So then….
I just finished a James Elroy novel, The Big Nowhere. Truth be told, I only read it because I was feeling lazy and reached for something I thought I’d be able to read without using up too much brain-space. And it was good for that. The novel is richly textured and consuming, and drives along with good thrust to it, packed with continual incident and motion - great for no brainer entertainment. However, something else also quickly became apparent to me too, and that is that James Ellroy is a major talent.
That Ellroy is talented is no surprise to many: he’s been nominated for major literary awards (unusual for a crime writer), sold many millions of books, been name-dropped by writers all over the world, and even politicians want to be associated with his brand – Aussie political icon Bob Carr thinks The Big Nowhere is ‘one of the finest novels ever written’ apparently . Big raps. But is he worth the hype?
Well, yes and no. Ellroy certainly is a formidable writer, and The Big Nowhere is fabulously entertaining. And while it may well be time to wack out the Tolstoy comparisons (something Ellroy himself has done, and as I’ll do shortly), Ellroy has little of the electric perceptiveness and truth-telling ability that marks the greatest novelists. However he does have the ability to effortlessly conjure rich and detailed imaginary worlds that marks the best genre novelists, and it is in the fine-grained contours of this world – an LA noir that I’ll call Ellroyland – that his finest contribution is to be found.
The Big Nowhere narrates a spectacular string of bloody and viscous rape/murders, the hook from which Ellroy hangs his rich evocation of the geo-social world of LA, 1950. Amongst Ellroy’s trademarks is his ability to weave fiction around fact, and much of the detail in the novel is based on actual events – for instance, the Sleepy Lagoon murder of 1942, and the resultant race-based prosecutions and ‘Zoot-suit’ riots actually happened, and so too the various investigations of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) into communist activity in Hollywood, and the subsequent smear campaigns that Ellroy references.
The novel's narrative has three main voices. There's a couple of cops (constable Danny Upshaw and Lieutenant Mal Considine) and a mob strongman (Buzz Meeks). Responsibility for investigating the crimes falls to Upshaw. As it turns out, all of the victims of the bizarre and horrific murders are gay. LA police being what they were in the '50s (ie homophobic), their interest in the case cools, and Upshaw is ordered off the case. However Upshaw, the only even remotely sympathetic character – a man bewildered and torn by his own repressed homosexuality (he commits suicide halfway through rather than be outed) – is fascinated by the crimes and decides to investigate in his free time and much of the first half of the novel follows his progress.
Meanwhile, a parallel arc of plot concerns the communist witch-hunt, and in particular, a grand jury investigation into communist infiltration of unions as seen through the eyes of Considine and Meeks. The grand jury is being pursued less for ideological reasons than in order to make Howard Hughes – a major studio owner - money, and thus promote the interests of the DA (who is in Hughes' pocket). In turn Considine is offered a promotion for his efforts in furthering Hughes' and the DA's interests, and help with a custody battle he's fighting with his wife over their son... the complexities spiral in on each other, and out again, and inevitably, the two arcs of narrative intersect. And through it all, The Big Nowhere is filled with a dazzling universe of out-sized characters - repressed homosexuals, incestuous fathers, child holocaust survivors, Mexican-hating police lieutenants, upper-class socialists, and drug-peddling plastic surgeons. Corruption seeping through everything. Nothing is pure, nothing simple, everyone is playing an angle, there's always hidden motives, and even this these hidden motives are usually themselves layered with further ambiguity. Ellroy offers no possibility of redemption. For him there are no heroes, and there is no possibility of wrongs being righted, or of a saviour coming to heal his wounded characters.
Nope.
Everyone’s fucked, boiling away in that LA gumbo.
Ellroy is a master of mood and texture – his LA is a living, breathing thing, and the city is easily his most textured and fascinating character. On the other hand, his human characters are all a little thinly cast, pursued by their demons to the exclusion of all else, violent and focused. All this is great for a murder mystery, because it allows for a great deal of narrative thrust, without unnecessary phenomenological breakouts. However, it does rather undermine claims by many of his readers that his books are great literature, as great literature requires more than narrative drive - it needs to have something to teach.
Ellroy's choice to tell the narrative from multiple points of view allows him a quite wide view over LA, and it allows him, too, to push home his dark view of the metropolis – for there is not an ounce of goodness in Ellroyland. Everyone is possessed by a cynicism, a meanness – there are no angels, or even good, honest people. Everyone (with the exception of Considine’s young child) is on the take, playing an angle, cheating on someone else, or else just plain violent.
But it is this multiple-point-of-view device which perhaps ensures that Ellroy is never able to fully plumb the depths of any single character, to give us a feel for what it is like to be them, or to give us a sense of why they are like they are – we are always too busy switching voices, or else jumping in the police-car to get across town. Not that it isn’t possible to tell a story from multiple points of view – writers who use the device to spine-shivering effect drop easily from the tongue: Tolstoy, Woolf, Faulkner. Of these writers Tolstoy’s work that is most similar to Ellroy’s. To use War and Peace as our text, we can see that both Tolstoy and Ellroy use density of description as a major tool in building vivid, imagination-grabbing portraits of particular times and places – Russia during the time of Napoleon in Tolstoy’s case, and LA in 1950 in Ellroy’s. However, it is the differences between the two writers that are most illustrative. Tolstoy’s primary achievement, and the reason his book is so touching, is his delicate representation of characters changing over time, and the manner in which he is able to show how they are moulded by circumstance. He manages, in heart-breaking detail, to show how his characters make peace with fate, and to sketch their journeys through life and the way shifting priorities shape their own perceptions of happiness. It’s this that makes the book important – this, and the wonderful grasp Tolstoy has of what it feels like to be human, to be happy, or sad.
Ellroy has none of this, which is not to say he’s a bad writer, just that he’s no Tolstoy. His vision is, of course, very different – and it’s as narrow as it is vivid. All his primary characters are fucked-up, violent, and corrupt men. Indded, it wouldn’t be accurate to call them ‘corrupted’, really, because that would allow for the possibility of some other state. There is nothing else in Elloryland, he makes no allowance for no purity, virtue, or honour. Whilst Tolstoy’s is a universe filled with movement and change, of characters forming and morphing, a realm essentially of becoming, Ellroy’s universe is static and cruel. Ellroyland is a place where darkness reigns, evil triumphs, and violence trumps all.
It is mood that matters in The Big Nowhere - mood and worldview. If Tolstoy is Leonardo, all subtle lines and sublime uplift, then perhaps Ellroy is Breugel, a painter whose control of detail was somewhat more cacophonous and grim, if no less profound. At best, Ellroy’s characters are functional. They are actors – in the sense of being active - and are given psychologies rent and tortured, and dominated by sex just as much as by power. Upshaw, for instance, closets his homosexuality even from himself. There is a hint of nihilism to him and his interest in policing isn’t careerist; rather, he seems to sublimate his sexuality into the case he’s investigating – the rape and murder of gay LA men. Considine is haunted by his memories of Buchenwald; one of his key motivations besides ambition is the desire to protect his stepson Stefan, who is a survivor of that camp. Considine is also torn by his sexuality, which is used against him by his wife, and by accusations from fellow policemen that he is a coward. Buzz Meeks is perhaps the simplest character – an old-school hard man, capable of viciousness, but also tenderness – as is evidenced by his affair with Audrey Anders. Ellroy's sure ain’t white picket fence America: there are no stable heterosexual relationships in this book. The one character that is richly developed is, of course, as I mentioned earlier, ‘50s LA. Ellroy’s characteristically amoral and grim view is of a baking multi-racial city, filled with dives and jazz clubs, communist witch-hunts, movie lots, film stars, Jewish gangsters and corrupt DAs. His city has a real topography to it – he apparently sketches his novels out in immense detail before he writes them – and it shows.
I’ll end this essay by comparing Ellroy to that shadow that looms over all writers of noir, Raymond Chandler; for no one has yet managed to evoke the topography of the sun-drenched ‘50s metropolis quite as hauntingly as Chandler does, with his highways, his dusty offices, and his houses on the hill, and the classic noir hero remains Phillip Marlowe. And it is the role of Marlowe in Chandler’s novels that really marks the difference between the two writers.
Marlowe is central to all of Chandler’s eight novels – Chandlerland has a hero, and Marlowe is it. LA is merely his backdrop - a distinctive haze of alcohol, rich temptresses, violence and corruption, filtered through his distinctive weary, cynical, yet essentially moral vision; Marlowe is the moral weight that balances the excesses of the spoilt heiresses and corrupt cops. On the other hand, Ellroyland possesses no centre, and certainly possesses no heroes. Rather it is a great stinking cesspool of corruption. No one is clean, and no one acts for pure motives – there are no heroes, merely actors. The Big Nowhere's characters are violently amoral, with the possible exception of Upshaw. In this world, girlfriends steal from their boyfriends, fathers fuck their sons, mothers extort their children, cops killing everything in sight, and anti-Communist hysteria is whipped up just to make studio moguls richer. Ellroy’s is a grim vision, even for noir, where moral ambiguity is a given. This is a fundamentally different vision to that of Chandler.
Generally, novelists wish for a little uplift, a little beauty - this is what Marlowe’s moral vision gives Chandler, for instance. Romantic love often plays this role; within the detective novel, a particularly laboured example of this kid of device is to be found in James Lee Burke’s lurid and sometimes disturbing descriptions of Dave Robicheaux, his great character, finding comfort in the arms of a series of motherly women. Even within the unremitting darkness of Elloryland, it might be expected that there might be some purity to be found in love, be it heterosexual, homosexual, fraternal, maternal, or paternal. There is very little of it – a paper-thin sketch of affection between Considine and his stepson, and the relationship between Anders and Meeks – whose budding relationship rings a little hollow and isn’t really developed. While Ellroy is interested in sex's effect on the minds of men, there's no real evidence in this novel that women even possess minds - there are no interesting female characters, with the exception of an unsettling fundamentalist who appears towards the end of the story.
But these are piddling points: The Big Nowhere’s is a big, sprawling, rich and detailed vision. While the novel may fall a little short of War and Peace, that is not because of a failure of ambition. What Ellroy lacks is the psychological insight that separates Tolstoy from his imitators. But when if the competition was more along the lines of biting off more than you can chew, but still chewing away as fiercely as you can, then James Ellroy would be right in there with a shot at the title. His LA is a great place to visit - just make sure that you take a bulletproof jacket with you, a handgun, and some valium, and you should be fine.
