Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World.

Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World. David Rieff. Simon & Schuster, $20. I was hoping this guy would at least spare us the kosher burrito, that neatly wrapped foodstuff sold conveniently near the Los Angeles Times office building that writers love to use as a metaphor for Los Angeles. And close to the end of this book, which is devoted to examining the new influx of immigrants here, I began to get excited: Although he hadn't missed many other cliches about Los Angeles, Rieff hadn't raised the specter of the kosher burrito one time. Then he began telling us about a breakfast he'd had with a "distinguished psychologist" and his "well-known local portrait painter" wife.

They served up something called "dorito brei," a mixture between Huevos Rancheros and matzoh brei. Reiff can't hold back: "And yet, like the future itself, there it lay on our plates, its improbable mixture of aromas steaming pungently up at us."

This is not, of course, a book about food. It's hard to figure just what it is about. One minute Rieff plays the intrepid traveler setting out to test his sensibility in a foreign land. But instead of doing real reporting or even descriptive writing, he just kind of hangs out--and he's not a powerful enough writer to get away with it.

The next minute, though, he's a leftist academic brooding on L.A.'s future. He clearly comes from this world (he's the son of Susan Sontag) and he alludes to various highbrow schools of thought about Los Angeles, but he never pretends to be rigorous and the book makes no cogent intellectual argument.

Rieff's premise seems to be that Los Angeles is wrestling with its high level of immigration, soon to result in a white minority. And he appears somewhat miffed that people are going about their daily lives in the face of this encroaching reality.

Rieff seems to want to debunk the notion that this influx of people from all over the world means that L.A. has a bright future as the "gateway to the Pacific Rim." But he barely mentions the real ill effects of immigration--social services strained to the breaking point, poor health care, and disgraceful public schools. Instead, he just seems peeved that some people dare to be optimistic.

Rieff doesn't bother to puncture that optimism by discussing exactly where he thinks L.A.'s future lies. He's more interested in attitudes, and he reserves much scorn for the white middle class living on Los Angeles's Westside--the people wo put him up during his stay in Los Angeles (hey--you're welcome).

They live "in a First World way on Third World prices," he says, meaning that they reap the benefits of cheap labor to tend their children, clean their houses, mow their lawns, park their cars, and clean their high-rise offices. Meanwhile, they jog or go to the gym instead of getting their exercise in the back yard, as they would if they were truly integrated beings.

Worse, according to Rieff, these bourgeois yuppies don't truly interact with the immigrants working for them. This is because they're products of television, and on TV, families in sitcoms don't have servants, yet their houses stay clean anyway. Of course, the author didn't spend any systematic time with the immigrants; he just did things like sit with an attendant in the valet parking lot for a few hours.

Yes, there are a lot of rich jerks on the Westside of Los Angeles (and in the many other middle class areas of the city), and yes, people on the planet Earth tend to be concerned with parochial things like their own circle of friends and their neighborhood. This is particularly true in a city like L.A., which unlike Manhattan, say, has a large middle class sharing space with a huge immigrants population--and with remarkably little xenophobia. Yet Rieff seems to be saying that L.A. residents who aspire to own a home with a little patch of walled-in green around it are racists.

Rieff flirts with a real issue now and then, as when he talks about whether the new wave of immigrants will assimilate in a different way than previous waves, but here, too, he's relentlessly conclusion-free. He obsesses about some sort of mass psychology of can-do-ism, with a tone of "Boy, are they in for a surprise . . ." Angelenos, he keeps saying, seem to have an illusion that they can control their own destiny, that things will work out. If these mass psychologies realy exist, it's hard to believe they differ that much from city to city, or even nation to nation. Will New Yorkers be less capable of solving their problems because they're more "Old World" and cynical? Rieff keeps seizing on ephemeral cultural attitudes and trying to turn them into determinants of history.

There's much to marvel at in Los Angeles, and some problems that are unique. Someone should write a book about it. But the people who live there aren't nearly as strange a species as Rieff seems to think, even if they do have dorito brei for breakfast.