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For Norman Klein, downtown Los Angeles is a palimpsest, recording a
century’s collective dreams, fears and lapses of memory in its substance. The
History of Forgetting, with its bricolage of fiction, scholarship and
autobiography, may look trendily postmodern, but what it resembles most are the
novels of Balzac, where chapters of historical narration involve the readership
socially within a fiction. Klein is a fine stylist, an engaging
historian—his account of the way noir shaped the city is strikingly
fresh—but he’s no novelist. Clever, occasionally enlightening. Published
by Verso, £14, ISBN 1859841759.