The pointillist view of US lowlife
The Age
Saturday November 28, 2009
James Ellroy's latest effort inflates familiar sleaze in exhausting style, writes Scott Murray. Blood's a Rover By James Ellroy Century, $32.95 BLOOD'S a Rover is the third instalment of James Ellroy's Underworld USA trilogy. Following on from American Tabloid (which covers key American events of 1958-63) and The Cold Six Thousand (1963-68), Blood's a Rover is primarily concerned with the period 1968 to 1972. It is a mix of fact and fiction, filled with the famous and the less well known.Richard Nixon is trying again to be US president and is willing to do deals with anyone able to contribute to his rapacious election fund; Howard Hughes is trying to buy up Las Vegas from the Mob, who want to move offshore but leave moles in his gambling empire so that they can still skim off the profits; and a sexually challenged J. Edgar Hoover is overseeing an elaborate plan to infiltrate black rights organisations with the aim of discrediting them.This is a superb historical canvas on which to base a riveting epic, but while Blood's a Rover is certainly epic it is also almost totally devoid of drama.This is presumably intentional because Ellroy writes all his action scenes in a staccato and matter-of-fact way: "The masked men shot them in the back. They buckled and pitched foreword. The masked men shot them in the head point-blank. The thuds and skull crack muffle-echoed."Ellroy has long proffered an upturned finger to conventional storytelling, which relies on such traditions as a want-to-know factor, narrative drive and an interest in the fate of key players. He equally delights in upending the rules of grammar (and spelling). The "They" at the start of the second sentence is confusing, while the last sentence is a mess, whichever way you read it. And shouldn't it be "forward" not "foreword"?All great writing is about the interior music: F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away" is a legendary example. Do anything to the sentence (such as removing the first "and") and the music dies.In contrast, Ellroy's prose never finds its own melody; it clunks and stalls rather than flows.In an appalling synchronicity, he also shares with Dan Brown a passion for italics. Inelegantly highlighted phrases dot the narrative like dirty confetti.There is worse: "Masked Man #1 was tall and thin. Masked Man #2 was midsized. Masked Man #3 was heavyset. It's 7:20am."Is this a novel or a film script with those tedious character tags? At least the change from the past to present tense has a pleasant zing.Ellroy uses his pointillist approach to prose style on a grand scale: not only is each sentence a moment and monument unto itself, so is each sequence or chapter. Rarely does the ordering of events generate any forward momentum or interest. The scenes simply don't comment on each other in meaningful ways. It is just Tricky Dick being tricky, a gangster getting brutally pumped for information, an extended pun on the term "blow job" and so on, in an endless roll call of often unrelated events.Also problematic is the massive cast. It feels like a Russian novel with all those patronymics swimming in front of your eyes. It will take many readers a good 100 pages before they feel more or less secure about who's who.The big-name players, such as Nixon and Hughes, are fascinating, but there are too few scenes of them. The lives of the dreary foot soldiers keep getting in the way.There is no doubt Ellroy gains great pleasure from his uncovering and flinging of dirt. At times, the novel feels like a suppressed chapter of Hollywood Babylon, but one soon begins to distrust Ellroy's glee in wallowing in the filth. It is the childishly naughty tone.Ellroy's views on the significance of his accomplishment are revealed in a pre-release blurb: "In all its mellifluous and macho-maimed magnificence: my new novel, Blood's a Rover. [The publishers] will drop this atom bomb of a book on you . . . Your job is to groove it and grok its groin-grabbing gravity."No ego-deficiency issues there, though it is nice to see the word grok back in use; it's been a long time since hippies drunk on Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land proclaimed it the most meaningful word in the English language.Despite the claims of its author, Blood's a Rover has nothing of real importance to add to the Nixon or Hughes stories. It is just a fuller version of a sleazy story told many times before.The book is also long €” very long. An exhausting 646 pages.When released in the US, Ellroy's book spiritedly divided critics and fans, like most of his recent work. Many reviews were scathing, but a few proclaimed it his greatest testament, the defining masterpiece.Perhaps Ellroy is like jazz: you simply grok it or you don't.
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