Colin Marshall

When I noticed this book on a downtown library shelf, the prospect of a twenty-year-old assessment of Los Angeles by Susan Sontag’s “polemicist” son did not immediately appeal. Thinking of Sontag’s cultural affiliations with New York and Europe, one easily envisions nothing more than a prolonged dismissal of this city as a vast, backward hellscape of philistines and oppressed laborers. But since pre-judging a writer by not even his mother but an idea of his mother struck me as uncharitable — the very thing my imagined son of the idea of Susan Sontag would do to Los Angeles — I began reading. Rieff opens with an almost savage critique of friends and acquaintances in his New York coterie who, despite priding themselves on thinking with nuance and balance about issues like Israel-Palestine and German reunification (the year was 1991), blithely condemn the whole of Los Angeles with a misremembered Gertrude Stein quote or a one-liner that sounded warmed-over back when it came out of Woody Allen. Clearly, I was in for something unexpected.

Not far into Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World, either I remembered or Rieff reminded me that Sontag, though born and deceased in New York and buried in Paris, did a fair bit of growing up in Los Angeles. She even graduated from North Hollywood High, which puts her in the company of no less a Valley luminary than Adam Carolla (who, by his own admission, the administration just sort of waved through). Rieff himself logged a chunk of his back-and-forth, divorced-parents childhood in Los Angeles. So here we have a many-rooted and thus seemingly rootless cosmopolitan returning, in some sense, to the dirt where just one of these thin strands buried itself. No sooner does he emerge from LAX than he marvels anew at the openness, cleanliness, and peculiar conveniences — smiles, for instance — he’d grown accustomed to doing without in New York.

While these stars in Rieff’s eyes soon dim, he holds to this premise: we New Yorkers think of Los Angeles as undeveloped and culturally benighted, sometimes with good cause, but, y’know, we ain’t doin’ so hot ourselves. He directly and incisively analogizes the teeth-grinding freeway traffic to which Angelenos freely submit to the pervasive “filth and insecurity” to which he and his fellow New Yorkers have long since surrendered. He pokes fun at New York society’s increasingly apparent bewilderment, that of an out-of-touch parent, not only at Los Angeles’ failure to look east for guidance, but its lack of concern about what goes on in Manhattan at all. He relates terse telephone conversations with flinty friends back home who defensively repeat mantras like “Life is hard,” ridiculing the very notion that anyone, especially those airheaded Angelenos, might expect pleasure from existence rather than pain.

While inoculating himself against the cruder anti-Los Angeles prejudices, Rieff performs his own criticism of the city from what must have read, at the time, like a fresh angle. He enters Los Angeles from and bases himself in its wealthier, coastal westside. There he attends cocktail parties and visits friends of friends who, slowly but surely, reveal their startlingly total ignorance about neighborhoods mere miles from their own. Investigating further, he builds a narrative of Los Angeles starting with an improbable early 20th-century greening of the desert. This continues into large-scale salesmanship for the resulting “Anglo-Saxon homemaker’s” ideal place in the sun. Then follows the development of a freeway-laden constellation of otherwise isolated municipalities optimistically meant to avoid the entrenched troubles of the eastern industrial metropolis. By 1990, where Rieff came in, we watch the bewilderment as this Los Angeles dream fragments into something much more alien.

Though he gets decent mileage out of conversations with their illegal “help,” Rieff ultimately loses interest in westsiders and their real estate-y concerns. He spends more “vivid, peculiar, and unsettling” days among Los Angeles’ various immigrant populations, whose steady inflow from Mexico, Central America, and Asia — not to mention all of that era’s ominously direct Japanese investment — seems to have taken the “natives,” Anglo-Saxon homemakers and otherwise, by surprise. Sensing a local knack for the language of branding, Rieff notes how many Angelenos respond by boosterishly calling Los Angeles “the capital of the Pacific Rim” — indeed, the only American sub-economy diverse enough to compete with shrewd, calculating Japanese corporations otherwise raring to buy and sell the entire country. Certain well-to-do westsiders insist that Los Angeles’ Latin Americans and Asians will assimilate like New York’s Italians and Jews, but Rieff doesn’t see it happening — in fact, sees it actively not happening.

Rieff writes of much white, middle-class hand-wringing over the possibility that, assimilated or no, these waves of foreigners will wash them out of their exceptionalist Eden. And I understand the appeal, at least in the abstract, of a land of year-round sunshine that affords you — afforded you — a quiet, detached home of your very own, surrounded by an apron of Shropshire-grade lawn, from which you can smoothly motor — Twenty Minutes to Everwhere! — on those gleaming new freeways to your secure job in a faraway downtown tower. But I don’t feel it. Even today, I witness spasms of this strange nativist anxiety from longtime Angelenos, often triggered by exasperation at the prominence of the Spanish language they refuse to learn. “Betrayal” is the word Rieff uses; these people feel betrayed by the densifying, variegated, hyperpolyglot Babel of trains, towers, and desert gardens “their” city is becoming. But I would have moved to no other Los Angeles.

Upon hearing that I’d never read it, an interviewee with three Los Angeles years on me pressed his personal copy of Ask the Dust into my hands. I had felt some responsibility and curiosity about the book, since it occupies the unusual position of a 1930s Los Angeles novel that “everyone” is suddenly reading again. In fact, so many people suggested it for my alternative Los Angeles literature roundup that I immediately decided not to include it. But since I instinctively trust this the judgment of this particular interviewee, a novelist himself, I soon broke down and took in this story of Arturo Bandini, a fledgling Italian-American writer who pulls up stakes from Depression-era Colorado and drops himself, alone, into in Depression-era Los Angeles.

I often wonder whether a truly insightful Los Angeles book should avoid mentioning either the “car culture” or “the Industry,” those two highly visible black holes that suck many a portrayal of the city into mediocrity. Fante does well enough on these counts: the impoverished young literary Bandini lacks the means to buy an automobile until late in the story, and at no point does he look into screenwriting. He spends most of his time downtown, riding the Angels Flight funicular between his boarding house in the dense neighborhood of Bunker Hill to visit/hassle a Mexican waitress (his “Mayan Princess”) at an eatery very similar to Clifton’s Cafeteria. The year is 1933, the heyday of the Los Angeles and Pacific Electric railways, the latter of which Bandini takes down to Long Beach for an assignation with a middle-aged lush possessed of — I don’t quite know how else to describe it — a dead vagina.

That comes as only one of the novel’s several unsettling sequences. Afterward, Bandini wakes up alone and walks outside right into the Long Beach Earthquake of 1933. When I think of that particular disaster, I think of a certain photo someone uploaded to Wikipedia that, while capturing the aftermath of the quake in messy detail, does so in a way that makes the scene surrealistically desolate and dreamily horrifying. The most memorable parts of Ask the Dust share these qualities. I’m thinking specifically of one low point when Bandini’s emaciated, drink-enfeebled neighbor, claiming to know where they can get a free steak, drives them out to the sticks in the middle of the night, stops at a barn. He steals a calf to kill then and there and, theoretically, cook back at the boarding house.

In the book’s film adaptation — shot almost entirely, as you’d expect, in South Africa — Donald Sutherland plays this neighbor. I feel great fascination to see the choices he makes with this character, as any filmgoer would, but I do wonder if the cinematic medium can convey Bandini’s personality as well as does the book’s first-person narration. Fante has him oscillating between hyperinflated pride (artistic and otherwise), near-solipsistic self-pity, and hair-shirt Catholic guilt with almost mechanical regularity. Bandini’s relationship with Camilla, the aforementioned Mayan princess, introduces cycles of impotent aggression, ethnic sniping (“To me you’ll always be a sweet little peon. A flower girl from old Mexico.” “Look at your skin. You’re dark like Eyetalians”), and thwarted longing. He becomes the sort of protagonist a writer of any era would construct to air their anti-Los Angeles grievances: rootless, alienated, gauche, self-serving, striving yet strangely aimless — and, ultimately, hollowly successful.

I report with relief, then, that Ask the Dust doesn’t really have grievances to air. If Fante lambasts anything, he lambasts the transplants who delusionally project their own failings onto Los Angeles, condemning it as the very opposite of all the good and the pure left behind in their Edenic hometowns. “Nostalgically he talked of meat, of the good old steaks you got back in Kansas City, of the wonderful T-bones and tender lamb chops.” “He was homesick for the middle-west. He talked of rabbit-hunting, of fishing, of the good old days when he was a kid.” “He reveled in memories of Memphis, Tennessee, where the real people come from, where there were friends and friends.” Naturally, this requires a robust illusion — around a grain of truth though it may have formed — of having been shoved out west by the hand of fate.

Should you arrange your own Long Beach assignation, with a vagina dead or living, you can now take the train there just like Bandini does, although it’ll be the Metro Blue Line instead of the Pacific Electric Red Car. After its half-block move south in 1996 and its mechanical upgrade last year, you can ride Angels Flight to Bunker Hill. Bunker Hill itself, which you might know as the site of Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall, took a hit from Los Angeles’ freeway-building and redevelopment projects of the fifties and sixties. These, among their other unforeseen consequences, turned Bunker Hill into a platform for skyscrapers by the-mid eighties. When those towers fell into unprofitability, 1999’s Adaptive Reuse Ordinance opened them up to mixed usage and dense (i.e., parking-light) habitation. We have glimpsed the future Los Angeles, it seems, and it looks like Arturo Bandini’s.