Like the city, the stories in Rosecrans Baldwin’s Everything Now have no rigid order. But the book is stronger for these digressions. An elegant and unflinching observer, Mr. Baldwin digs up an invisible city under layers of pop-culture mythologizing and media cliches.

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.... And if “Everything Now” is not the first to remark on the double meaning of Angelenos “needing validation” — for parking but also their souls — no matter. Consider Baldwin’s ticket stamped.

For almost all of its history, LA has been a city colluded into existence out of stories told about itself; it’s what happens if you take the old saying “there’s no there there” and try to give it sidewalks and postal codes. As the subject of a book like this - part history, part travelogue, part epic pub-crawl - it presents endless opportunities for an enterprising writer, and Baldwin has written the best book on the subject since City of Quartz.... If you’re not already under the odd spell that LA so often casts on even people who’ve never visited it, you’ll feel the light brushing of that spell while reading these pages; if you find the whole idea of Los Angeles vaguely, indefinably revolting, Baldwin’s anecdotes will make you seethe delectably with vicarious disapproval; and if you are indeed already bewitched by LA, you now have a new piece of required reading.

Throughout, Baldwin shares eye-opening statistics (80% of children enrolled in the L.A. Unified School District live below the poverty line) and weaves in colorful historical snippets and reflections on the city from writers including Héctor Tobar, Joan Didion, and Octavia Butler. This multifaceted, openhearted account reveals L.A. as a “shifting mosaic of human potential” unlike any other place in the world.

Los Angeles, at the center of the tectonically, culturally, and financially hyperactive Pacific Rim, has displaced New York as a place of innovation, change, and multicultural encounter. “It is enormously ambiguous,” writes Baldwin, to say nothing of being enormous: LA is not so much a city as an agglomeration of 88 cities, with a larger population than 40 of the 50 states and an economy that overshadows the GDP of most nations. A footnote to larger and more in-depth portraits of the City of Angels, though not without merit.