Al wrote:
>
> This discussion began with the question of whether
Ellroy was a good writer
> or not. Here's my brief thoughts.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "JIM DOHERTY" <
jimdohertyjr@yahoo.com>
>
> >What Brian implied, and it's a fair point, is
that the
> >TOTAL corruption Ellroy shows, in which there is
NO
> >character acting from good or noble purposes is
at
> >least as far from reality as a presentation
that
> >suggests that there is no brutality, corruption,
or
> >racism in the ranks of American law
enforcement.
>
> Unfortunately there is no such thing as objective
reality. Like the rest of
> us, Ellroy can't step outside his own ideological
framework. He has a
> distrust of people. Somebody out there killed his
mother. Ellroy blames
> everybody for her death. In his paranoid world,
everybody acts out of
> self-interest, everybody is corrupt, everybody is a
potential killer. In
> terms of establishing whether or not he's a good
writer, it doesn't matter
> whether the above is true. What matters is whether
or not he presents HIS
> truth, his worldview, convincingly.
>
> If he does, and that's what we should be debating,
then he's a good writer.
>
> Al
In brief response to Al's last point, in my opinion, Ellroy
did a fine job of this with "The Black Dahlia". His voice
knocked me for a loop, and I *heard* him here. The work of
his that I have read since has, in my non-objective opinion,
been a long, slow slide into self-parody.
Brian
-- # 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 : 25 Nov 2002 EST