Bill D, thanks for the review.
I'm with Bill C, the excerpts don't make me want to read the
book, either.
However, that doesn't keep me from thinking the reviewer is
amazingly wrongheaded and condescending. And Ellroy is
probably in complete agreement with him. I love it when an
artist pisses all over his loyal fans. And in Ellroy's case,
many seem to become more loyal the more they're pissed on. Or
do they believe the attitude is pointed at everyone else, me
and Ellroy against the world? (I know, I'm confusing the art
and the artist, but as I've stated before, Ellroy has done
his best to join the two.)
"And he almost succeeded; "American Tabloid" jerked Ellroy
out of the crime fiction shelves in the big bookstores and
into fiction. And, even more incredibly, Ellroy did it
without changing his subject, crime, and his subtext, evil.
He did it, as he told me years ago he would, by making each
succeeding book "bigger, denser, more complex, more
multilayered, more multiplotted, richer, darker, more
stylized, dare I say it, more profound." Dare it, dare
it."
So a book about crime is not crime fiction simply because
it's longer? Ellroy did not really change anything in
American Tabloid. The style was already pretty much there in
White Jazz (and it was certainly an attempt at a vernacular
speech, something we've often called a defining point of
hardboiled lit, no matter how constructed). All he did was
exaggerate everything he was already doing (which is why I
was disappointed by Tabloid, finding it more style than
substance, just Ellroy doing Ellroy) -- even the reviewer
admits he's the same Ellroy, just more so. So how is it no
longer crime fiction? Just because bookstores changed what
shelf he was on?
"Fans of crime thrillers would have complained that "American
Tabloid" was nearly as impenetrable as "Ulysses" -- that is,
if fans of crime thrillers had known what "Ulysses" is. I
think Ellroy knows damn well what "Ulysses" is, and I think
he has intended "The Cold Six Thousand" to be his -- dare I
say it -- "Finnegans Wake.""
I find this incredibly insulting even though I never got very
far in Ullysses (even when it was assigned reading) and never
attempted Finnegans Wake. However, the bigger question is,
WHAT FANS OF CRIME THRILLERS COMPLAINED? How can American
Tabloid have brought him more readers (and I'm not aware of
any it lost, everyone I knew who was already reading him
read, and most enjoyed, that one, too), as he earlier stated,
if it was so impenetrable? It's not like the bestseller lists
are filled with dense literary novels or even reissues of
Joyce.
"Ellroy has gotten a lot of ink as a result of carefully
cultivating his image as an American primitive, a natural,
uneducated talent (you know, little Latin, less Greek) who
has succeeded despite having written more books than he has
read."
While Ellroy does play up the primitive role, I've never been
aware of his claiming to be unread, especially when it comes
to crime fiction. As a matter of fact, that's part of his
primitive myth (whether true or not), that he spent several
years doing speed, jerking off and reading crime novels all
day and prowling and breaking into houses at night.
And as for the reviewer's big revelation that Ellroy must
have read DeLillo's Libra, Ellroy has loudly proclaimed his
admiration for and debt to DeLillo's book. He gave credit at
the Tabloid reading I attended, as well as in numerous
interviews.
""Fuck being a crime novelist when you can be a flat-out
great novelist," he once told me --"
They're mutually exclusive?
"He made a conscious decision, with "American Tabloid," to
write a book that couldn't be categorized as a mystery or a
thriller and thus risked losing his hard-won crime
following."
Again, how is American Tabloid not a crime novel. Sure, it's
not a mystery, but how is it not a thriller?
Mark
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 13 Jun 2001 EDT