Mike Davis' City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

The novelist Frank Norris remarked that the United States had only three "story" cities, and identified them as New York, New Orleans and San Francisco. I'm not sure that I would have ever wholly agreed with that list's being so limited. (What about, for example, Boston or Chicago, where Norris was actually born--and to which he did devote a major novel, the second installment in his Epic of the Wheat, The Pit?)

However, I certainly tended to not think of Los Angeles as on that list--even though it was the default setting of our screen stories from the sitcom to the action movie. Compared with those metropolises of which Norris wrote, and the other older American cities with them (like now nearly four century old Boston), L.A. seemed not so much "young" as "new," and if in portions glittering essentially hollow--a spot on the map rather than a place that (apart from a handful of Hollywood landmarks that I knew to be only a very small part of the whole sprawl, and remote from the everyday lives of almost everyone living there) lacked local character, or even simple visual distinctiveness. (I remember reading a review of 1997's disaster movie Volcano at the time of its release which lovingly detailed the succession of L.A. sights devastated amid the chaos. It just looked like generic modern cityscape to me.) Reflecting this, when toiling away on thriller plots in those days it was very far down my list of potential settings. (Where North America was concerned I inclined to New York--with legacies of that to be seen in both Surviving the Spike and The Shadows of Olympus.)

It was only reading Mike Davis' City of Quartz that made me look at Los Angeles differently. As with many of Davis' books it is less a neatly unified text than a loose collection of essays examining such varied subjects as the emergence of the city's "power structure," the views European visitors took of the place, the penchant for fortification evident in the local architecture, the counter-insurgency-like policing of the Daryl Gates era, the locale's "homeowners'" associations, the Catholic Church's role in local life, the economic fortunes of nearby Fontana, California--and of course, how the city has been "marketed" nationally and internationally. Still, together they covered a very great deal of territory, from a great many angles, and in the process gave me a sense of Los Angeles as a "place" that it did not have for me before, and better appreciate it not just in itself but as American myth, dream, fantasy and nightmare all at once, and in every one of those respects import in American history culturally as well as materially.

Of course, others remember the book differently. Davis, whose work since that time includes such titles as Late Victorian Holocausts, Planet of Slums and, in his other writing on L.A., Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, is the sort of public intellectual who gets little mainstream attention. (In line with its centrist prejudices the media is so much more fearful of the left than the right that in its case it more often hews to the view that "any publicity is good publicity," and denies it that, smothering it with silence.) And what attention Davis has got has often not been positive--sneers about a proneness to "catastrophism" a cliché of the dismissal of his work.

Also becoming a cliché in its way has been the tendency for those dismissals to look foolish later on. Anticipating a "social explosion" in Los Angeles in City of Quartz Davis looked inspired rather than scare-mongering in the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles riot. Likewise, as COVID-19 upended the world in ways few have the courage to acknowledge even three years on, his book about the danger of a pandemic meant a spike in "demand" for his comment--while one would imagine that the ongoing spread of avian flu that seems to have played a part (but only a part) in the soaring price of eggs to a degree conspicuous even in this moment of soaring prices for everything would have made him similarly in demand now were he still alive, that particular threat having been the focus of the aforementioned work.