I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger [Hardcover]

Amy Wilentz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 15, 2006

From one of our most astute writers comes an irreverent, hilarious portrait of the state of California, its unlikely governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, celebrities she can't place, famous salons, and the neglected office of one very special 9,000-year-old woman.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

For those living outside the Golden State, it's easy to forget that somewhere "out west" there is a land of sunshine and Schwarzenegger that may be a bigger force in shaping America's idea of itself than any self-respecting New Yorker would admit. Into this California—"the New World's new world, America's America" as Wilentz describes it—plunges the former Jerusalem correspondent for the New Yorker and lifelong East Coaster. Her book is both social criticism and the memoir of a self-described "catastrophist," who fled New York not long after 9/11 (having first bought an inflatable boat to escape her Upper West Side apartment in case of emergency). With pessimistic wit that is pure East Coast, Wilentz regards California, and Los Angeles in particular, as the same kind of strange and dark-hearted place it was for Nathanael West. Through Wilentz's Gulliveresque chronicles of the gubernatorial recall, natural disasters and Hollywood, there surfaces a clear affinity for the "showmanship" and "blowhardism" upon which California is founded. It is, Wilentz writes, America's "sunny coast of the imagination"—a dreamworld with all the confusion and awesomeness that implies. (Aug.)
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From Booklist

As a former foreign correspondent in Palestine and a resident of New York during 9/11, Wilentz had experience with the threat of catastrophe. So she was geared up for the possibility of earthquakes when she moved to California in 2003. She was so anxious for the experience that she felt them even when they hadn't occurred. What she hadn't geared up for was the experience of Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor. Wilentz recalls giant billboards announcing the DVD release of Terminator 3 just as Schwarzenegger was beginning his campaign, signs that reminded her of the public billboards of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad and piqued questions about why and how Californians were recalling their governor and anointing Schwarzenegger. In Schwarzenegger, the pure narcissist, the California electorate was infantilized by the appeal of a Terminator in troubled times in the state and the nation. Wilentz also turns a sharp eye to other aspects of California culture, from high-powered big-money political fund--raisers to New Yorkers who complain endlessly about the sunshine but appreciate the money "the industry" pays. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; First edition (August 15, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743264398
• ISBN-13: 978-0743264396
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,923,211 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I grew up in a small, industrial town in New Jersey, a place unimaginably distant in every way from my latest home in Los Angeles, where I live with my husband and three sons. I moved to California as Arnold Schwarzenegger was making his political debut, and I wrote a book about it. But since the earthquake in Port-au-Prince in January, my heart has returned with a crash to Haiti, the country that made me, as a writer. Haitians are still dealing every day with the horror and reality of the quake. And in my way, I'm still wrestling with what it means to me to lose so much and so many. My reaction has been to write, of course -- and to attempt to focus the proper kind of outside attention on Haiti. But I'm also trying in my own way to be of use; helping to support a little boy who lost both hands when a wall fell on him, trying to put together a library of images of Haitian art that was destroyed in the quake, and even thinking about going down to help rebuild, although I am definitely more efficient with a keyboard than with a hammer. Meanwhile, my publisher is reissuing The Rainy Season, my book about Haiti, with a new, post-quake introduction. I'm amazed at how I continue to be drawn to the country and to identify with it -- to feel shattered when it is shattered, to be happy on the rare days when things are going well, to be okay in those long stretches when things are pretty much all right. I trust in a lot of cliches in these moments of enormous tragedy, the main one being this: maybe out of the rubble will emerge something new, maybe even something better, but something still beautiful, still authentic, still Haitian.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Calfornia Rubs Off on Author, December 22, 2007

By 

KTP (Northridge, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger (Paperback)

If I had to describe this book to a friend, I would say that it's one woman's experience of moving to Los Angeles, told as if she were talking to you while cleaning her house. She jumps from topic to topic with no segue, and the only real thread is her perception of the chronology of Arnold Schwarzenegger's ascension to the governorship. The language is self-indulgent and dreamy, with an air of "outsider-ness" that doesn't ring true, considering the author's nice house in Larchmont Village with a newly remodeled poolhouse and her kids' attendance at school among the children of the elite. This is not a real person's experience of Los Angeles. It is the experience of a rich East Coaster with friends in high places. There is only a passing mention of the legions of homeless and almost nothing about illegal immigration. Instead, the author concentrates on Schwarzenegger and the Hollywood notables who supported him. That's not my Los Angeles, however much those people influence it.

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars L.A. Times Book Review, January 10, 2007

By 

Marc Porter Zasada (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger (Hardcover)

From the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Aug. 13, 2006

Entitled, "Barbarians at the Beach"

When writers visit Los Angeles, they often find Something Very Wrong here. It's a noir something. A darkness-hiding-in-the-sunlight something. A vapid-facade, tragic-narcissistic, dystopic-unease sort of problem. We Angelenos failed to create paradise, and we must pay the price. Too much wealth and too much poverty lurk behind those bright lawns and giddy hibiscus, so our town's bound to see trouble.

Occasionally, the SVW manifests itself in biblical fashion with an earthquake, a fire or a flood. Sometimes, it surfaces with a perilous flash in the life of a Sharon Tate, an O.J. Simpson, a Phil Spector or a Robert Blake.

Whatever the SVW may be exactly -- fate or hubris or just something in the air -- it has grown into a recognized discipline, like cosmology or anthropology. And along with distinguished researchers like Nathanael West, Raymond Chandler and Joan Didion, it attracts many lesser poets, novelists, filmmakers and commentators. Some, like social critic Mike Davis, have built entire careers on the SVW: proving its existence, discovering its habits and demonstrating its power. Just last year, an SVW flick named "Crash" won the Academy Award for best picture.

With "I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen," journalist Amy Wilentz makes a lively, if modest, contribution to the field. She doesn't much like L.A., and she claims that California "has a dark heart," but that only places her in the mainstream of the SVW tradition. She sets out to update us on the improbabilities of life in the pueblo since her arrival in early 2002, she takes us inside L.A.'s salon culture and she deftly chronicles one of our most successful commercial products: Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Wilentz is a seasoned traveler. She's covered Haiti and the Mideast for the New Yorker and the Nation. Still, she asks us to picture her as a wide-eyed everywoman, another innocent Manhattanite tossed up, however reluctantly, on our shores: "I didn't want to be in a place where -- according to the tropes, clichés, and stereotypes that I'd absorbed as a proper New Yorker -- everyone was blond, tan, cute, strong-jawed, empty-headed, and athletic, and possibly spiritually inclined. I was dark, bespectacled, bookish, and both physically and mentally not tan. I did not belong in L.A."

Still, her husband, Nick Goldberg, lands a job at the L.A. Times, (he is editor of the op-ed page and the Current section) and she hopes to escape the anxiety of New York after 9/11 -- where she had actually bought an inflatable boat in case she had to escape across the Hudson. Not surprisingly, she finds an equal, even expanded sense of "catastrophism" along the Pacific.

Wilentz feels few earthquakes and sees no riots, but she does get close to fires and floods. And she reliably -- if rather traditionally -- conjures up the SVW while viewing prehistoric bones at the La Brea Tar Pits, while shopping the faux streets of the Grove, or while contemplating her eerily pleasant yard in the figurative shadow of the Hollywood Hills. She recalls Charles Manson's relationship with the Beach Boys; she drives out to failed desert paradises like California City; she tours the sterile suburb of Lakewood with its resident poet, D.J. Waldie; she reads a good deal of Didion and perhaps too much Davis.

And apparently like every new everywoman in town, she does lunch with Warren Beatty, hangs in the salon of Arianna Huffington and mingles in the foyer of entrepreneurs Stewart and Lynda Resnick's enormous mansion along Sunset Boulevard. Along with the ever-looming presence of the Arnold, each of these folks become important local symbols: the handsome liberal, the reinvented immigrant, the savvy marketeers.

The Resnicks make a fascinating study. They own vast tracts of agricultural land in the Central Valley -- along with fad-driven businesses like Fiji Water, Pom Wonderful juice and the Franklin Mint. Like other potent Angelenos, says Wilentz, they act as absentee landlords for American taste -- creating low-brow kitsch as easily as designer waters. She explores what she calls their "Little Versailles" on the suspicion that it might be a safe house for the SVW and discovers (brace yourself) that L.A. fosters excess, even among billionaires.

Yes, the author makes occasional forays north: to the Esalen Institute at Big Sur (where she investigates the failures of the '60s) and all the way to Sacramento (where she fails to meet the Arnold). But despite her often-repeated promises, this book is not about California as a whole -- indeed, it mistakenly assumes that L.A. facades represent California facades, that our noir reflects a statewide noir. And while mocking us for our celebrity worship, it must be pointed out that she also dwells on celebrity: the few working people we meet tend to be valet parking attendants in Bel-Air.

Wherever she travels, Wilentz finds something, well, wrong: our too-easy wealth, our too-easy fame, our frank pursuits. The Resnicks understand marketing perhaps too well. Huffington's spiritual advisor, the ever-smiling John-Roger, proves perhaps too "quackish." We are chastened to learn that "[n]o one ever gives a party just to have fun...A party here always has a money aspect and an informational aspect -- as if they have to justify a party and prove that their heads contain something other than air." And we're relieved when she finds comfort among the self-mocking "Morons," a rump group of L.A. thinkers organized by writers Mickey Kaus and Ann Louise Bardach. Much of the fun in this book comes from learning who hangs in which salon: who's formal, who's casual, and who, like Rob Reiner, "pontificates."

Wilentz paints expert and convincing portraits. Her observations prove charming, incisive, even true. And yes, even locals will picture the SVW more clearly through her eyes. Nevertheless, in the same way her anti-Israel slant might have made you uncomfortable with her Mideast coverage or her pro-Aristide stance might have troubled you in Haiti, Wilentz does push local stereotypes a bit far. When we read: "Everyone at Huffington's is arrogant in his or her own private way, in his or her own private sphere, and that's part of the reason they all get along so well" we do get a little worried that Wilentz won't be invited back. OK, not that worried: she probably spelled everyone's names correctly.

Wilentz is at her best when she writes about Schwarzenegger and his outsized role in our collective psyche. During the recall election of 2003, the Terminator offered, she says, a post-9/11 comfort figure, the superhero we all craved. She traces Schwarzenegger's global iconography, his crudity and the puncturing of his hyper-inflated ego in the special election of 2005. "More than anything," she says, "he reminds me of Hercules, who killed snakes in his crib, and who had to be taught and taught again to have a conscience, to have second thoughts about the uses of his own power." As often happens, she overstates her case, but we enjoy the simile.

Is there really Something Very Wrong with L.A., and by extension, this unredeemed but still-golden state? Are we really just successful barbarians? Is our power so unworthy? Are our virtues really so few? Is our genius merely crass? "Gee," the longtime Angeleno wants to ask, "can't we at least take pride in the way we surfed the big curl coming off that last, really gnarly century? You know, how we rode it so high and wild?"

In the end, Wilentz does not provide answers to such questions, and remains content simply to register her notes in the SVW archives.

The book concludes with her drive into the first stages of a large storm. The coming rain may prove catastrophic -- but it may not -- and she leaves the consequences of her journey, like those of L.A. itself, for future researchers to ponder.

For this she may be forgiven. We Angelenos have not yet determined the moral of our own tale, and surely we should appreciate it when our foibles are pointed out so skillfully. Really we should. Unfortunately, as usually happens when the SVW is brought to our attention, we smile with a vague embarrassment, we acknowledge each well-aimed blow and then we return to our gaudy search for paradise.--Marc Porter Zasada

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars about a place that is more of a pattern or a space, June 19, 2008

By 

Adam Rust "a_rust" (Durham, NC) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger (Hardcover)

Amy Wilentz moves to Los Angeles and finds it no more alike her hometown of Perth Amboy that she found her earlier stops in Port au Prince and in Jerusalem. She cannot identify with the healthful, absent-minded blondes. She prefers to think of herself as most like the ancient woman found in the La brea Tarpits. The focal point of her alienation stems from the pull of the orbit surrounding Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I like this book. Its a book made up solely of the imagination of a wandering observer. She drives to California City and contemplates what the original settlers of the state sought. She wants to understand the feeling of nature and the attention to bodies, so she goes to Esalen. She has a minor car accident and the experience forces her to think about race and class and the disparate communities within the city. She meets celebrities, but can't grasp their power within the culture.

I love the idea of asking someone to tell you who they are by telling you what magazine would represent their personality. Of course, this is California, so Wilentz wonders what magazine would be her car. She decides her used minivan is Parade -- out of step with the Prius' driven by celebs, the Escalades by the record promoters, and even a step from the secondhand Corollas favored by recent immigrants.

I suppose this is two books, and so far I've focused more on the place it concerns. Schwarzenegger is the lead figure, no doubt. I learned a lot about him. I suppose it is a virtue to bring a new voice to a one party community, but a lot of the rest seems less of virtue and more about self.

Well, I would encourage people to read this book. It is more reflective than most non-fiction. I think it would leave a lot of room for book clubs or any group that wants to talk about a book.