James Ellroy and V.

[Diana York Blaine]

The _V._ reference, while not entirely tongue in cheek, probably needs a
gloss for those who are not thinking about the book in the way I am/do.
Stencil's obsessive quest for his "mother" V., her body, her memory, her
impact on him, mirrors Ellroy's own quest for his murdered mother's
history. A friend sent me the Ellroy because I study the prevalence of 
images of dead women in literature and the visual arts and our
corresponding social "ignorance" of it--in other words the dead body
of a woman is so common that it becomes invisible and so acts more as
a vehicle for the male author's feelings/emotions/aesthetics (and a
panacea for his own death) than a "literal" (whatever that is)
representation of the dead woman herself. Ellroy's book certainly fits in
here--clearly the quest is more about the author than the long-dead
mother--but she is his obsessive focus and the dead woman who defines
him, for better or worse, like  Stencil's quest for V. defines him. -Diana