On 2/7/06, Kerry J. Schooley wrote:
>
> That said, I haven't been able to get more than 100
pages into The Cool
> Two
> Thousand. Or was it more than two thousand? That I
can't remember
> indicates
> my level of interest. I don't put it down in disgust
or anything. I just
> put it down and forget about it. And I've read
nothing else Ellroy's
> written since that.
Actually, it was Six Thousand. :)
But, while I enjoyed American Tabloid and The Cold Six
Thousand, I can't deny that they don't succeed, in the way
White Jazz does. I think, and I have nothing to back me up on
this, the reason is the scope of it.
It's hard enough to write an all-encompassing story, with the
attendant cast of hundreds and an equal number of plot
twists, in a compelling way in plain English...particularly
when the narrative spans 500+ pages. Hell, the very best
crime fiction is typically stuff that reads 200 pages at
beast (Yeah, yeah...Joe Blow wrote a seminal novel whenever
that tracked 400 pages).
So to use the Jazz style for something as convoluted and
wide-ranging as Six Thousand and Tabloid...something is going
to be lost. I did like those books, but I think it was a
reviewer for the Times who noted something to the effect that
it looked like Ellroy just submitted his outline to the
publisher (or something like that).
Tribe
-- http://tribe.textdriven.com/blog Tribe's Blog
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
RARA-AVIS home page: http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rara-avis-l/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: rara-avis-l-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 07 Feb 2006 EST