I have no fond memories of Los Angeles. In my few visits, it has struck me as dirty, noisy, underdeveloped but overwrought, a city desperately striving to be significant, contrasting poorly even with such upstarts as Phoenix and Las Vegas, both of which at least know what they are and are content to be it. I’ve often wondered how it is that much of our national culture comes from a city like LA, where the very cracks on the sidewalks are insecure.
Jonathan Leaf’s new novel, City of Angles, gives some answers to that question. The book is at once a rollicking takedown of the City of Angels and a study of culture: the tending—or neglect—of the soil of humanity. Culture is a many-faceted word. It means simultaneously the intellectual, moral, and aesthetic environment we inhabit and the physical tending of the soil to produce crops (like in “horticulture”). And it is no accident that both of these words come from “cult.” To cultivate something, to devote our lives to tending it, is to give to it our piety. It is, in a way, to worship it. When we cultivate something worthy in a right way, our worship rises upwards like incense to the God worthy of our worship. When our cultivating efforts center around something unworthy, however, the smoke crawls down and chokes us.
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