The big nowhere

I was thinking, in the middle of the book, Ellroy never describes anything. He doesn't just stop and say this is like this, that is like that. He inhabits his world, he fills it. He writes as though you know his world, as though you are walking the streets of 1950 LA and don't need to be told what it looks like. Ellroy's skill is such that you never gainsay that idea. You never feel you cannot go where he takes you.

He is often described as a cynical writer and yet his central characters are Romantics to a man (I can say this because Dudley Smith, though a huge character in the book, never is the POV character). Danny Upshaw fights his flaw, his hamartia, which as it must, brings him down. Mal Considine aims for the noblest end -- love. And Buzz Meeks. A character to die for. Unsentimental but romantic, noble but low, willing to swim with sharks but a man with his own sense of right and wrong. Anyone who's read LA Confidential or seen the film will almost weep at the dramatic irony of knowing his end.

But they all do meet sad ends (bar Smith, of course). Ellroy doesn't do happy endings. He does something much more real and vital. It is rich and satisfying; it is what you need but it is not what you want.

I mentioned a couple of months ago the notion of the writer who threw you twists that, while plausible, are not foreseeable. A writer who allows you to be able to know, but you cannot know. I was challenged to name a work in which this was the case. Well, The big nowhere is one.

This is not its only virtue. He never slips in tone -- it's pure 50s street, always believable (if you get in a tizz at the "N-word", don't get this one from the library). The pace is unrelenting, yet never forced. The plot works itself out without contrivance -- it is kinked but it doesn't rely on fatuous coincidence, and it doesn't sell itself out.

On top of that, this is the work of a stylist supreme. It's an absolute joy to read. Ellroy doesn't know how to write bad sentences (I daresay I'll get quoted a couple now, but there were none that nagged at me in reading). This is not quite the stylistic experiment that The cold six thousand (one of the greatest works in American fiction -- I will bat for it in any arena, it is a brilliant success) turned out to be. But it is taut. It's somewhere between the hardboiled policier style of The black dahlia and the protoSixthousand of American tabloid. There's no relief but you do not ask for it, breathless, you keep wanting more.

If I aspired to write thrillers (I don't), I would be looking at this as an example of what the genre can achieve and as a daunting summit to climb. There is no one in the genre that I know of who gets close to Ellroy's ability. He transcends it. He leaps out of it. As it happens, I do aspire to write fiction and I look at The big nowhere and I think this is what I must strive to match, but how I don't know.

posted by Dr Zen @ 7:29 pm