Review: This Storm

This Storm by James Ellroy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

At this point, Ellroy is an acquired taste…one I have certainly acquired.

I can start to describe the plot here, but, truth be told, that’s secondary. Ellroy deals with plot like Coltrane dealt with melody. It matters – it underscores everything – but it often becomes secondary to his riffs and improvisations.

Above all, you read Ellroy for the music. I listened to this one and paper-read (“eye-cameraed” or “peeped” to steal from the master) the last, and the effect is the same. I’ll go long stretches without quite paying attention to what’s happening just to be caught up in the effect of his prose.

There’s no easy way to describe what he does and what its effect is, so I say just turn yourself over to it and read. Sometimes it’s the Tommy-Gun fusillade of short, declarative sentences. Sometimes it’s the deep play on words, three-quarters found and one-quarter invented from his idiosyncratic mixture of jazz-speak, Yiddish, and thieves cant. And sometimes it’s just a quick and clever gut punch. My favorite example of that here comes when Dudley Smith tells ‘journalist’ Sid Hutchens what to say in his publication: “He abridged his Fifth Amendment rights.”

In any case, that’s where the fun is. I think in any case that Ellroy is expecting most of us to get lost in what’s happening. One of his quirks in this one is to repeat (quickly) large stretches of what a character already knows. It’s like a quick catch-up opportunity, and you can be sure I took advantage of it.

There is a potentially thrilling plot here, and I spent some time trying to imagine what the late, gifted Curtis Hanson might have done if he’d taken a shot at filming a second Ellroy after L.A. Confidential. Heavy rains bring an abandoned coffin to the surface, and the body inside helps spark an investigation around a decade-old gold heist and major L.A. fire. Several murders later, we’re thigh-deep in World War II Fifth Column stuff, and Dudley – that beautiful bastard of a human being – is trying to triple-profit on extorting Japanese-Americans bound for internment, exploiting undocumented Mexican immigrants who’ll take their jobs, and smuggling heroin across the border in the trucks he’ll be using.

There are many others in a cast that’s flat-out bewildering – bewildering even for someone like me who’s got most of Ellroy’s related work under my belt already. Lee Blanchard, Buzz Meeks, Claire DeHaven, Hideo Ashida, Elmer Jackson, and a host of others swirl around. We get the action through third-person limited omniscience in almost every case (we do get nice interludes from Kay Lake’s diary for punctuation) with the result that there are a lot of stops-and-starts as well as recaps along the way.

I don’t think this is quite Ellroy at his best. The L.A. Quartet stuff is great (at least Big Nowhere and L.A. Confidential) because you can see him inventing the method. (If you’ve read some of his earlier work – like some of the Lloyd Hopkins, it’s all the clearer to see how he made himself into a real master from what was otherwise just pedestrian stuff.) The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy is probably his most sustained period of greatness because, with the method figured out, he sets out to show how the America we know is the product of some pretty debased people. It’s bleak and beautiful, and easy just to get lost in.

This second L.A. Quartet – which precedes the first chronologically – seems to know more of what it’s supposed to be doing without quite finding the ambition of the Underworld U.S.A. stuff. I very much enjoyed Perfidia, and I think this one is almost as good, but I’m less surprised by Ellroy with these. He isn’t breaking new ground as a stylist – though, he’s got the style mastered – and he’s revisiting characters whose fate we should already know. And there’s also the matter of his sometimes calling on his characters to act out of character for effect. Hideo is the best lab tech in the country; why would it serve anyone to have him facing shotguns?

Anyway, my only real disappointment with this one is that it’s over already. Listening to it was a deep pleasure. Maybe, since there are moments I just let slide by me, I’ll give this one another listen before long again.


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