Ellroy &Pynchon WAS RE: The movies

[Doug Millison]

I'm working through and enjoying  Ellroy's so-called "LA Quartet", finishing
up L.A. Confidential after having recently read The Black Dahlia and The Big
Nowhere.  I find Ellroy to be a kick-ass writer and I love the way he weaves
the bebop, cop, gangster, demimonde, dope peddler/user slang and sensibility
of the late-40s and 50s into his stories -- he writes syncopated prose that
really pops. I highly recommend these three books, and I'm planning to move
on to White Jazz (final of the four in the LA Quartet) when I finish LA
Confidential.  I haven't read American Tabloid or the new one yet either. 

The politics of Ellroy's cop/gangster cooperation do remind me of Pynchon,
especially Vineland; Ellroy's cops and gangsters work together to contain
the Red Menace, in The Big Nowhere especially, where the story line about
the crackdown on Commies in Hollywood recalls that storyline in Vineland. I
think you could make a case that the way Ellroy's cops favor and protect one
gangster ("Mickey Cohen") in order to control and limit underground activity
echoes the way the U.S. government favors one or another thug government in
order to contain Communism in the Cold War period, but Ellroy doesn't make
this sort of echo terribly explicit in the three novels I've read so far;
what I've seen of the reviews of American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand
suggest he might be moving into a slightly bigger arena with regard to
politics and conspiracy.

So, in these three novels at least, I see some commonality in subject matter
with Pynchon (when P focuses on American politics).  But Ellroy is a very
different writer, much more commercial and accessible -- assuming you're hip
to the lingo his prose is easy to read.  I find his vision of humanity is
consistently darker than Pynchon's -- Ellroy seems to me to hold out even
less hope, offering no redeeming moments.  Where Pynchon allows the
occasional moment where love can redeem the shit of the world, where
friendships can last and flourish and nurture (as happens with the eponymous
characters of Mason & Dixon; or Frenesi's welcome back into her family at
the end of Vineland; or Slothrop's breakthough into bliss in GR), Ellroy
doesn't let anything like that happen -- everybody betrays everybody,
nothing works out for the good.

Ellroy has also been a very public writer -- he reaches out to fans,
promotes himself and his books, and he has an interesting personal past that
he's written about in a memoir called, I think, My Dark Places, that a
friend of mine has also recommended.

-Doug

Thomas:
P.S. There are two movies in pre-production now that are based on novels by
James Ellroy, "The Black Dahlia" and "White Jazz". Ellroy with "American
Tabloid" and his latest, "Cold Six Thousand", which I have not read yet,
seems
to be getting into Pynchon and DeLillo territory now, at least as far as
political conspiracy is concerned. Any opinions (on Ellroy, the movies
etc.)?