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L.A. Times - Books & Talks

'The Second Plane' by Martin Amis
Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700
September 11: Terror and Boredom IT would be too easy to read Martin Amis' slim book on Sept. 11 in a day and to dismiss it with a politically correct glare. The dozen essays, columns and reviews and two short stories in "The Second Plane: September 11, Terror and Boredom" are more illuminating than that, though deeply, sometimes self-indulgently flawed.
'The House of Widows' by Askold Melnyczuk
Mon, 07 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700
Family secrets lie at the end of a dark and twisted path FROM its puzzling opening line ("The most common grammatical error is the lie"), there's an ominous vibe to Askold Melnyczuk's third novel, "The House of Widows," and the sense of unease lingers until the final sentence. It's a mysterious, masterfully taut story in which dread plays a prominent role.
'Marco Polo' by Laurence Bergreen
Wed, 24 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0700
An account of the adventures of the celebrated 13th century world traveler. MARCO POLO was only 17 when he departed for China in 1271 with his father, Niccolò, and his uncle, Maffeo. Those two merchants of Venice were known to the boy primarily as storytellers of their fabulous exploits, writes award-winning biographer and historian Laurence Bergreen, for they had been absent more than 16 years, Marco's entire childhood. The pair had followed trade routes east, encountered exotic countries and customs and survived many perils; they had even lived for a time at the court of Kublai Khan, the leader of the Mongol Empire. Eventually they agreed to accompany his emissary west to the pope, vowing to return to Cambulac (Beijing) with several items the Great Khan had requested.

NYT > Books

Stephen King’s Glass Menagerie
By JAMES PARKER Fri, 06 Nov 2009 02:21:35 -0000
When an enormous transparent dome settles over a small town in Maine in Stephen King’s new novel, it’s just fine with Big Jim, the local tyrant-in-waiting, and his pet goon squad.
The Critic’s Critic
By HAROLD BLOOM Fri, 06 Nov 2009 02:03:13 -0000
A valuable new biography of Samuel Johnson, the most eminent of all literary critics.
Barbara Kingsolver’s Artists and Idols
By LIESL SCHILLINGER Fri, 06 Nov 2009 02:09:25 -0000
This novel, about a boy’s consequential bonds with Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Leon Trotsky, is a call to conscience and connection.

Fiction & Poetry

Stephen King: "Premium Harmony"
Stephen King Mon, 02 Nov 2009 05:00:00 -0000
They’ve been married for ten years and for a long time everything was O.K.—swell—but now they argue. Now they argue quite a lot. It’s really all the same argument. It has circularity. It is, Ray thinks, like a dog track. When they . . .
Katie Ford: "November Philosophers"
Katie Ford Mon, 02 Nov 2009 05:00:00 -0000
Nothing is nothing, although he would call me that, She was nothing. Those were his words, but his hand was lifting cigarettes in chains and bridges of ash-light. He said he didn’t want his body to last. It wasn’t a year I could argue against . . .
Glyn Maxwell: "Southeast of Eden"
Glyn Maxwell Mon, 02 Nov 2009 05:00:00 -0000
Together they took the least space they could. Entered each other deeply, to be less, to throw one shadow only, to be still for all the world while moving for each other. —So space, so barely dented, might not bruise and cry, and time come running. To this end . . .

Books news, reviews and author interviews | guardian.co.uk

'I cannot go on'
Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:05:03 -0000
The second volume of TS Eliot's fiercely guarded correspondence reveals the terrible strain he was under caring for his wife and editing the Criterion. By Stefan Collini'I have written nothing whatsoever for three years and I do not see any immediate likelihood of my writing. The writing of poetry takes time and I never have any time." That, alas, is an all-too-accurate summary of TS Eliot's life during the three years covered by the second volume of his correspondence. Its 800 pages document in dispiriting detail the life of a writer who was not doing any writing. There was just too much else to do, and much too much else to worry about.There was, to begin with, his wife, Vivienne. As a lonely, shy American graduate student in philosophy at Oxford, Eliot had married Vivienne Haigh-Wood in June 1915, not many weeks after meeting her. By 1923, the disastrousness of the marriage for both parties was becoming all too apparent. Vivienne was plagued by almost constant ill health, often severe; it may now be impossible to say how much of this was psychosomatic, and it may not really matter. The signs of mental instability were by this point hard to explain away. Eliot, with a highly developed sense of his responsibility to provide for his wife, repeatedly made himself ill worrying about her, looking after her, and needing to get away from her.Then he had to worry about international exchange rates, the bond issues of foreign governments and the payment of war debts. Eliot, it may be timely to remember, was a banker. Since March 1917 he had worked in the colonial and foreign department of Lloyd's Bank in the City, rising to a position of some responsibility, overseeing the analysis of information about the financial activities of European governments. By 1923 the strain of his divided life was becoming unendurable, and various possibilities were canvassed that would buy him out of the black-coated army, but the regular salary from the bank, and even the distant pension prospects, mattered more and more as Vivienne's future became increasingly uncertain.And then he had to worry about the Criterion, the intellectually ambitious literary and cultural quarterly review that he edited, more or less single-handedly, in his "spare time". The review had been launched in October 1922, financed by Lady Rothermere, wife of Harold Harmsworth, first Viscount Rothermere. (Harold had helped his brother Alfred, Lord Northcliffe, establish the press empire whose flagship was the Daily Mail.) Eliot aspired to make the Criterion the most prestigious literary review of the day, promoting his favoured blend of modernist literature and reactionary politics, but he soon discovered the scale of the labour this required. After a while, a typist was taken on to handle some of his correspondence, and there was a brief period during which the poet and translator Richard Aldington acted as his assistant but, as the successive deadlines rolled remorselessly around, it was Eliot who seemed to be responsible for everything from commissioning contributions to correcting proofs and arranging payments.It was all too much. "I am worn out. I cannot go on," he lamented a little histrionically as early as March 1923, but he still had a long way to go on. February 1925 found him "at the blackest moment of my life", but in reality there were blacker moments still to come. "So life is simply from minute to minute of horror," he wrote to Virginia Woolf the following month, perhaps hearing a draft line of poetry forming itself somewhere in his mind. But, as far as we can tell from these letters, during these years not many lines of poetry were forming in the mind of the figure who was arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century.It is Eliot's poetry, of course, that represents his principal claim on the modern reader's attention, for all his influence as a critic, playwright, editor and cultural commentator. Only last month, he was voted Britain's favourite poet – perhaps a surprising choice when one considers the notorious difficulty of his verse, but maybe less so when one remembers that his light-hearted Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats provided the inspiration for the hit musical Cats. His standing as a poet does not, of itself, account for the frisson of anticipation that has for some time been building up in advance of the appearance of this second volume of his letters. The mild sense of drama attending the publication (writers and publishers lead sheltered lives, for the most part) has been heightened by Faber's unusually elaborate security measures, with reviewers having to sign legal agreements binding them not to reveal any of the contents of the volume to "any third party" before the day of publication.A brief historical recap may help to explain some of the fuss. In 1957, when Eliot was 68, he married his secretary, Valerie Fletcher, who was 38 years younger (Vivienne had died 10 years earlier). Following Eliot's death in 1965, Mrs Eliot and the publishing firm of Faber & Faber (of which he had been an active director for almost 40 years) controlled his estate, carefully regulating both the reprinting of published work and citation from unpublished material, including letters. In 1971 Mrs Eliot published her facsimile edition of The Waste Land, complete with Ezra Pound's annotations. She had also undertaken the huge task of collecting and editing his letters, the first volume of which (covering the years up to the end of 1922) finally appeared in 1988. In the introduction to that volume, she explained that she had intended it to go up to 1926, but that there had proved to be too much material for a single volume. Therefore, she announced, the second volume would be published "next year". The literary and the scholarly world waited, but "next year" never seemed to come.This delay was particularly unfortunate because, in the four decades following Eliot's death, many scholars had difficulty in getting permission from the estate to consult or quote from unpublished material. When Peter Ackroyd published what is still the only serious approach to an adequate intellectual biography of Eliot in 1984, he had to record: "I am forbidden by the Eliot estate . . . to quote from unpublished work or correspondence." (He had to paraphrase his sources.) Some individual scholars were more fortunate – I was given permission some years ago, I should record, to quote from a few letters in an essay about Eliot's social criticism – but a policy that could seem to be somewhat capricious was obviously an unsatisfactory situation, especially when it was known that the estate held or had amassed a considerable collection of material, not all of which had yet been seen by scholars. Just recently there have been encouraging signs of a thaw. Plans have been announced for a multi-volume edition of Eliot's prose, under the general editorship of Ron Schuchard, to be partnered by a complete edition of his poetry, edited by Christopher Ricks. And now, at long last, 21 years after its predecessor, we have the second volume of the letters, co-edited by Hugh Haughton, with the project henceforth under the general editorship of John Haffenden.Given this history, the stock phrases about a book having been "eagerly awaited" or its publication being "a major literary event" are in this case understatements. For, in addition to the considerable interest in Eliot's poetry and criticism, other aspects of his life and his views have attracted broader media attention and even controversy in recent years. It has, for example, been widely known that Eliot suffered acute anguish over his decision, first, to separate from Vivienne and, second, to have her committed to a "sanatorium". His responsibility for his wife's physical and mental problems has sometimes been assessed in hostile terms, a line of popular speculation fuelled by Michael Hastings's 1984 play Tom and Viv, which was subsequently turned into a film. In addition, Eliot came in for some rough handling in the wake of Anthony Julius's 1995 book, TS Eliot: Anti-Semitism and Literary Form, which mounted, with great forensic vigour, the case that Eliot's oeuvre as a whole was irremediably tainted on account of a handful of allegedly antisemitic references. These controversies cannot have been welcome to the Eliot estate, and may have fuelled its apprehension about the possible public response to any further revelations.Anticipation has been increased by the fact that the first volume of the letters was full of matter for those with a serious interest in Eliot's work and career. It covered the years in which Eliot, arriving in England in 1914 as an unknown 26-year old graduate student, emerged as the most startling poet of his time, from the publication of Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917 up to The Waste Land in 1922. This was also the period in which he established himself as the critic most admired by the intellectually serious young, notably through the publication in 1920 of The Sacred Wood, a slim volume of critical essays that managed to be at once offhand, exciting and authoritative. The letters, therefore, had allowed us to glimpse the inside story of nothing less than the making of modernism. What could the second volume offer that would be of comparable interest?"Not a lot" is the short and only partly misleading answer. After all this fanfare, these letters will, I fear, be a disappointment to many readers. Though they document the tribulations of his and Vivienne's illnesses and unhappiness in heart-bludgeoning detail, they contain no great revelations, nor are most of them captivating pieces of writing in the way in which, say, the recently published selection of early Beckett letters is. Eliot scholars, not a small tribe, will doubtless mine them for illustrative or corroborative detail, but in truth they throw little light on the poetry, not least because he was not writing any (except for sections of "The Hollow Men" and the verse-drama Sweeney Agonistes, written towards the end of this period). Nor did he write any of his major critical essays during these years, and the letters say very little about his own critical, as opposed to editorial, practice. However, if what you want is a practical handbook on how to edit, single-handedly, a high-end cultural and literary periodical, this is an essential guide. Overwhelmingly, the letters from this period were written by Eliot in his capacity as editor of the Criterion and, if this is something that interests you (I must warn you that it interests me a lot), then this volume is rich in fascinating detail.Much of Eliot's editorial correspondence deals with what, to anyone who has any experience of literary journalism, will be bound to appear as the familiar constants, almost the universals, of the trade. Here, over and over again, is the desperate last-minute scramble to meet (or sometimes not quite to meet) the deadline for the current issue, followed by repeated resolutions to have the material ready in good time for the next issue. Here, in dispiriting quantity, are examples of the various ways of sucking up to eminent potential contributors, of well-meant evasiveness with lesser supplicants, and of tactful dealings with imposssibly difficult authors (Wyndham Lewis wins the prize). Here, too, are the familiar grumblings about the inefficiency of printers, the usual unrealistic fantasies about circulation and the vehemently expressed regrets at ever having taken on such a doomed and life-destroying enterprise in the first place.Apologising to one contributor for the fact that, a year after being accepted, his article had still not been published, Eliot tried to enlist his sympathies: "I can only say that there are others – in fact nearly all of my contributors at one time or another – whom I do not dare to meet in the street. Conducting a review after 8pm in the back room of a flat, I live qua editor, very much from hand to mouth, get myself into all sorts of hot water and predicaments, and offend everybody. At the end, the review is squeezed together somehow, and is never the number that I planned three months before." In this case, he promised the article would be published "early next year"; in the event, it never appeared.Hand-to-mouth it may have been in practical terms, but Eliot had a pretty clear idea of the kind of review he wanted to produce. It appealed, he insisted without any defensiveness, only to "the cultivated": he reckoned that there were only about 3,000 such persons, though the basis for this high-handed piece of intuitive sociology is not clear. It was to be essentially a literary review, but "Its scope is wide enough to include almost everything of interest to people of culture with the exception of economics and contemporary politics." Lady Rothermere, who had hoped for something with rather more appeal to the beau monde, is reported as finding the journal "a little high-brow and grave" (well, if you appoint TS Eliot as editor . . .). Though it is true that the Criterion did not deal with day-to-day party politics, it nonetheless had a very marked political character. It was explicitly intended to provide a counter to "the usual Whig and semi-Socialist press of London". It was hostile to all forms of liberalism, Whiggism, romanticism and subjectivism; in its severe, aloof way, it upheld what Eliot came to call "classicism". It is from this standpoint that we find him here dismissing Arnold Toynbee as "a noxious humanitarian" and sneering at John Middleton Murry as "this apostle of suburban free thought".In trying to establish the reputation of the new journal, Eliot had to perform the usual delicate balancing act: he wanted to publish high-quality original work of the kind he admired, but he also needed contributions from established names, which sometimes meant accepting work that was neither high-quality nor original. The correspondence of any editor might catch him out saying different things to different people, but there are some arrestingly immediate juxtapositions in these letters. When, as the editor of a new journal, he is sedulously courting the 77-year-old George Saintsbury, Eliot hastens to tell him that he is "the most eminent English critic of our time"; two years later, the journal now established, he frankly confides to another correspondent: "Saintsbury, for all his merits, now has little point." Similarly, Eliot is to be found writing to several authors in flattering terms explaining that he may be able to double the normal rates of payment to a truly exceptional contributor, "one of whom is, of course, yourself". Having already confided this, in turn, to Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound and Virginia Woolf, he then writes to WB Yeats's agent, saying: "For such an important contribution from so distinguished a writer I would make an exception" to his usual rates and pay double. "This is the only occasion on which I have ever offered more than the standard rate; but I have very great admiration for Mr Yates' work . . ." and so on, a profession whose sincerity, already doubtful, was made more doubtful still by his misspelling of Yeats's name.The question of two-facedness surfaces most awkwardly in his tricky friendship with Leonard and Virginia Woolf. While jockeying to establish himself in literary London, he had been grateful for the Woolfs' patronage: their Hogarth Press published The Waste Land in book form (after it had appeared in the first number of the Criterion), and in 1924 they were to publish three of his review-essays as a Hogarth pamphlet entitled Homage to John Dryden. In 1923 the Woolfs seem to have helped to persuade Maynard Keynes to offer Eliot the position of literary editor on the Liberal weekly the Nation. The position, though attractive, would not have provided Eliot with the financial security he needed, but it is not clear whether the paper's uncongenial political identity played a part in his eventual refusal (Leonard Woolf himself took on the post).At a less public level, Eliot shared some common ground with Leonard as a man who had considerable experience of handling the moods of a mentally unstable wife, but his direct relationship with Virginia was always shot through with distrust and a kind of literary rivalry. Neither Eliot nor Virginia Woolf gets high honours for consistent candour, and the very full annotations to these letters indicate a little of the discreditable backbiting that went on off-stage. Having cajoled Virginia to publish her (soon to be celebrated) essay "Character in Fiction" in the Criterion for July 1924, Eliot enthuses to her that the presence of her piece alongside those by Proust and Yeats means "The July number will be the most brilliant in its history". But some months later he praises the next issue to Lady Rothermere by saying: "There is nothing of the costly showiness of Proust and Virginia Woolf (neither of which I cared much about myself)."At one point Woolf confides to her diary (quoted in the editorial annotations) the conviction that "There is something hole-and-cornerish, biting in the back, suspicious, elaborate, uneasy, about him." There was truth in this, though there was more than a touch of pot and kettle, too. At the end of this volume, Eliot leaves his job at Lloyd's to join Geoffrey Faber's new publishing firm. Part of his private understanding with Faber was that the new firm would henceforth publish Eliot's books, beginning with Poems 1909-1925, which included The Waste Land. Eliot continued to write to the Woolfs in affectionate terms while somehow managing not to tell them that the Hogarth Press had just lost one of its star authors.But it must be said that Eliot, by fair means or by sharp professional practice, made a success of the Criterion during those years. He was justified in boasting in October 1924: "I think that at the end of the third year it will have as brilliant a record of contributors as any magazine could have in the time." He had secured original contributions from most of the leading modernist writers of the time, including Joyce, Woolf, Pound, Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis, and the review could boast a particularly impressive array of European contributors, a deliberate policy on Eliot's part, one that was not matched by the habitually parochial established journals. The critical essays and, later, the book reviews generally maintained a high, if at times highly ideological, standard. Publication in the Criterion's pages, he informed prospective contributors, ensured "more intelligent attention than a contribution to any other review". Only the circulation remained stubbornly resistant to Eliot's blandishments, sales never exceeding 800 to 1,000 copies per issue.Beyond documenting his life as an editor, these letters add a little thickening detail to some of the already well-worn themes of Eliot biography and criticism. There is, for example, his view (to be trusted no further than several other ostensibly revealing confessions in these letters) that there were only "about 30 good lines in The Waste Land". It is somewhat more winning to find him acknowledging that his own prose has "a rather rheumatic pomposity", and a knowingness about his early critical perfomances is suggested by his advice to a young would-be review essayist: "You must begin by being or pretending to be an authority on some subject or other." Every so often the letters will contain some remark in the lapidary style of his best literary journalism: "Good verse is only recognised after five years at least. Good criticism is noticed at once. The cultivated public prefers critical to creative work." His correspondence with his mother and brother over investments shows him fully sharing the family penchant for cautious capitalism (even though he was a banker). Part of his qualification for becoming a director of Faber's new firm was that, in addition to being one of the best-connected writers and editors of his day, he was "a man of business". And, inevitably, we get a few asides about "Jew publishers" when his dealings with his American publishers were particularly vexed. No one could pretend that the writer of these letters emerges as consistently likeable or admirable, but it is hard not to feel sympathy for a man so cornered by personal unhappiness, financial anxiety and professional frustration.Eliot often affected the identity of the "resident alien"; perhaps he came to feel that that label accurately described his relation to earthly existence as a whole. As a young man, he was not short of reasons to feel ill at ease in the world, and many of those who met him during his early years in London remarked on this characteristic. Alternating between shyness and attitude-striking, he made others feel ill at ease with him, uncertain how far they could trust this now smooth, now angular chameleon. Disguise, camouflage, adaptation: Eliot was rich in the strategies of self-protection. VS Pritchett later called him "a company of actors within one suit". Several members of the company are on show in these pages; the one constant is the suit, literally as worn to the bank every day, metaphorically in the pinstriped casing of so much of his epistolary prose.If all of Eliot's surviving letters are to be edited on this lavish scale – and, as he became more famous in later years, presumably even more letters will have survived – one has to ask whether the enterprise is well judged. With almost 40 years of his life still to go, there could, at this rate, be a dozen volumes of similar dimensions to come, perhaps more. One cannot help wondering whether the needs of scholars might be more economically met by an electronic edition, or whether there might not be a case for a more lightly annotated edition or a volume of selected letters. Eliot is, beyond question, a hugely important writer and an intriguing man, but the spirit does not leap at the prospect of some 10,000 pages of elaborate politeness.This edition, it should be emphasised, presents Eliot's own letters; it does not provide both sides of the correspondence, even where such replies exist. But just occasionally the text of a letter from one of his correspondents is included, and the gain in our sense of the exchange is immediate. There are, in addition, a few impressive letters from Geoffrey Faber, setting out the terms on which Eliot was to work for the new publishing firm, as well as Faber's own conception of the kind of periodical the new Criterion was to be (quite like the old, as it turned out). And there are several letters from Vivienne to other correspondents which vividly illuminate Eliot's predicament, though it is not immediately obvious why they and not others have been included.Vivienne's letters have both a directness and an incoherence that rip apart the smooth surface of life, which Eliot's guarded prose was always trying to maintain. Two of these raw, disturbing scribbles, from late 1925, suggest something of what Eliot had to contend with, but both are also mind-searing in the glimpse they give us of Vivienne's tortured, disturbed, unendurably miserable life. The first is to the Eliots' maid, Ellen Kellond, a desperately inappropriate choice of recipient; it is a panicked and plungingly despairing wail from a woman who found herself held in a sanatorium against her will, keening for the love she believed her husband had withdrawn, and ending: "I mean to take my life . . . It is difficult here, but I shall find a way. This is the end." The second is to Eliot himself. It begins calmly enough but soon degenerates. Amid illegible words and inconsequential remarks about various possessions, she suddenly throws herself into an anguished apology: "I am sorry I tortured you and drove you mad. I had no notion until yesterday afternoon that I had done it. I have been simply raving mad. You need not worry about me." But he did worry about her, ceaselessly, and this great slab of mostly unrevealing, practicality-driven letters depicts in harrowing detail a man almost drowning in the busyness he needed to stop himself from being driven mad.TS EliotBiographyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Telling tales
Claire Armitstead, Sarah Crown, Scott Cawley Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:47:47 -0000
Taffy Thomas is a one-time fire-eater who has just been appointed the UK's first laureate of storytelling. He joins us on this week's podcast to explain how a personal catastrophe in his mid 30s set him on course for a new life as a weaver of yarns. He also explains why lying is a noble art, why storytelling is undergoing a renaissance and how it is not just for the very young – but can be just as valuable to those at the end of their lives.Stories of a different kind throng Michael Peel's book A Swamp Full of Dollars, just shortlisted for the Guardian first book award. He tracks the malignant effect of oil from the west African mangrove swamps to Europe's corporate headquarters, and shows how the hostage-taking bandits he encountered in the Nigerian delta were ultimately less dangerous than the politicians who have creamed off the country's oil wealth and the banks who have helped them do it. He explains why the whole world needs to sit up and listen to Nigeria's story.Finally, David Vann talks about Legend of a Suicide, the novel that survived rejection by all the big US publishing houses to become one of the fiction sensations of the year.Elsewhere on guardian.co.uk, join Tim Radford in a discussion of Primo Levi's The Periodic Table. It was awarded – in a very informal vote – the title of the best science book ever written, but what makes it a science book at all?Reading listA Swamp Full of Dollars, by Michael Peel (IB Tauris)Legend of a Suicide, by David Vann (Penguin)Claire ArmitsteadSarah CrownScott Cawley
Blood's a Rover by James Ellroy
Christopher Tayler Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:06:11 -0000
Set in the 1960s, the final novel in James Ellroy's 'Underworld USA' trilogy reflects the here and now, writes Christopher TaylerJames Ellroy often tells interviewers that he has no interest in current events, but even he seems to feel that the stars are in alignment for the publication of Blood's a Rover, the closing novel of his "Underworld USA" trilogy. This vast enterprise, which started appearing 14 years ago and now runs to nearly 2,000 pages, depicts 14 years of American history – from 1958 to 1972 – with a tight focus on conspiracies, murder, madness, corruption and racial hatred. When Ellroy launched the series with American Tabloid (1995), right-wing paranoia about the Clinton presidency added wind to his sails, and with Obama in the White House conditions are even more favourable. Racially charged hysteria and accusations of communism are the ideological small change of the power players in these books. In a note appended to advance copies, Ellroy writes that "this is a book for these times!" It's also filled, he says needlessly, "with my trademark craaaaazy shit".Ellroy began his trilogy after finishing the quartet of Los Angeles-set crime novels that made him famous, in which plotlines concerning serial killers, police corruption and shady political manoeuvrings gradually thicken and merge and turn out to be connected by long-buried master-crimes. Two of the LA books have three main figures who take turns as the focal character, and all four of them incorporate real-life people and events into the carefully organised layers of fantasy. American Tabloid and its follow-up, The Cold Six Thousand (2001), use similar narrative machinery to build detailed backstories to the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King. The plots' strings are pulled by J Edgar Hoover, the Mob, Howard Hughes and the CIA, but the main emphasis is on Ellroy's beloved "bad white men" – the rogue cops, shakedown artists and conflicted Mafia lawyers who work for the main players – and the prices they all pay "to secretly define their time".As for the "craaaaazy shit", it comes in several varieties, served up in changing proportions from book to book. Apart from the basic building-blocks of Ellroy's world – acts of extreme violence, quasi-Oedipal sexual obsessions, litanies of entertainment-world sleaze – there are two principal areas of craziness. One is Ellroy's writing style, which mixes telegraphic terseness with hep-cat "rebop", old-time cop-speak and other high-impact registers, heavily seasoned with sexual, religious and ethnic insults. Though less extreme in some ways than Ellroy's White Jazz (1992), The Cold Six Thousand has the unusual distinction of being made hard to read by the shortness of its sentences, which mostly come in at four words – one of which is always likely to be "nigger", "cooze", "hebe", "fag" or "slope". This amplifies the other unsettling effect: the odd blend of amused relish and hardboiled blankness with which the characters' activities are viewed. Writing from inside the worldview of his killers and casual-to-committed right-wing extremists, Ellroy rarely feels a need for explicit condemnation.Blood's a Rover initially looks like more of the same, though Ellroy has dialled the terseness back to American Tabloid levels in the interest of reader-friendliness. This time round, only one of the main characters was equally prominent in the previous book. This is Wayne Tedrow, an ex-cop, dope chemist, assassination conspirator and newly minted parricide. (The Cold Six Thousand ends with him arranging for his stepmother, with whom he's in love, to beat his dad to death with a golf club; most readers will agree that the old man had it coming.)Wayne has landed the job his father wanted as Howard "Dracula" Hughes's right-hand man in Las Vegas, and is also in hock to both Hoover and the Mafia bosses. Despite his extravagantly justified reputation as a racist murderer, however, Wayne is a tormented soul who believes in civil rights and dreams of finding better ways of interacting with black people than killing them or selling them heroin to fund third-world coups.Next up as a focal character is Dwight Holly, an FBI agent known as "The Enforcer" who also played a part in the MLK hit. Dwight's new job is to slip a provocateur into a minor black nationalist movement to further Hoover's plans to discredit the civil rights cause. Finally, there's Donald "Crutch" Crutchfield, a low-rent surveillance artist and "dipshit kid" with an Ellroy-like past and strong voyeuristic tendencies. At first, Crutch – whose name and some of whose attributes have been borrowed from a real-life acquaintance of Ellroy's – comes across as merely filling the now-traditional "junior partner who'll wise up and turn nasty" role. But the centre of his operations, Los Angeles, and his peeping-tom obsession with two mysterious women, slowly introduce a fevered, personal note that has more in common with the LA novels than with The Cold Six Thousand's sometimes rather dutiful slog along the historical timeline.This note gets stronger as the book progresses, perhaps because Ellroy is no longer constrained by the need to work up to a keynote assassination. Watergate, he's said, has been over-done, and too many of the participants are still alive and lawyered-up, so the trilogy's climax relies more on imagination. The immensely complicated and skilfully orchestrated plotlines contain most of the usual ingredients: heroin, psychopathic Cuban exiles, a cab business used as a crime hub, and a Mob attempt to replace the lost Havana casinos, this time by building in the Dominican Republic. There are walk-on parts for Nixon and Reagan as well as more recent obituary subjects: "Bill Buckley snitched neocons. Chuck Heston snitched potheads." On top of all this, there's also the fallout from an unsolved armoured car heist and the murder of an LA hate tract magnate. Everything seems to circle back to some emeralds and a woman named Joan Rosen Klein, who gives the book's antiheroes a shot at redemption.Joan, aka "the Red Queen", and her friend Karen Sifakis, Dwight Holly's part-time lover, turn out to be Ellroy's spokespersons for the left. And though Joan is nearly as compromised as the numerous rightwing characters, Ellroy finally makes it clear that his sympathies are with her and what she stands for. Under her influence, Dwight contemplates writing a confession that sounds a lot like Ellroy's novel: "A huge feat of exposition. A densely packed indictment. A treatise on the collusive mind-set. JFK, RFK and MLK are all dead. Let me tell you how." In an unexpected metafictional twist, Joan and Dwight start planning a violent event that will break the story wide open, which they discuss like novelists ("It densifies every level of our subtext"). We're also offered a partial explanation for the novel's narrative idiosyncrasies, though not an especially plausible or satisfying one.These developments make an interesting departure and help close the trilogy in a surprisingly sweet way. (Sweeter, anyway, than The Cold Six Thousand's last lines: "His father screamed. Blood sprayed the panes.") It must be said that Ellroy writes terrible diary entries for his radical left intellectuals, who all think in an interchangeable, polysyllabic voice: "Our shared world is humanly unquantifiable and ideologically confused"; "Our goals are both inimical and fully synchronous." And while it's good to know that he disapproves of "puerile Feds fucking the disenfranchised for kicks", it's still more fun to read the narrator's demented epithets for parrots ("The cocksucker bit his hand and flew off") or the Dominican elite ("light-skinned beaners" who "grooved on their Spanish roots").The upheavals of the 60s – Ellroy's ostensible subject – are mostly presented here as an epidemic of hipsterism that has even Nixon saying, "On the QT, baby", and some readers might feel that this is as it should be.In its serious aspects, then, Blood's a Rover can be mildly silly in comparison with the tightly controlled American Tabloid. But the serious aspects are only intermittently what's serious about Ellroy's achievement in these books. Slyly knowing about the fantasies he trades in, funny when you least expect it, and a master of private languages, he isn't in any way a conventional historical novelist. At his best – when the strong internal logic of his books takes over the history he's exploiting – he gives you the sense of being plugged directly into an entire culture's unsavoury dream life, its boasts and self-reproaches and arguments with itself.James EllroyFictionChristopher Taylerguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

NPR Topics: Books

How Market Crash Helped Hedge Fund Operator
Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:00:00 -0500
Before the financial crisis hit, John Paulson was just your run-of-the-mill hedge fund operator, worth millions of dollars. But when the market crashed, Paulson made billions. How he did it lies at the heart of a new book called The Greatest Trade Ever. The book's author, Gregory R. Zuckerman, offers his insight.
Sapphire's Story: How 'Push' Became 'Precious'
Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:47:00 -0500
The gritty realism of the film Precious is even more intense in the novel Push, upon which the film is based. Author Sapphire discusses the inspiration for her work — and her initial reluctance to allow her work to become a film.
Gore Urges Obama To Take Lead On Climate Change
Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:06:00 -0500
In his new book, Al Gore argues that consumers have "all the tools we need" to solve climate change. But unless the United States takes a leadership role, "it would be impossible to resolve this crisis," he tells NPR.

Slashdot: Book Reviews

Drupal Multimedia
samzenpus Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:50:00 -0000
coder4hire writes "Of the leading content management systems used by developers for creating websites, Drupal is highly regarded for many characteristics, including a much smaller initial footprint, compared to Joomla and other CMSs. Yet some developers find this a disadvantage as well, because one of the most common criticisms leveled against Drupal is its lack of built-in support for images and multimedia elements — thereby forcing new Drupal developers to choose from the thousands of contributed Drupal modules those that would be optimal for implementing their websites' multimedia functionality. Aaron Winborn's book Drupal Multimedia is intended as a guide to help such developers." Keep reading for the rest of Michael's review.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Android Application Development
samzenpus Mon, 12 Oct 2009 18:17:00 -0000
stoolpigeon writes "Google's mobile OS Android has received plenty of press. As with a lot of Google products, there was much anticipation before any devices were even available. Now a number of phones are available, with many more coming out world-wide in the near future. Part of the lure of Android is the openness of the platform and the freely available tools for development. The SDK and accompanying Eclipse plug-in give the would be creator of the next great Android application everything they need to make their idea reality. The bar to entry in the official Google Android Marketplace is very low and it doesn't seem to be much of a stretch to predict that the number of developers working on Android is only going to grow. As with any hot technology the number of books will grow as well and O'Reilly's Android Application Development has jumped into the fray, promising to help budding Android developers what they need to get started." Read on for the rest of JR's review.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Learning Ext JS
samzenpus Mon, 05 Oct 2009 18:41:00 -0000
stoolpigeon writes "Rich Internet Applications (RIA) have often been associated with some type of sandbox or virtual machine environment to make desktop features available via the web. Many applications though, have left behind the restrictions and demands of those technologies, implementing RIAs as pure web interfaces. One key technology in this area is JavaScript. It's been well documented that working with JavaScript can be problematic across various browsers. In response a number of JavaScript libraries have been created to alleviate the issues in dealing with different browsers, allowing developers to focus on application logic rather than platform concerns. One such library, focused on providing tools for building RIAs is Ext JS. For the aspiring developer looking to use Ext JS, Packt provides a guide to the library in the form of Learning Ext JS." Read on for the rest of JR's review.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Books

What Was Lost
I just finished What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn and I loved every page. I was so sad at the end, though, and have been thinking about it ever since.
D-Day: The Battle for Normandy
After countless books and movies, it’s hard to imagine that there is much left to write about the D-Day invasion of German-occupied France in June 1944. But as Antony Beevor demonstrates in D-Day: The Battle for Normandy, our knowledge of this military campaign – like any part of history that ...
The Rum Diary
A book I take with me to school everyday is The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson. "The Rum Diary" is a hardened, straight-forward, novel that would make Hemingway proud.

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Meta Description: [ The Electronic Labyrinth is a study of the implications of hypertext for creative writers looking to move beyond traditional notions of linearity. ]

The Libyrinth - Site focuses on 20th century contemporary literature and author resources available online.

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