Mad About L.A. : At a time when we all seem to want out, author Peter Theroux finds plenty of reasons to stay. We ‘have one of the more peaceful and optimistic mixtures of cultures that you will ever see.’

Each year of L.A.’s dramatic new troubles--and endless round of Armageddon and Armageddon-outta-here--made me more determined to stay. I decided to weigh in, not as an accidental tourist, but as something of an accidental resident. --Peter Theroux in “Translating L.A.”

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Peter Theroux fell in love with Los Angeles the moment he arrived, and what was there not to love?

He was visiting--or rather decompressing--from almost five years in Saudi Arabia. It was November, 1984. The Olympics had just ended, and here were green lawns and flowers, homes and mountain views, ocean breezes and one particularly memorable dinner with friends at Lucy’s El Adobe.

Now almost 10 years later, he has penned his love affair to the city.

“Translating L.A.: A Tour of the Rainbow City” (Norton, 1994) is a wry, offhanded homage. Not since Randy Newman wrote his happy adulation has the City of Angels enjoyed such unapologetic praise.

Theroux, 38, lives in Signal Hill, works in Long Beach and keeps close ties to the Middle East working as a writer and a translator.

He speaks six dialects of Arabic.

Los Angeles is close enough to--and far enough from--the Middle East to suit this transplanted Bostonian, younger brother of adventure writer and novelist Paul Theroux, just fine.

Loving Los Angeles does not come easily. This is, after all, a city notorious for police brutality, senseless crime, filthy air, earthquakes, fires and floods. But Theroux looks at these problems from the perspective of having lived in the Middle East, a world almost “feudal” in its class system.

“The more negative people are about L.A.,” he says, “the less they tend to know about the world. It isn’t that the problems here should go unexamined, but we should realize that we are living in a fairly civilized setting.”

It is a perspective that many are unwilling to concede. When asked by Theroux’s publisher for a cover blurb, writer (“City of Quartz”) and activist Mike Davis responded: “Properly shredded, I think the book would make excellent cat litter.” The New York Times, while praising Theroux, referred to his investigation of the city as a “surface treatment.”

Theroux makes no apologies. He admires Los Angeles with curiosity and a sense of humor.

Written as a series of tours, “Translating L.A.” has a distinctly worldly point of view. Its chapters present lively explorations of the valleys, beaches, inner city and hinterlands without preconception.

The results are both serendipitous and surprising.

In Beverly Hills, he happens upon a Lebanese woman speaking French to her baby, who is crying for juice in Arabic. At Forest Lawn, he pauses to consider three Rastafarians photographing the sarcophagus of Liberace. In Santa Monica, he talks with a homeless woman hawking abandoned screenplays from a shopping cart.

The rainbow in the subtitle refers not so much to the city’s varied ethnic palette as to a route ending in a pot of gold. At a time when everyone seems to be finding reasons to leave, Theroux finds plenty of reasons to stay.

“He’s 100% right,” says historian Kevin Starr. Now working in Sacramento as official state librarian, Starr tries to get back to Los Angeles every two weeks just “to place my hands on this dynamo.”

“Why would one like London under Queen Elizabeth I?” he asks. “Or Jerusalem under Solomon, New York in the 1930s or San Francisco in the 1890s? You feel that Los Angeles is a city in the stages of reaching a defining moment for itself.”

Another veteran observer of the city agrees. “I love it,” says Warren Olney, host of the radio program “Which Way, L.A.?”

“L.A. provides me with a sense of hope for the future.” If we can get it together here, Olney believes, then maybe the species will not self-destruct--a comment that is even more significant considering one of his recent interviews.

When Olney asked Shimon Peres if there existed a model that the Israelis and Palestinians might consider in their peace accord, the Israeli foreign minister immediately cited Los Angeles, commenting on the tolerance that Angelenos seem to exercise so easily.

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The point is not lost on Theroux.

Something miraculous happens when people arrive in the city. Hostilities and antagonisms don’t seem to last, he says. While Angelenos are often criticized for being rootless, it is precisely this rootlessness that washes hatred and resentment clean. In comparison, Theroux looks at other places in the world--Bosnia or Rwanda, for instance--where people pay a terrible price for their deep roots.

Whether attending the Watts Tower Festival, riding Metrolink with sightseeing Koreans, or teaching literacy skills to a Vietnamese woman, Theroux appreciates Los Angeles as a multicultural environment without loading the issue with a self-conscious dose of political correctness.

“The diversity is one of the great things about L.A.,” he says. “I think this city has one of the more peaceful and optimistic mixtures of cultures that you will ever see. We celebrate diversity here on a daily basis. We don’t need a permit or a city council seat or a grant.”

Yet it is precisely this point of view that most infuriated Davis when he read “Translating L.A.” Just at a time when the city needs most to understand the recent changes--best seen in the riots of 1992, the recession, the passage of Proposition 187--in walks Theroux telling everyone to lighten up.

“To me, Theroux’s book encapsulated New York publishers’ attitude toward L.A. in general,” Davis says. “It’s what they have been doing for years--have someone come into L.A. and have a quick look around and make fun of the natives and go back to Lower Manhattan and have a chuckle with friends.”

Theroux is not afraid to be blunt. At one point in “Translating L.A.,” he criticizes ethnic advocacy groups for turning cultural diversity into the “city’s biggest bore,” and he admits to finding in racial politics a certain amount of “show business and social climbing.”

Davis was particularly offended by Theroux’s chapter “La Lucha Continua,” describing his visit to UCLA last year when students went on a hunger strike in a protest for a Chicano studies department. His depiction of “the struggle” focuses more on the irony than on the spirit of the occasion, a time when Schoenberg Plaza was renamed Plaza Aztlan and when portraits of Cesar Chavez, Pancho Villa and the Ayatollah Khomeini were hung from the strikers’ tents.

“I found Theroux’s attitude toward the hunger strikers a malignant piece of writing,” Davis says. “I take heart in the militancy of kids. There is no better antidote for the demoralization of teens than to get them involved with other teens.”

Davis believes that the student demonstration at UCLA, as well as the recent protests against Proposition 187, are important experiences. In a city that, in Davis’ view, is waging war against its children by cutting education budgets, incarcerating gang members and failing to maintain its employment base, he has found “the most hopeful kids today are ones who are fighting for change.”

Yet Theroux had a different point to make. “My experiences of college campuses,” he writes, “have shown me that in certain cases the multiculturalism phenomenon was the opposite of broadening. At times it resembles a dogmatic tribal nationalism that actually rules out a multicultural understanding of humanity.”

Nationalism used to preserve cultural identity, he believes, is a pernicious trend in any society, be it academic or urban. Cultures are far more durable than people want to admit, a lesson he learned in the Middle East after watching rituals with nearly prehistoric roots.

“Cultures are living things that are never really killed--except by genocide,” he says. “The idea of enshrining the Hispanic culture in California is stupid. Your internal culture, whether it’s ethnic, religious or familiar, is a closed system. It survives within you. You don’t need social training wheels to help it survive.

“One of the best ways to threaten a culture is to ghettoize it, classify it as a political cause and separate it from the mainstream culture.”

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Theroux is aware how conservative he sometimes sounds, and it is a stance he is not beyond mocking. Yet no matter how much he may sound like “ol’ Mr. Front-Porch America,” he has more faith in the ability of individuals to preserve their roots than in a society’s attempt to preserve them.

In Los Angeles, too, he believes it is something of a specious cause. As a tutor in the literacy program at the Long Beach Public Library, he came in contact with immigrants more concerned with making a living and assimilating than turning their cultural ties into a political issue.

Take Shula, an Israeli who one day told him that Los Angeles reminded her of Tel Aviv.

“Why do you want to live here if it’s so similar?” he asked.

Her answer--”There’s no war or threat here, the economy is better, I can make money and a good reputation as a beautician here”--showed him a perspective many Angelenos never see, judging by the wide support for Proposition 187. Shula belongs to a very serious, committed group of people--some legal, some not--who know how good they have it here.

Of course, this boot-straps mentality does have another side--a reluctance, as Davis points out, to look at what is being dismantled and destroyed while focusing only on the rebuilding and reinventing.

Olney agrees: “I think there is a tendency, now that no one is throwing rocks and burning buildings, to want to think everything is fine when it isn’t. The root cause of the rage and desperation has not been dealt with.”

Even so, Olney grew up with the idea of Los Angeles as a “blossoming place.” Today he believes there is still more blossoming to be done.

“Otherwise you just throw up your hands,” he says.

From his own point of view, Theroux denies taking a “just say no” approach to what ails Los Angeles, but he believes that in a city “as big and exhibitionist as ours, everything gets worked out.”

But Theroux recognizes that solutions are not easy to come by.

“Angelenos are working at a disadvantage,” he says. “We believe that life must end like a movie. So we have to wonder what we can do to work toward that happy ending. And why not?

“But in Los Angeles, life is less a movie than a documentary. From one day to the next, for better or worse, there is no end. We may want ‘High Noon,’ but we’ve got ‘Gandhi’ instead.”