To write the definitive book about Los Angeles would be impossible. In Everything Now, the novelist Rosecrans Baldwin doesn’t try. And in not trying, he may have written the perfect book about Los Angeles.

... presents endless opportunities for an enterprising writer, and Baldwin has written the best book on the subject since City of Quartz. He helicopters his broader narrative down at carefully-chosen points in the city’s history.

... deeply empathetic and insightful.

After discussing Hollywood, Baldwin mesmerically captures the horrors of recent forest fires and the 2018 mudslides, events that have scarred the landscape and its residents. In the final section, perhaps the strongest, Baldwin looks at the tragic and inexcusable inequality that divides L.A. Full of surprising facts and anecdotes, this is a compelling, thoroughly researched, and lovingly crafted chronicle of how Los Angeles came to be..

Baldwin seems comfortable with the idea that city-state is more metaphor than fact, but even as metaphor, repeatedly invoked, it can feel diffuse. Baldwin’s notion of Los Angeles as city-state is further watered down when he refers to LAX, the airport, as 'a city-state unto itself' because it is large and has its own SWAT team and theme song.

The writing is engaging, and the author argues for the city-state label in a variety of ways, but the book seems like a rather disjointed series of essays and quotes that happen to have a loose association to Los Angeles and its surroundings. The somewhat sprawling narrative takes detours to explore LA’s relation to California in general, and the wide-ranging effects of the city’s ongoing gentrification and its impact on Black and Latinx residents.

A 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.

... witty and imaginative.

... there’s not much new in these pages, which tend to the aridly bookish without the charm and good humor of the author’s entertaining Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down (2012). At one point, Baldwin quotes or cites three books in a mere 12 lines, which is at least intellectually honest: He’s not presenting anyone else’s thoughts as his own, an unusual bit of purity in the bricolage culture of Hollywood. On that note, the author is at his best when he tests commonly accepted tropes and finds many wanting. The narrative takes on topical urgency when it addresses issues of racial and social justice.