Dude, Where's My State?

By By Lev Grossman

Her nerves jangled by Sept. 11, her husband tempted by a schmancy new job, New Yorker Amy Wilentz pulled up stakes and moved across the country to Los Angeles. What she knew of California was largely derived from Beach Boys lyrics. What she found "felt a lot like the Third World": a state beset by fires, floods, earthquakes, energy shortages, debt and political crisis. "I had arrived in L.A. hoping to avoid catastrophe," Wilentz writes in her new book, I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen (Simon & Schuster; 322 pages), "only to find that I was living in its capital."

That is what happens when one coast rolls over in bed and stares, shocked and remorseful, at exactly whom it has been sharing a continent with all these years. Wilentz is horrified by her new home state, but she's also mesmerized by it, and she sets out to get to the bottom of what makes California Californian. She parties with Arianna Huffington, lunches with Warren Beatty and does yoga next to Nicole Kidman. She studies with nutty mystics in Big Sur. She rents out her house as a film location. She visits California's failed desert communities and explores its complex water-management system. (She can get a little wonky at times--"Water flow is measured in acre-feet ...")

She lavishes extra fascination on Arnold Schwarzenegger: man, meme, Governor, bodybuilder, robot assassin--a man who cannot pronounce the letter r even though there's one in California and three in his name. It still boggles her that a celebrity can trade an actor's fame for a politician's popularity and have it be accepted as legal tender, one for one. Schwarzenegger's sheer blankness interests Wilentz too. "He's a pure narcissist," she writes. "Contentless, and in this way highly appropriate to his times."

But spot-on as it usually is, and amusing as it almost always is, Wilentz's book is missing something. Maybe looking for complexity in a man as simple as Schwarzenegger is just quixotic. Maybe it's the Governator himself--she never does get an interview with him. Maybe it's just that too many of the cliches about California are so familiar. Is it worth being told again that Hollywood is out of touch, rich people are phony, and the state is overrun with wacky spiritual advisers? There's something unfocused and Californian about I Feel Earthquakes, which made me keep referring to the front flap to be reminded of what, exactly, the book is supposed to be about. It's pleasant enough, but as Gertrude Stein said of her hometown (it was Oakland, Calif.), "There's no there there."