James Ellroy’s ‘This Storm’ is dark, joyless slog
I remember liking, even enjoying, James Ellroy. His first “LA Quartet” of novels were throwbacks to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett’s 1940s Hollywood. Mr. Ellroy introduced us to all the corrupt cops, ambitious politicians, world-weary dames and debased crooks our minds could imagine.
They featured numerous and intersecting plot lines and a cast of characters so vast that he has only recently begun to include a multipage dramatis personae in the back of his books to catalog their associations and recurring appearances. It is said that after selling the screen rights to “L.A. Confidential,” Mr. Ellroy raised a champagne toast in his agent’s office, declaring, “I just sold the rights to an unfilmable novel!”
His next novel, arguably his best, was “American Tabloid,” which careened its way through clandestine CIA ops, Mafia thugs, disgruntled Cuban dissidents hung out to dry by the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, and a series of cascading events resulting in the John F. Kennedy assassination. It was a frolicking and frantic read that ended too soon. I remember thinking that his fictional take seemed more plausible than any explanation or conspiracy I had been told about that day in Dealey Plaza.
The two novels that completed his “Underworld USA Trilogy” following “Tabloid” received uneven reviews. Although Mr. Ellroy has always employed a pitter-patter prose and truncated narrative that keeps exposition to a bare minimum, he now took it to such extremes that his clipped phrases barely formed complete sentences. It was film noir on Quaaludes. Many reviewers found the writing barely comprehensible. Others thought it was masterpiece.
In 2014, Mr. Ellroy debuted a second “L.A. Quartet” of novels set in pre-World War II LA that form a prequel to his first quartet. “Perfidia” begins on the day before Pearl Harbor and ends three weeks later. At a time when Nazis in Germany were cracking skulls, rounding up undesirables and confiscating their wealth, the LAPD was doing the same, sweeping up Japanese-Americans for internment while also tormenting plenty of Mexicans, Jews and Chinese — anyone not a part of their white man’s world.
Now we come to book two, the recently released “This Storm.” It’s New Year’s Eve of 1941, the day after “Perfidia” ends. As usual with James Ellroy, there is a maze of interconnected events — a triple homicide involving dead cops, a decomposing corpse exposed after heavy rains induce a landslide, and a trove of Nazi and Soviet gold. For a book of such length, these plots fall into laps a bit too quickly and coincidentally. There’s a lot more skull cracking than actual police work here. Whereas the plot of “American Tabloid” rolls out like a precision drill team, “This Storm” spews out more like bumper cars.
Although I was a fan of his first quartet, I hadn’t read Mr. Ellroy since “American Tabloid.” But I was looking forward to a little prewar intrigue and the rousting of Nazis in old Hollywood. Sure, Mr. Ellroy dwells in the shadows, but I remember him doing so with Quentin Tarantino-like mischief that smirked at the corruption and violence with a wink and a nod, mocking their preposterous schemes. What I got in “This Storm” is a 600-page entanglement so dark and disturbing that it left me wondering, did he change or have I changed? Or has the world changed?
Gone is the fun. Gone are the winking nods and mocking observance. Now we are participants in the mayhem. Mr. Ellroy seems to revel in the debauchery, and in doing so, he seems more like a twisted caricature of his previous self. It feels as though we are now just playing at cops and robbers so we can relish doing horrible things and spewing the most vile and racist dialogue you can imagine — but it’s OK because it’s “historically accurate.”
It’s one thing for horrible characters to say horrible things. It’s begins to weigh on you when the racist epithets find their way into the third-person narrative. But it really goes over the top when minstrel show talk appears in descriptions of character history (“Oooga-booga. It’s like he back in de ole south. De hellhound’s on his trail.”) and the description of a nightclub becomes “a
garage.” The use of italics is Ellroy’s choice, as if giggling with us over his middle school cleverness.
It’s rough when you discover that an old friend has changed. Or you’ve changed. But in a world in which Nazis are relevant again and people deemed as “others” are languishing in cages on the border, reading a book like this feels less like Tarantino and more like “Faces of Death.” This former fan is in need of a shower and a literary palate cleanser.