Ellroy has made claims that he's moving out of the genre,
into the
grander historical novel. I'm not quite sure where this idea
comes from
or what it will mean. He clearly wants to be a Novelist with
a capital
N, rather than a crime writer. On the other hand, I don't
think he's
pulling it off. To my mind, the stronger novel on the
Kennedy
assassination is DeLillo's _Libra_. (A novel that Ellroy
himself
praises strongly.) Of course, DeLillo does not write with
the
page-turning intensity of Ellroy, nor does he mean to.
Ellroy fans should look at a book called _Unchained
Memories_, by a
psychologist or psychiatrist who does work on "recovered"
memory. One
of her case studies is Ellroy, visiting the stuff that now
forms part of
his recent memoir. The writer seems to have "rewritten"
Ellroy himself
in a way that he seems to have taken to.
Other dissenters on Ellroy out there?
Doug Levin
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