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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Unread primitive, my ass. I think Ellroy has read a lot of books. I'd give Felix Trinidad-type odds that the labyrinthine conspiracies surrounding the JFK assassination in both "American Tabloid" and "The Cold Six Thousand" were the result of Ellroy's being wowed by Don DeLillo's "Libra," just as "L.A. Confidential" was a hostile reaction to the sentimentality beneath the surface cynicism of Raymond Chandler. Which is what made the absurdly overrated film version of Ellroy's novel so pointless; its hard-boiled but noble cops and hookers with hearts of gold were everything that Ellroy had set out to eradicate.
Not that Ellroy is cynical, as many of his critics contend; he's having much too good a time to be that. It's true that Ellroy doesn't believe that good triumphs over evil; it can't in Ellroy's world because good can overcome evil only by becoming evil itself, which is another victory for evil. But -- and here's Ellroy's real contribution to crime literature, and why he's been able to elevate it above the genre -- evil can be overcome by causing it to burn itself out. To accomplish this an Ellroy "hero" (now there's a word in need of an overhaul) must toss himself onto the conflagration, to make it burn higher and brighter.
This view of the nature of cops and crime comes perilously close to embracing fascism (what truly efficient brand of law enforcement doesn't?), and it is precisely in skirting that razor's edge between control and anarchy that Ellroy can be most thrilling. Make no mistake, there is no doubting where Ellroy's sentiments lie -- no more pre-Miranda rights kind of guy ever breathed L.A. smog -- but it is not bigotry that lends glee to the passages in his books where cops kick open doors and burn black or Mexican hoods. He'd just as happily write books where cops kick in doors and burn Italian and Russian hoods if he could do it and still be realistic. He isn't nostalgic for a time when white cops beat up colored crooks; those just happened to be the shades of the cops and robbers when he was in his formative years. But, like the detective in "Memento" and most Republicans, Ellroy seems to have a memory that reaches back to a certain point in time and then stops, unable to assimilate what has happened since.
In "American Tabloid" and "The Cold Six Thousand" Ellroy has expanded his view of evil to include ... well, damn near everybody. He is finding a wider audience, but perhaps only because he's widened his web of evil to include someone that everyone can identify with. My own personal favorite is Ward Littell, a mob lawyer, former Jesuit and FBI agent who embodies almost everything I hate in one handy character. Maybe your taste runs more to Wayne Tedrow Jr., a crooked Las Vegas cop whose dad is a right-wing hatemonger, former corrupt union boss and gambling casino owner. (How can one person, you'll repeatedly ask yourself as you read this book, be so many bad things at the same time?) There is the Mafia, right-wing Cubans, the Ku Klux Klan, the Mormon Church, J. Edgar Hoover (at his most engaging, but revealed to us only through a long-running series of phone transcriptions), Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Hoffa, Bobby Kennedy, Howard Hughes, Sonny Liston and dozens of others, with Dean Martin and the McGuire sisters crooning in the background.
That's part of the problem. They may sound great on the "L.A. Confidential" soundtrack, but there's only so much of them that a modern audience wants to hear. Can Ellroy develop some new memories in time for the next book? Can he find a new style, can he be more profound without being bigger, denser, more complex, more multilayered, more multiplotted, richer, darker, more stylized? Because I really don't think that James Ellroy can pile on any more "mores," or at least no more that I can take. If Ellroy wants a prize for having created the ultimate crime novel, I'm prepared to give him one. But ultimate means no escalation from here.
If Ellroy wants to ditch the genre label, it might be time for him to ditch the territory. I mean, fuck being a crime novelist if you can be a flat-out great novelist.
