci Code” -- requires Isabel to produce none other than the Mona Lisa with Cher’s face, she’s inspired to begin the series of paintings that she hopes will launch her career.

Her oeuvre, “conceived as a satiric bayonet into the partially hydrogenated heart of contemporary society,” features “American Gothic” with the original faces replaced by those of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, “The Death of Marat” featuring Kurt Cobain and Macaulay Culkin as “The Blue Boy.” The paintings are priced at $50,000 each by art dealer Juan Dahlman, an oversexed Falstaff type given to primal screaming, creative profanity and death threats, who runs “possibly the biggest gallery in L.A.,” where Isabel’s introduction as It Girl is to take place.

But her moment of triumph is endlessly deferred by one Los Angeles caricature after another. Her Miracle Mile-adjacent apartment begins sinking into a methane-rich tar seep. She learns that her celebrity chef-boyfriend, Javier, has dumped her for his latest client, a teen pop sensation who proclaims herself “the Latina Britney Spears.” Juan demands that she appear in an advertising campaign for vaginal rejuvenation. And her parents and their neighbors, a former porn star and an aging fitness guru, dally with the mild equanimity of cocktail party guests as a wildfire advances toward Isabel’s childhood home in the hills beneath the Hollywood sign.

(Selwood’s point, in case you missed it: Rome is burning. Angelenos are fiddling.)

It seems that things should pick up or at least develop something like a plot when Isabel meets handsome mixed-race billionaire philanthropist Alex Tzu, who has just purchased several of her paintings for his adopted daughter, the precocious juvenile delinquent Cordelia. Instead, more set-pieces ensue: a robbery of dinosaur bones from the Page Museum at the La Brea tar pits, a tepid sex scene in the Bat Cave in Griffith Park, and so on through a couple of anticlimaxes to the novel’s uncharacteristically earnest ending, when Isabel renounces L.A.’s soul-killing art scene for “the primal pleasure of artistic creation.” Selwood is a bright, wildly imaginative writer, and when his book isn’t threatening to collapse under the weight of its self-congratulatory satire, it dazzles with cleverness -- the library of the teen sensation’s mansion is stocked with the entire series of “The Complete Idiot’s Guide”; the vaginal rejuvenation campaign riffs hilariously on World War II-era beauty ads; Isabel paints James Earl Jones and Jamie Foxx into Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam,” and Martha Stewart as Munch’s “The Scream.”

Ultimately, though, Selwood’s talents are misdirected. A cartoonish critique of Los Angeles as the epicenter of Western culture’s decadence is neither bold nor subversive, as the author evidently aims to be; rather, it’s a windmill-tilting exercise in preconceived notions.

The novel’s title refers to a discovery made by Isabel’s astrophysicist father that the world will end on Oct. 9, 2049, when the planets break free of their orbits and go smashing into one another. The theory’s accuracy is widely verified by the scientific community -- which then promptly turns its back and claims absolute ignorance of his findings. “Apparently nobody, not even hard-core scientists, wanted to be confronted with the end of the world,” explains Isabel.

Selwood, who was raised in Hollywood and lives in Oregon, intends this as a trope for the willful and widespread denial that he seems to believe is a particular if not exclusive provenance of Angelenos. One character references French social theorist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard, asking whether, “since the world appears to be on a delusional course, we must develop a delusional approach to the world,” and Isabel reaches the conclusion that everyone in L.A. has done precisely that; they “experience truly ludicrous situations every day of their lives, and yet instead of confronting them, they choose to put on blinders and ignore them.”

What’s being denied, exactly, or how the citizens of the City of Angels qualify as more deluded than those of any other locale, is never made clear, only gestured at. Los Angeles is, like, you know, lame or whatever.

There are certainly relevant critiques to be made about the delusional nature of the industrialized world -- and in this city, as in any other, there’s rich irony (16-mpg SUVs sporting “War Is Not the Answer” bumper stickers) and dark matter (income gaps, murder stats) to be mined. Regrettably, Selwood squanders his talent and intelligence on threadbare shtick. In the final analysis, it’s the author, rather than his subjects, who chooses to put on blinders.

Darcy Cosper contributes to publications, including Bookforum and Time Out New York.