Hi! I’ve got two reviews of LA crime novels for you this week. I’m also busily reading sources and preparing some writing for my Gen X project (I need a name for it, and preferably a better one phrase description… an old issue for my projects). Enjoy!
CONTENTS
Reviews
James Ellroy, The Enchanters
Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice
James Ellroy, The Enchanters (2023)
Next year it will be ten years since my first paid, published piece of critical writing, my look at James Ellroy’s work in Jacobin. A lot has changed since then! I no longer write for or subscribe to Jacobin- I don’t hate it, but I got the runaround from the editor a few times and lost a lot of the excitement I had for it circa 2011-2015. I had an arc of getting pieces out there but do a lot less of it now, preferring to write for myself, here. It doesn’t pay, online criticism. Even when the editors are good – and a lot of them aren’t – it’s a lot of time and bother for chicken feed. I’m still in touch sometimes with the editor who commissioned the piece, who I do like, but via email- he was a social media brawl casualty, but he seems to be doing ok away from Al Gore’s Internet.
I still read James Ellroy’s work as it comes out, and plan on reading the rest of the back catalog, too, when and as I find the time. This means I read The Enchanters, his latest, a little while back. In this one, he gives the Ellroy treatment to the death of one of the historical figures who is getting a lot of attention these days, Marilyn Monroe, building a great big long conspiracy-filled novel around her demise. But in his classic fashion, Ellroy’s approach cuts across that of the trend-hoppers playing around with the same material. Ellroy has insisted in the press lately that he takes on no media produced after the early 1960s- no news, music, movies, etc. But something tells me that some of the “sad girl” ethos, the upswing in interest in stories of messy, glamorous women made into objects, partially with their consent, for male consumption only to be thrown away, has reached him. For one thing, the version of the story that cast Monroe in this role has been around probably since before Sophia Coppola or Greta Gerwig were born, since a time when Ellroy did have some interest in the then-present. For another… how walled off is a guy who hosts podcasts, as Ellroy does, going to be? The way he depicts Monroe in The Enchanters as a woman who just barely perceives the contradictions in her position that sad girl culture would dramatize, but who had neither the integrity, the discipline, nor the brains to act on that insight… I think it’s pointed enough to say he knew what other big-ticket Monroe stories were coming out this year, and have at least an intimation of some of the discourse around it. And so we get Ellroy’s Monroe- she isn’t tragic like Antigone, she’s sad like a farce.
This might be mean-spirited but it comes from somewhere. Ellroy, widely lauded as the grand old man of American crime fiction, has enough wiggle room at this point that he can write more or less what he likes. Since he wrapped up the Underworld USA series in 2008, he’s published an array of novels that often leave fans like me a little confused, even disappointed. They’re not bad, as such. The telegraphic prose is there, the intense focus on place, on time, on history both personal and global, the channeling of obsessiveness, the dirt and sleaze. Some of us put our finger on the lack of a broader political picture, like emerged in Underworld USA and to a lesser extent the Los Angeles quartet. But both those series meandered off “the point,” that’s part of the charm. They weren’t lectures in geopolitics or regional corruption with bloody crime scenes attached, they were sprawling crime epics that evinced a razor keen sense for those political realities and the lived realities backstopping them.
It took me four big books — the two extant installments of the “second Los Angeles Quartet,” Widespread Panic, and The Enchanters — but I think I now have a tentative handle on what he’s doing. Ellroy always insisted he was more of a moralist than an ideologue, and I think he tells the truth there. He’s a ruminator, too, the way moralists, voyeurs, obsessives, and historians tend to be- he likes to return to scenes of crimes, primal scenes, the archive. He is telling moral stories here, but not of the kind we’re used to, not the just-so stories of “overcoming adversity” or their little opposite number in our head crushingly obvious pas-de-deux, the tale of shrugging or smiling acceptance of irreducible complexity. I’d say these are somewhat closer to the moralism of the Coen brothers- there’s a moral order, we’re going to explore it, but you’re not going to like it or find easy answers there. We’re closer to a meta-morality- an exploration of the ways to fail and those to achieve grace in a world with many visible signs but no real instruction manual.
You wouldn’t look to Freddy Otash for moral instruction, anyway. The main character of Ellroy’s last two novels and a side character in several prior works, Otash was a real guy, an LA cop turned “private eye to the stars.” He also played around in blackmail, selling dirt to tabloids, and various other business opportunities that availed themselves to him in his position. He gets into the Monroe situation, following her around and figuring out her deal, due to a convoluted set of plots involving Jimmy Hoffa, the Kennedys, competitors for the succession to Chief Parker’s throne at LAPD and Hoover’s at the FBI, and all kinds of other skells. Otash an ideal Ellroy protagonist, and not only because he basically lived his actual existing life as an Ellroy protagonist, during Ellroy’s formative years. In one of his critical essays, Ellroy said that Raymond Chandler wrote Marlowe as the man he wanted to be, whereas Dashiell Hammett wrote the Continental Op as the man he feared he was. Ellroy has done both with his protagonists over the years, and Otash is somewhere in the middle. He’s tough, capable, free. He moves through the world of Ellroy’s dreams — midcentury Los Angeles — in a way Ellroy, a man with a profoundly disorganized life before he became a famous writer and a highly controlled life thereafter it seems, could only wish. But Otash is also a degenerate, a man engulfed in a world of sleaze, in the grip of compulsive behaviors (voyeurism, drugs, violence)- a man in need of salvation.
Ellroy may be a Christian but salvation doesn’t come through Jesus in his books- it comes through women. Not just any women! And, definitively, not through Marilyn Monroe. As depictions of objects of worship in monotheistic cultures tend to do, Ellroy’s redeeming women resemble each other. They are women of substance, women who’ve been through a lot- every now and again, an Ellroy man tarries with a mere flimsy girl, and of course often has a lot of meaningless sex with floozies in the rear view, but developing something between courtly love and pathological obsession with a woman who can match, often exceed, his strength, his constitution in the face of the horrors of life. They don’t come easily to him. They’re often, but not always, midwesterners who came to Los Angeles and got dealt a bad hand, in some respects like his mother. They’ve got pasts- crime, communism. It’s not in marrying them or bedding them or avenging them (I can’t recall Ellroy killing one off) that Ellroy men like Otash achieve something like grace, but in one way or another making themselves worthy of being in their orbit. You can’t be worthy of their love, anymore than one can truly deserve the love of the harsh Calvinist variant on the Abrahamic God, but it can come, via some grace.
Why wouldn’t Marilyn fit in, here? She had a rough go of it! I think that’s part of where The Enchanters gets some poignance from. Not every woman with a past gets to be an Ellroy holy woman. There’s no formula, no road to follow, belief to hold, perspective to have. It’s possible to get almost all the way there – there’s a highly unlikely celebrity version in The Enchanters I won’t spoil – and then not quite make it, like Moses before the holy land (though, whether it’s such a great deal, being an Ellroy holy woman, is an open question). Marilyn falls in with quack psychologists, radical politics phonies, and many dope peddlers. Perhaps the closest to a rationally discernable disqualifier for Ellroy sainthood is to fail to accept humanity’s essentially depraved nature, as evinced most prominently by violent crime. Monroe simps for criminals, seeks to return at times to the skid row elements of her childhood. But even this isn’t necessarily disqualifying, though that kind of thing would be in the past for a real Ellroy holy woman- one imagines Joan Rosen, the most interesting of these women because she was also plot-central and independently capable (instead of Ellroy just assuring us she –could– be capable), wasn’t exactly a law and order veteran, what with her distinguishing knife scar from fighting American Legion goons at Peekskill.
I’m pretty sure it’s two things. We get to look at Marilyn a lot through the eyes of Freddy Otash. Her last days (really, most of her days) are well documented, and Ellroy is also quite capable of using his imagination. Even at her lowest, at the most convinced of her own lack of personal agency, Ellroy’s Marilyn always imagines herself the main character. She is the subject of her story, the protagonist or at the very least the female lead, in the melodrama of her life. One thing Ellroy women do, even when they are highly active in this life, is to accept a higher actor- again, not the Christian God as such, but something between history and fate that might as well be God in the world Ellroy creates. Is it fair? Why wouldn’t Monroe, one of the most famous women in the world and one constantly involved in other people’s productions – films, relationships more about the other’s ego and self-construction than anyone else, endless fantasies of millions of people – consider herself a main character? Well, the answer is the same as the second thing that makes Marilyn existentially unfit for salvation, in Ellroy’s book: she’s not in the elect. The elect are the elect and that’s it. Is it fair? From this kind of perspective, that’s a meaningless question. Fair gets you on the bus.
I can’t prove it, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Ellroy had some idea of the poetics around Monroe and other dead beauty queens these days, efforts to reclaim some agency for them even in death, etc etc. And I can see him writing against that, even indirectly, but with intent. Of course, it could also be coincidence- he could be as walled off as he says. Monroe would make a good foil for his vision of fate, sin, salvation, and womanhood in any event, even if the broader culture he disdains also took up her story for distinctly opposed purposes. What’s more, I could see why these strange, long tales, with their repetitions, build ups and come downs with odd pacing, and unusual (to those not accustomed to them, like me) writing tics really wouldn’t work for everyone. How many people have an investment in Ellroy’s version of sin and redemption? I’m not sure I do! But I enjoy Ellroy’s worlds and writing well enough to stick with it.
Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice (2009)
I think at one point when I was reading The Enchanters, I also had Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice in the rotation, and so was doing two tales of Los Angeles sixties (one early, one late) skullduggery and hallucination. If this were a Shaw Brothers movie, I would have inherited the grudge held by my literary sifu, John Dolan, against ol’ Indoor Tom. I actually grant most of Dolan’s depiction- Pynchon as a high brow ripoff artist, grabbing with both hands from both honest genre writers and from the sort of European modernists whose American market breakthroughs were impeded by sketchy pasts — Céline, Wyndham Lewis — and gussying them up with bad jokes and obscurity. “Highlights Magazine for grad students” is one phrase the good doctor has used in a number of places- spot the motifs! catch the references! find the themes! - and it’s a good one, not just for Pynchon but for a lot of these guys.
Well- a key difference between my sensei and me is that I did not try to make a living in or around literature in the late twentieth century. If I did, I bet that stuff would bother me maybe almost as much as it bothers Dolan. Being around people who treat high theory and literary gamesmanship of the Pynchon variety as courageous truth telling and the last frontier of human knowledge… well, theory, specifically theory that makes much of its own abstruseness and lack of utility, has made something of a comeback with “the youth,” and that’s uncomfortable enough. Having to try to make connections with these people, get jobs and publishing deals from them? Hard pass! I’d rather steal, or worse, do honest work.
But to me, “The Big Lebowski but make it… LIT-RAH-churrrr” is kind of a fun concept, like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (“take Victorian pulp characters and make them The Avengers (and watch them fail and hate each other)). Or, for that matter, that one guy who rewrote The Big Lebowski in the mode of Shakespeare- a fun novelty. It helps that I have no real memory of The Big Lebowski as a flop, which it was when it first came out. I have no memory of the Coen Brothers being considered in any meaningful sense “less than” the likes of Pynchon! I know it happened. But it doesn’t have a ton of emotional reality to me.
There is, indeed, “more to” Inherent Vice than a Coen Brothers homage/appropriation. Pynchon has Doc Sportello, his hippie detective, play for stakes most of us would recognize as higher than that The Dude played for — lost love versus lost carpet — and with heavier players: drug cartels, crooked cops, real estate moguls. He knowingly and winkingly takes from Ray Chandler, “Chinatown,” and who knows how much else LA crime lore to construct his particular shaggy dog story. But Chandler and Jake Gittes didn’t do shaggy dog. The Coens do, and they did plenty else in The Big Lebowski that shows up in Inherent Vice: glum pondering of the end of the sixties dream, hippie detectives, hazes of weed smoke over everything, and it doesn’t help that Joaquin Phoenix has more than a little of The Dude in his lead performance in the film adaptation of this novel.
So is there more to Inherent Vice, or less? Along with some extra obscurity both in prose and plot (though this is more comprehensible than Gravity’s Rainbow by a mile- less ambitious too), Pynchon also makes romantic love much more central to the plot than what you see in The Big Lebowski. Docs’s lost love, symbolic in many respects of the best hippie years, is in trouble, etc etc. Is that an improvement over a rug? No, in my opinion. The rug is funnier, the rug is less cliche, the rug doesn’t try to tug on heartstrings while simultaneously pulling numerous emotional distancing tricks out of the sack, as these heavy literary dudes inevitably do when they’re working with love. In general, most of the ways that the rug beats whatsherface as a quest object parallel the ways in which The Big Lebowski beats Inherent Vice… and let’s not forget — let’s not forget, Dude/reader — the rug? There first. Inherent Vice came out over a decade after The Big Lebowski. Originality means something, in this little pied a internet, anyway.
But- I still basically enjoyed Inherent Vice for what it was. I always liked Highlights! And there was a little more in the tank, emotionally speaking, than that here, too. It got across a pretty clear sense of historical transition and loss, and there were a few chuckles here and there. I’m easy. I can afford to be! Still and all… I might be up for another Lebowski watch soon. It’s been a little while.
Here’s a picture of Mithra, and a much blurrier picture - I generally only see it when she’s moving - of her little belly pouch, where she keeps her sins.