COVER -> American Dreams
James Ellroy
Hardcover - 688 pages (May 8, 2001)
Knopf; ISBN: 0679403922
The last time I saw James Ellroy, he informed the nation on "Late Night with Conan O' Brien" that Bill Clinton was hung like a cashew. He wiggled his pinkie finger as a visual prop. I got the feeling he wouldn't be invited back.
I am predisposed to like Ellroy. I was born in 1950's LA, and when Ellroy riffs on the cultural minutae of that time and place, he's jacking direct to my psyche. The streets, the hoods and cops that ran them, the bush league celebs that jostled each other for face-time on magazine covers and movie posters, all resonate in my brainbox like a Bernard Hermann film score. My mom kept a dog-eared collection of Confidential magazines stashed under her bed, and I gleeped them and glommed them whenever I had the chance, wolfing down stories of mary jane busts and movie stars clinched with pool boys and doxies with the wrong skin tones.
Elroy made his bones with the so-called LA Quartet, four books starting with Black Dahlia that nail post-war LA though a series of splashy crimes, dirty cops, and heroes with more baggage than a Pullman sleeper. After publishing White Jazz, the last and most dyspeptic of the LA Quartet, Ellroy jumped from behind the screen of fiction to present My Dark Places, a memoir centered around his mother's unsolved murder, his twisted bio, and his search for her killer thirty years later. Ellroy lay out his obsessions on black velvet for examination like a jeweler presenting engagement rings, and fitted readers with an eyepiece so we could look reeeeal close.
After baring his panty-sniffing, pad-prowling soul, Ellroy announced he was writing a trio of books that would chronicle American History from 1960 to 1980. The Cold Six Thousand is book two of this effort.
The Cold Six Thousand, like American Tabloid before it, tries to get us hooked into a secret underground history of the US groove. Like, the Mob, CIA, and the FBI colluded to assassinate JKF. And Martin Luther King, and RFK. That sort of thing. Problem is, we already know that. We know that the CIA was using the Vietnam War as a front for heroin dealing; we know that the Teamsters and Mormons formed a nexus with Howard Hughes to buy up 'Vegas. We know this cuz the Left in the US, back when there was a Left in the US, dug all this shit up and waved it around for anyone with eyes to see. Anyone remember the Church Committee? Don't expect Ellroy to cop to this, though. He thinks anyone starboard of the John Birch Society is a pussy.
Ellroy, in his heart of hearts, thinks like the hard guys he writes about. Anyone who isn't a sociopathic killer of some kind gets the short shrift, and usually ends up killed or a suicide. Anyone who isn't white is either invisible or a rank stereotype.
- Blacks are coons, doing the wa-watusi when white guys interupt their crap games to toss them short dogs of Thunderbird.
- Gooks talk funny gibberish and act like treacherous monkees until you give them opiates, then they calm down enough to piss themselves.
- Mexicans are either Bill Dana peons or dapper pimp/cops in SS surplus uniforms who run donkey shows out behind the calaboose.
The only two black characters in "TCST" who don't devolve immediately into white-women-raping jigaboos are an unnamed victim of a church bombing, who's in shock and can't get it up to do an Ellroy tap dance routine, and Bayard Rustin, MLK's lieutenant from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who isn't so much a coon as he is a swish, and therefore subject to a different jacket of sterotypes.
Ellroy is writing his American Trio in a style akin to the one developed in White Jazz - staccato bursts of short sentences, American vernacular that propels the narrative. The Cold Six Thousand, with a dozen or so main characters to keep track of, suffers from this propulsion, it reads more like an outline than a novel.
Ellroy has got so much to tell us that he doesn't show us anything. We get glimpses of characters, glimpses of places, and then we're off - from 'Vegas to LA to Vietnam to Dallas, and then back and forth in a confusing rotation of characters. Ellroy uses death -- always violent, messy, and baroque -- instead of punctuation. Novels are more than plot movement, though. They should create whole universes. "TCST" reads like a 900 page PowerPoint presentation - bullet pointed, with no paragraph longer than three sentences.
Ellroy's getting older. You can tell this because his characters get heart attacks and cancer. They chew anachronistic pieces of Nicorette gum, and, when they get socked in the jaw, their dentures fly across the room. Mortality weighs heavy on Elroy's psychotic killers (that is, death from old age), as well as dietary restrictions and heart meds. Maybe he's burnt out.
Somewhere between American Tabloid and "TCST", Elroy produced a collection of short pieces called "Crime Wave", a mix of true crime and fictional writings. The true crime pieces crackle with intelligence and compassion, Ellroy delves, Ellroy describes, Ellroy writes. The fiction in "Crime Wave" was completely over the top, romps with Dick Contino, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr and other names. The stories' escalating outrageousness played like Ellroy having fun with himself, destroying the particular genre of crime writing he'd invented, just for the fuck of it. He had fun, and it was fun reading. It felt like closure.
Unfortunately, "TCST" reads as self-parody, too -- but it's absolutely no fun.