The king of neo-noir L.A. crime fiction built a career on psychosexual drama and unfulfilled desire. So did the siren of the silver screen.
In the spring of 1995, dozens of snakes appeared on the beaches of Southern California. Panic. A Biblical curse, some held, to punish the wicked. “California has been given so many signs: floods, drought, fires, earthquakes lifting mountains two feet high in Northridge,” the California congresswoman Andrea Seastrand declared. “Yet people turn from His ways.” The Los Angelesmade soothing noises, counselling against the curse theory.
To pick up a James Ellroy novel in the year 2023 is to know the score. We—“the peepers, prowlers, pederasts, panty-sniffers, punks and pimps,” as he refers to his readership—do not arrive expecting much in the way of lavish scene-setting, characters who confound us with complexity, or commas. We are here for the short, stabby sentences and percussive rhythms. Stories are sheared down to bare-bones plot, almost stage directions, almost, at times, demented square-dance calls: “Pete rotates.
What does it mean to embrace such men? For Ellroy, this is literary vision—to see the world for what it is, to love it as it is without flinching, and to see yourself in the same way. In effect, it means that he can never fully abandon his psychosexual plots; they burn at the core of everything he writes. You even find it in the section headings of “The Enchanters”: “Sex Creep,” “Bait Girls,” “Wife Swap.
This is not necessarily a flaw; it’s rare to encounter a portrayal of Monroe unconcerned with diagnosing, rescuing, or rehabilitating her. And there’s no question that Monroe could have provided all the details and darkly funny lines needed to carry an Ellroy novel. But Ellroy seems determined to curtail her presence. He can only write about her, it appears, because she is so often in disguise.
Freddy was last seen in “Widespread Panic” , dangling in Purgatory, confessing to his crimes and hoping for a more permanent placement. The Freddy we meet in “The Enchanters” is tragic, cowed, and inexplicably more taciturn, even as he goes to work with brutal efficiency on some quarry of the hour. “The drop ran eighty feet,” Freddy observes in the novel’s opening sequence. “I held his right arm. Max Herman held his left arm. Red Stromwall jammed his head down and force-fed him the view.
It’s perplexing to see Ellroy let his story go so slack, to see the tension flatlining, resistant even to the defibrillations of jokey, jittery tabloid-speak. Monroe, who could have been the book’s making, is instead its undoing—which is, consoling thought, an odd sort of triumph on her part. But, for all the novel’s exasperations, its author’s talent for mayhem still has its charms. Under the L.A. heat dome, he sends snakes among the sunbathers and challenges us to tell them apart.
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