"We're self-absorbed and confuse our lives with history" Discuss

"`We should have had a child together.'

"Jack squeezed her arm, soft. `I remember the first time you said that.'

"`When was it?'

"`Fall '54. The Army-McCarthy hearings were on TV.'

"`Why do we remember things that way?'

"`Pure arrogance. We're self-absorbed and confuse our lives with history.'"

— James Ellroy, Blood's A Rover

That exchange comes near the end of James Ellroy's "Underworld U.S.A." trilogy of novels (previous volumes: American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand). The trilogy begins with an introductory note that reads, in part:

"America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can't ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. ... Mass-market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never existed. ... The real Trinity of Camelot was Look Good, Kick Ass, Get Laid. Jack Kennedy was the mythological front man for a particularly juicy slice of our history. He talked a slick line and wore a world-class haircut. He was Bill Clinton minus pervasive scrutiny and a few rolls of flab."

Taking the two passages into consideration, how would you characterize Ellroy's view of history? Are the two selections consistent? Did Ellroy's conception of American history change from 1995, when American Tabloid appeared, to Blood's A Rover (2009)? Did Ellroy become more introspective, perhaps? Is the snippet of dialogue, set in 1972, from Blood's A Rover a rueful commentary on the tumultuous years covered by the book and on Americans' attitudes towards those years?  Extra credit if you've read all three novels and can cite examples.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

L.A. is my Ellroy: Fiction, setting, and history

I browsed some James Ellroy before my recent trip to Los Angeles, and I've been reading his novel Blood's a Rover since I got back. One can enjoy Ellroy without having been to L.A., but, having just returned, I got a special kick out of lines such as:

"Canter's Deli in Fairfax. The 3:00 a.m. clientele: cops and ultra-soiled hippies."

I was there!!! though not at 3 a.m., and the clientele I most remember were two middle-aged working guys who did not look Jewish but who nonetheless gave the waiter a lesson in Yiddish.

Ellroy's earlier novel, The Black Dahlia, dating from a time when his books were much closer to conventional crime writing than they became, includes a long scene that, having read Kevin Starr's California, I now know was based on the Zoot Suit Riots.

Ellroy gets tons of publicity for his eccentricities and his dark past. Less noticed is his fascination with the history of Los Angeles. He may thrive on depravity, greed, and perversion, but he wants to get the historical details right. And now your questions, Part I: What novels and stories, crime or otherwise, are inextricably bound up with their settings? What stories make you feel like you're there? How do they accomplish this?  (And what cities or other settings make you feel like you're in the middle of a story?)

And Part II: Ellroy has peopled his more recent novels with historical figures and built them around historical events. Is his work historical fiction? Why? Why not?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

James Ellroy, Part II

I don't know if anyone could justly accuse James Ellroy of humility, but he did show some candor when a member of last night's audience in Philadelphia asked if he had a favorite among movie adaptations of his novels.

L.A. Confidential was a fine movie, he said, and I believe he remarked that sometimes one gets lucky with adaptations, and sometimes one does not. But, he said, "I would never criticize an adaptation, because I took the dough."

Ellroy read from his new novel, Blood's a Rover, at the Free Library of Philadelphia's Central Library. Perhaps because the library had recently survived a city budget crisis and the threat of closure, he stressed the formative roles that public libraries and reading had played in his life. And he repeated, amid many plugs for the new book, that "if you don't have the cash, the gelt, the dinero" to buy the novel, you can read it free at the library.

He also told the crowd that the pillars of his upbringing were the Lutheran Church and Confidential magazine, where he could read "who was a homo, a nympho, a dipso, a lesbo," and he invited "the most invasive questions" the audience could come up with.

These questions naturally concerned sex and money, and Ellroy neatly, gracefully and amusingly sidestepped them. A showman he is, and one who, at least last night, knew for every second exactly what he was up to.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

A Cool Six Thousand

Yes, James Ellroy could have read with drums and a saxophone behind him tonight at Philadelphia's Central Library. The jazz cadences were there — great streams of words, startling verbal BLAAATS! and outrageous proclamations. Oddly enough, the only musical reference he made was to Beethoven, whom he called "my greatest teacher."

The man is capable of great hyperbole and verbal music, but I believe his invocation of the titanic Beethoven was sincere, and it was certainly quite moving. How can he, Ellroy, complain, he said, when Beethoven wrote such music while mired in poverty and imprisoned by deafness?

"What about Thomas Pynchon and Inherent Vice?" someone asked.

"SNORE!" replied Ellroy.

"Why did you end the Underworld U.S.A. trilogy just before Watergate?" someone else (me) asked.

"Watergate?" said Ellroy. "The biggest SNORE! since Thomas Pynchon."

In short, Ellroy gave the happiest, most buoyant, most joyously self-aggrandizing performance I can remember from an author, perhaps because of a new love whom he mentioned several times and to whom he blew a kiss as he took the stage. And yet he was capable of moments of great earnestness, as with Beethoven, or in reply to the inevitable question about his writing process. Such a question often induces groans. Here, Ellroy somberly outlined his procedure: For Blood's a Rover, his new book, a four-hundred page outline, research reports, then sitting down and making the stuff up.

Of special interest, perhaps, was his answer to the questioner who asked "Why Los Angeles" as the archetypal noir city?

"Because Raymond Chandler wrote there," he said, and because that's where the movie studios were, and that's where the great films noirs were made.

More, perhaps, to come.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009