My Mother the War?

[Dkipen at aol.com]

Dear list,

Q: What did Kathie Lee Gifford say when her co-cost exposed himself on
national television?
A: "Ick, Regis!"

Reading the late Mrs. Pynchon's obituary, I formulated a question I don't
think I've ever seen tackled here on the list. Namely, how did Thomas Pynchon
get to be Thomas Pynchon? He has siblings who, while presumably fine people,
 aren't contenders for the Nobel Prize in any categories I'm aware of. So
what is it? Genes? Good teachers? Sunspots? How do a Protestant from an old
New England family and a Catholic nurse active in her local Friends of the
Library organization come together to produce, in Victorian parlance, a
Napoleon of literature? 

A-and another thing. Was I wrong when I eviscerated James Ellroy in a book
review a couple-three years ago, as follows? (I'm going to keep quoting
myself here until somebody calls me on it. It's just so nice to write for
people who actually read.)

Noisy Days in Cliché

"Dummy Uhl -- all the middle of him gone -- slid down to the floor and made
more of a 
puddle than a pile there."
Dashiell Hammett, "Dead Yellow Women"

"...breath like the inside of a motorman's glove..."
Raymond Chandler, "The Big Sleep"

"And Maggie was ixnay, splitsville, off to Gone City."
James Ellroy, Hollywood Nocturnes

	Amo, amas, amateurish.  
	The declension of American crime fiction from Hammett down to James Ellroy 
stands natural selection on its head.  Upright, thinking man has evolved back
into a 
nematode.  
	Ellroy's new Hollywood Nocturnes isn't a novel.  Even "book" is putting it
leniently.  His latest effort collects a novella, "Dick Contino's Blues,"
five recycled short stories, and eight pages of subliterate maundering that a
GQ editor last November apparently mistook for an essay.
	Selling spare parts is no crime, of course.  Before the gloves really come
off, it 
warrants mention that Ellroy has acquired quite a following with his
so-called "L.A. 
Quartet" of novels about Los Angeles in the 40s and 50s.  Those who admired
"The Black Dahlia" or "White Jazz" or either of the novels that came between,
may feel Ellroy's entitled to a showpiece or two by way of encore.  John
LeCarre brought off something similar in The Secret Pilgrim, where he
arranged several short stories into a kind of valedictory to George Smiley
and the Cold War.  This functioned as a kind of palate cleanser for him, and
freed him up to tackle the post-Cold War depredations of The Night Manager.
	But where Ellroy will go from Hollywood Nocturnes is anybody's guess.  A 
different line of work is probably too much to hope for, with the kind of
encouragement he keeps getting in the press.  "Always a master at painting
the dark portrait," purrs the AP on Nocturnes' jacket, "Ellroy's stripped
down the language to a hard, cutting tool."  In vain one searches the pages
of Hollywood Nocturnes for some of this naked language, but his
interchangeably sociopathic ex-cop, ex-con, ex-prizefighter antiheroes keep
feeding their long-suffering molls sludge like this instead:  "You couldn't
take the danger, romance, the heartache and vulnerability inherent in a
mean-street-treading knight like me.  Face it, baby:  I was too much man for
you."
	Way to strip down that language, Jimbo.  If Ellroy would just crack a smile
once in a while, you could write him off as a mediocre parodist, but after
ten books of this cheese, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that he actually
believes in what he's doing.  
	Why has he gotten such a critical free ride all this time?  My best guess
is, the 
popular press doesn't know Raymond Chandler from Dorothy Chandler, and thinks
just because Ellroy's on Ray's turf, he's in Ray's league.  The alternative
press forgives him his racism -- "Murikami's slant eyes bugged out until he
almost looked like a fright-wig nigger" -- and misogynism -- "Lizzie's a
blast:  she's smart, tender, funny and gives great skull" -- because his
comic-book nihilism must be mother's milk to the black-coffee-and--crape
crowd.  Me, I can forgive anything except lines like  "Fear adrenaline was
scorching my soul," followed not 50 pages later by "Adrenaline scorched my
blood vessels," as if we hadn't met before.
	And the cliches, God, the cliches!  Name your favorite.  "Why are we
whispering?"  It's in here.  "It's your nickel"?  In here.  The infallible
gumshoe who can impersonate anyone, memorize six license plates at a glance,
and tell a faked orgasm "from twenty feet away"?  Look no further.
	Worse than the cliches Ellroy flogs are the ones he mints.   He favors
three-way 
shootouts over one-on-one showdowns.  He's big on ripping open bags of money
on windy days, and has a soft spot for lesbians, as in "I hear she's a
lezzie," and "Are you lez?"  For the opposite of "lez," as an alternative to
the clinical-sounding "heterosexual" and the insufficiently gender-specific
"straight," Ellroy proposes the undeniably snappy "non-dyke."  The
introduction of several female characters by reference to how "prodigiously
lunged" they are would flirt with offensiveness, if Ellroy's schmendrake
narrators weren't also fretting incessantly about what a "hard yard" their
romantic rivals might be toting.  And "Russki roulette," as he calls it, is
overused enough without Ellroy's help, but it turns up in at least half of
the six stories here.
	Have some more rope, Jim:  "I leadfooted it to Wax's office, the radio tuned
to a 
classical station--I was hopped up on blood, but found some soothing Mozart
to calm me down, and highballed it to Beverly and Alvarado."  At times Ellroy
reads like some kid who got the "vivid verbs" lecture in freshman comp and
never looked back.  But after a few pages of "spritzing" and "spieling" --
words I'm not crazy about even as nouns -- and the ubiquitous "glomming," you
may begin to feel like highballing it to the cocktail shaker.  
	The only live round in Ellroy's clip might be a little story called "Gravy
Train," in 
which an Honor Rancho parolee falls in love with a bull terrier who's just
inherited several million dollars.  It's just as unreadable as all the rest,
but the dog's good company, and Ellroy's slang's always worth a laugh (cf.
"shvoogies," an apparent conflation of shvartzes and boogies).  Plus it's his
first published work in years that takes place in the present.  The attitudes
are just as dated as ever, but then he's writing about the L.A. he remembers,
since he hasn't lived here for years.  
	Maybe if he tried writing about the mean lanes of Connecticut, where he
lives now, or visited today's L.A. for longer than a book tour, he'd finally
crank out something that feels a little less fraudulent.  For the meantime,
Ellroy remains genre fiction's poster child for arrested -- no, aborted --
development.  He's stolen everything from the masters except what matters
most, skill.  Ellroy thinks he's hardboiled, but his entire oeuvre is
poached.

Best,
David