NP Ellroy'

[Doug Millison]

I wouldn't put him in the same league with Celine, Beckett, and Kafka,
except in the most tenuous of connections, but others do.


http://www.fluxeuropa.com/jamesellroy-quartet.htm

excerpt:
When Samuel Dashiell Hammett disrupted the linear causality of crime
fiction, that rarefied 19thC rationalism and positivism, just when it seemed
that even the most extreme contradictions of human behaviour could be forced
to the surface and understood, he struck a rich black seam of evil with
roots that ran deep into the very terra firma of this planet. Although
Hammett might have anchored crime in the broader social milieu he wasn't
really interested in the underlying political and economic inequalities
which are so often cited as its cause. Hammett was a writer well aware of
man's 'fallen' state, but he waded only so far into such dark, polluted
waters. Ellroy on the other hand takes you all the way down from silence to
madness and exposes that central flaw right to the vein. Compared to Ellroy,
even Hammett's greatest books are like a run out with the family to Whitley
Bay.
Yet of all the writers Ellroy has been compared to the one he most closely
resembles is a non-crime writer; that bete-noir of French letters, Louis
Ferdinand Celine. Celine's books, all of which were journeys to the end of
the night, were also mystical quests to find a true image of the human
condition and to understand what its consequences are. Inevitably the answer
that is gleaned from bitter experience is to be found in absurdity, madness
and death.
Like the characters in Celine, Beckett and Kafka, the world and its
injustices makes no sense to Ellroy's detectives. But even so they still
have this desperate urge to understand both rationally and emotionally the
derailed values and the fatalistic collusions of chance which coalesce in
the act of crime. And through this they struggle to grasp the cosmic
connections that will answer "the big WHY ?" itself. They are not content to
stop at the existential limits of their own self but try instead to make
sense of the whole shebang even though they know that they will fail.
Ultimately all there is to do is negotiate their own twisted metaphysic; a
cut-rate, bargain basement sale on revenge, redemption and rebirth, but they
can only dimly perceive what is going on as they are dragged down into the
madhouse of the skull. And as it turns out, it's a hell of a long way down.
It comes as little surprise then that Christian humanism - in which God
represents absolute reason in a rational universe - plays no part in
Ellroy's black-as-pitch cosmography. Nor is there any room at the dark
centre of these novels for its secular fallout - liberal humanism. If there
is a God then He is the dark, inscrutable God of Calvinism who represents
absolute Will. Calvinism has that emotional discipline which appeals to
Ellroy; an emotional rigor that doesn't break down in tears every time it
hears a hard luck story (and hasn't everyone got a hard luck story?) But
above all Calvinism recognises the eternal and immutable presence of evil.
Thus Ed Exley's toast to the crimes that demand absolute justice at the
beginning of LA Confidential, is the outward manifestation of someone
desperately trying to find something to believe in. Like Ellroy he is trying
to bulwark some form of order, even if it is only attenuated religious
feeling, against crimes and contradictions that he can only begin to
understand. As Ellroy has said, the obsession that lies behind crime writing
is that "it gives me tidy resolutions to dark deeds".