It's an LA Thing: Pynchon, Ellroy & Philip K Dick

In the early 1970's James Ellroy, Thomas Pynchon and Philip K Dick were all living within a few miles of each other in Greater Los Angeles. Ellroy was a 23 year old kid beginning his first experiments with writing, Pynchon was 34 and editing the book which would become Gravity's Rainbow and Dick at 42 was reaching his peak as a novelist, having the experiences and working on the book which would become A Scanner Darkly. There must have been something about that time and place because - joining Scanner - we've now gotten Pynchon's version of events in Inherent Vice and Ellroy's take in Blood's A Rover and they all seem to share certain thematic unities: pandemic drug use, paranoia, corrupt LAPD officers, belief in government conspiracies, supreme disillusionment with politics, and, in the case of Ellroy and Pynchon, an odd obsession with Las Vegas and Howard Hughes. The overriding impression you get from these novels is that America as an ideal has reached a dead end here at the edge of the continent among the wastrels, drug dealers, dreamers and movie stars. And it might even go deeper than that - not only has America failed, but the whole enlightenment project has failed. The modern world is fundamentally broken and cannot be fixed; democracy has no future - you either have total license or total tyranny and the proponents of these extremes are shrill and crazy.

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But that just may be Los Angeles. Don't get me wrong, I like LA. Fat Burger and Santa Monica and Malibu Creek are worth the drive, but I don't think you could have written Rover, Scanner or Vice in New England where people are not known for their demonstrative or hyperbolic nature. William Faulkner tells a story about how he was driving in Maine once and asked for directions. "Can you get to X, from here?" Faulkner wondered. "Yes." a local farmer responded. "Thanks," Faulkner said and off he drove before finding that the road he was on ended in the middle of nowhere. He drove back and encountered the farmer again. "I thought you said I could get to X from here," he wondered. "Not on this road," the farmer told him. Faulkner claims that he was impressed by the Mainer's precise answer to his question. In Mississippi they would have gone out of their way to show you the right road, but that was unnecessarily verbose in Maine.

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I have to say, although Faulkner was subtly dissing the north east, I really like it up there: people keep to themselves, they're suspicious of authority and innovation and they don't fall easily for the latest trends. Perhaps in the Los Angeles of 1971 America's future seemed bleak - as it does today - but drive up to New Hampshire or Vermont or Maine (and many other places in the heartland I'll bet) and you'll see a landscape and culture unchanged in nearly four centuries and a hardy, skeptical people who are not afraid of the future and who can handle just about anything.

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(Except maybe the terrible circumstances of another novel I read recently - Cormac McCarthy's The Road. )

Blood's A Rover

JAMES Ellroy, a devoted boxing aficionado, is a little like the Joe Frazier of American letters. While Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy get spoken of as contenders for the title of America's greatest novelist, Ellroy often gets dismissed as a mere crime writer. His amour-propre, his past as a teenage neo-Nazi and the fact he writes about that most gauche place, Los Angeles, has never endeared him to the literary establishment. 

Blood's a Rover, however, may well change their opinion. It is the completion of Ellroy's near 2000-page American Underworld trilogy that began with the evocative American Tabloid and continued with the extraordinary The Cold Six Thousand. 

American Tabloid is a technically impressive and often brilliant novel structured around the Cuban revolution and John Kennedy's assassination, written in a clipped ultra-telegraphic prose style that reinvents American crime fiction in a way no writer has attempted to do since the 1920s. 

Harsh, single word, verbless sentences pile on top of one another like the dripping tap of a water torturer, producing a hypnotic, trance-like effect that repels as many readers as it seduces. 

But where American Tabloid is a book teetering on the edge of a cliff, The Cold Six Thousand jumps into the abyss with an even sparer haiku-like prose style and a complex narrative of conspiracies, invasions and cover-ups starting with JFK's murder and ending with the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. 

Blood's a Rover breathlessly continues the story in the days following King's death in Memphis. The central characters are the ones we got to know (and in most cases dislike) in The Cold Six Thousand: the conspirators who planned the hits on both Kennedy brothers and MLK. 

If this sounds a bit crazy, well, it is. 

In Ellroy's America (and one assumes he does not actually believe this) King was shot by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI working with the mafia, Cuban exiles and the CIA. King's murder incites rioting in America's black ghettoes and Richard Nixon rides the conservative backlash to get elected with a little help from the mob, Dominican drug dealers, an ex-FBI macher called Dwight Holly and a murderous ex-Las Vegas cop, Wayne Tedrow Jr, who ended book two of the trilogy by helping beat his father to death with a golf club. 

To complete the Freudian triad of central protagonists in Blood's a Rover we are introduced to the new character of Donald Crutchfield, a neophyte private investigator, voyeur and pervert. 

Ellroy has described himself as the Tolstoy of crime fiction and Crutch is transparently Ellroy's Pierre Bezukhov, a mostly sympathetic avatar of the novelist who gets his kicks (as Ellroy once did) by breaking into women's homes to sniff their underwear. We follow these diverse sociopaths on a wild ride through the politics, controversy and insanity of America in the 70s, with Ellroy gleefully libelling the conveniently dead Nixon, Hoover, Lyndon Johnson and Howard Hughes, who were all in on the whole Kennedy thing. 

And, yes, I know this is a novel and not history but I still find it a little disturbing that Ellroy absolves real-life individuals such as Sirhan Sirhan, Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray, all of whom are patsies in the wider conspiracy. 

Then again, maybe that is the point, as in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, Ellroy's world is not quite our world: this is an alternative 1970s, a slightly darker America where intelligence agencies, the military industrial complex and very rich men are the sinister puppet masters. 

Ellroy's strengths are his descriptions of men of action doing violent deeds or preparing for them. In these scenes his writing jumps off the page and his language is ironic, cynical and at times humorous. Watching professionals do their job can be a lot of fun, even if they are ice-cold killers. 

The writing in Blood's a Rover is Ellroy at his most confident and mature; the staccato prose style has been dialled down a notch from The Cold Six Thousand and the plot is inventive, surprising and, because we are still talking about a crime novel here, exciting. Ellroy's weaknesses are his weirder flights of fancy, the occasionally peculiar motivations of his characters and his female leads who, although given much more room to breathe in this book, still act and talk like few women any of us would recognise. 

Blood's a Rover is a line from A. E. Housman, which gives you a clue to Ellroy's sensibility; as George Orwell noted in his essay Inside the Whale, Housman is the poet par excellence for men baffled by "treacherous, half-human" women. (Although perhaps a writer whose mother was murdered by persons unknown when he was 10 should be cut a little slack.) 

Ellroy's language, too, can be offputting, riddled as it is with ethnic slurs and homophobia, but it is a canard to accuse Ellroy of racism; he is an ironist, not a racist, and the entire American Underworld trilogy can be read as an apocalyptic parable about the rise of fascism. 

Blood's a Rover is not quite the masterpiece that was The Cold Six Thousand but it is an ambitious, bold, outrageous, over the top tour de force that confirms Ellroy's place as one of the most important living novelists in the US. 

I tackled (I use the word advisedly) the book in two sittings and it will almost certainly in my top 10 crime novels of the year. While Ellroy may never be the favoured son among the New York literary elite, he has shown with this trilogy that he can go 15 rounds with Pynchon, DeLillo, Roth or any other heavyweight American novelist you care to name.

SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

Long Day's Journey Into Night

Apollo, God of the sun and of the morning and, er, mice, gave humanity one piece of advice at his sacred shrine at Delphi: "Know Yourself". 19 hours on a plane will teach you a lot about yourself, perhaps things that you don't want to know. My love of life is suprisingly tenuous and my fear of hijack and diversion to a random airport is not as high as one would expect. I flew from Melbourne to Dublin to do some book readings and since I have done this journey a couple of times before I at least was prepared. I downloaded two movie rentals onto my iPod nano and I brought along 3 books: Michael Chabon's The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (excellent so far), Tony Judt's Reappraisals (ok so far) and thanks to the largesse of Seana Graham, James Ellroy's Blood's A Rover (which I'm saving for the return flight). The iPod films I watched were ones I had seen before as I didn't think I could take the risk on a new movie: Man on Wire and Waltz With Bashir (two favs from last year). On the plane I watched Mr. Brooks, which looked like a good idea but was clearly committee-ed to death by the producers. In order to appeal to America's alleged puritanical streak (just like in cheesy American horror films of the 70's) every person serial killer Kevin Costner kills sort of deserves it because they are sexually open or have a moral weakness; of course we don't get to see the grisliness of these murders or their consequences - it's a cowardly film and was rightly panned when it came out but the worst aspect is a frankly insane subplot with Demi Moore as a detective who early on survives being thrown from a van at 50MPH into another car's windscreen, without even messing up her hair. It's very nice hair, but still...

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My neighbour on the flight was a Melburnian woman fluent in Sicilian going to spend the summer with her sister south of Siracusa. I haven't been to Sicily but anyone who's read Thucydides will never forget the disastrous Athenian invasion of Syracuse which destroyed the Athenian Empire and basically led to Athens becoming an occupied city for the next 2400 years. My neighbour told me that the ruins are spectacular and definitely worth visiting and some day I hope to do just that.

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A final word about Man on Wire. Highly recommended if life's been getting you down lately. You'll say, as Woody Allen says at the end of Hollywood Ending, "thank God for the French."