MixedThe NationA book delineating the history and nuances of this peculiar set-up might be fascinating—if a bit wonky—but Baldwin’s interests are much more sweeping and don’t seem particularly attuned to local politics ... it’s the metaphor of the city-state, not the fundamental workings of one, that Baldwin is after, and even then he carries it only so far. \'The great city-state of Los Angeles\' becomes more of a quasi-poetic refrain than an organizing principle for his book, and one that can begin to feel wearying. Even if half-hearted, the portrayal of LA as a city-state also occludes the way it actually functions (and regularly dysfunctions) as a city—albeit an atypical one. It’s difficult to pinpoint from Baldwin’s book why the analogy would make a place already so deluged in cliché any more comprehensible ... Baldwin is a good reporter, and his clear, engrossing retelling of other people’s stories is the strongest aspect of his book ... Baldwin can also be insightful on the nature of \'home\' in Los Angeles ... Baldwin, while still pointing out horrific wrongdoings, takes a more conciliatory approach, striving to be neither \'overly optimistic [nor] pessimistic.\' The effect can sometimes read like an anthropomorphizing of place, as if the city’s trials were somehow endemic, as opposed to the results of discrete actions taken by a long list of individuals—be they water barons, real estate developers, morally malleable politicians, or the members of local government agencies whose incautious decisions have affected millions.
Sheila Heti
RaveLos Angeles Review of Books\"I first read Sheila Heti’s new novel Motherhood during a period when my five-month-old baby was waking often in the night. In my state of rabid exhaustion, I found the skepticism Heti deploys toward childbearing in the book utterly contagious. A stream of questions that explore the topic of having a child and making art forms much of the basis of Motherhood’s narrative ... On a second read (and under improved sleep conditions), though, I realized that these kinds of comparisons are in part what Heti is trying to interrogate. More resigned to the ways my life had changed, and also hadn’t, with a child, I was able to enjoy Motherhood not as a polemic but as an inventively crafted novel about the complications of being a human being with competing or contradictory desires.\
Lauren Elkin
MixedThe Los Angeles Review of BooksThe parameters seem fairly broad. Flâneuse tends to sweep across time and place on a surprising scale, given the immediate, eye-level experience one might expect more of in a book ostensibly about walking the city (though each chapter does take a set of personalized directions as its epigraph) … The hybrid approach, which flips between snippets of her own life and those of the women she writes about, is searching and meandering, full of cultural insight and a diverse range of references … Gentrification’s threat to the diversity of the world’s major metropolises is another subject that should be of concern to the flâneuse. Elkin’s book mostly overlooks the phenomenon (maybe not by coincidence, all her main subjects are white), in part because she seems attached to a romantic idea of the city as a place wholly different from the suburbs.
