Customer Reviews

White Jazz

5 star:		(38)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

White Jazz: novel, long, odd.

James Ellroy: author. Turns out a good sentence. Knows his stuff. Tough. Uncompromising. Not afraid of risks.

Style: Unusual. Off-putting. Jangled. Nervy. Hard to follow. Worth the trouble.

Dudley Smith: Ellroy's signature character. Evil. Obscene. Brutal. Good to see him again.

Problems: Confusing. Often. Get. Lost. In. Stacatto. Prose.

Plusses: Stream of Consciousness choice inspired. Gets in mind of Dave Klein. Doesn't judge him. Lets us into his world.

Overall: Don't miss. L.A. Confidential - Big Nowhere - Black Dahlia - White Jazz. Terrific. All.

The rumor is that Ellroy turned in a 900-page first draft. When his publisher protested, the author cut down the book to its
present length by eliminating verbs, articles, adjectives, and most other parts of speech. The result is a breathless gallop through a darkly fascinating world of murder, incest, perversion, corruption, greed, and lust. And that's just for starters!

Reading WHITE JAZZ is like reading Anthony Burgess's CLOCKWORK ORANGE. The language is a mélange of English, LAPD crimestoppers' jargon, and 1950s pulptalk. Be prepared to deal with 187s, B&E, bootjacking, hinkiness, FIs, 459s, IAD, rebop, snarfing with soshes -- among other things.

What makes it all worthwhile is that Ellroy has a great story to tell, and he tells it well even if he invents his own language that only tangentially resembles English. Be prepared for harsh lights thrown into the darkest parts of the human soul. Be
prepared for almost universal corruption, varying only in degree. As you spiral into the depths with Ellroy, you can almost feel the walls converging and the floor dropping from under you.

This is a worthy conclusion to the author's Los Angeles Quartet. Be sure to read the novels in sequence for a sweeping panorama of 15 years of postwar degradation: THE BLACK DAHLIA, THE BIG NOWHERE, L.A. CONFIDENTIAL, and -- not least of them -- WHITE JAZZ.

Dig: Every book in the L.A. Quartet is a must. Every one of them. Feature you read just one or start in the middle, you're a chump. White Jazz - a great closer. Can't miss.

After reading the first three novels in the series, I was reluctant to read White Jazz. I was scared off hearing so much about Ellroy's deepening usage of staccato prose and unattributed dialogue. I was led to believe the book was almost written in an experimental language. Well, I am writing this review for one purpose: to keep people from being fearful of this amazing book. If you like Ellroy, and if you've enjoyed the quartet thus far, you'll love it.

Is White Jazz my favorite in the series? No. I still prefer L.A. Confidential, followed by The Big Nowhere. But White Jazz is much more evolved than The Black Dahlia. And as brutal and dark as it is, White Jazz has more laughs than all the other quartet novels combined. While the novel's halting presentation doesn't allow you to roll through the pages, that's almost a blessing, because every line is dense with nuance and information. You want to pay attention.

I absolutely recommend reading the series in order, and if you're through L.A. Confidential, you simply must complete the quartet. White Jazz strikes the perfect notes in capping the series, and ties up a few ends along the way. It is beautiful, savage, powerful and stunning.

Feature it's more challenging than a Grisham book. Feature that's a good thing. Dig: No big deal. Don't get scared off. Brass knucks/brain swelling/reading in bed. Big fun - big reward. CRAAAAZY.

Feature: Chief of Detectives Edmund Exley, the once morally ambiguous hotshot in LA Confidential, now revealed to be a dangerously polished hyena is mad at the Feds, who are now launching a full fledged investigation into his insalubrious efficient gutter that is the LAPD. At one of his many press conferences, he says of the probe: "It will fail because he (the Fed head of the probe, Welles Noonan) has grievously underestimated the moral rectitude of the Los Angeles Police Department." No such luck, moral rectitude is never an issue here. The only thing an inquirer may underestimate is the survival skills of the inquired.

The slime-balls are all here. James Ellroy's White Jazz is the authentic feeling, brilliantly foul continuation of the life and times of the various parasites that populate the 50s LAPD and the corrupt politicians, drug-pushers, tabloid hounds, pornographers, pimps and prostitutes they feed on. It is a first person account by lieutenant Dave "the enforcer" Klein. A casual murderer of numerous witnesses and others that happen to be in the way of where ever he's going. He doesn't feel bad about it, probably doesn't have time to. But he does admit certain queasiness after a kill. Ellroy's novel is too hardboiled to be one of redemption, but he does offer castigation to all his sinners. There is for instance Klein's unsubtle incestuous obsession with his sister. In fact, incest seems to be Ellroy's preferred method of punishment. A longing that can never be satisfied, and if satisfied will be the source of infinite desolation. At the center of this hell is a diseased family Klein observes as an investigator. They are a crime family, long involved with the LAPD. Their numerous afflictions are of the darkest kind, and are the source of the novel's deceptively euphonious title. The family is also a reflection of Klein, of his irreversible destination.

Often in crime tales (both films and books), characters seem to have becomes criminals for the exclusive privilege of spouting phrases like "waste em" or "clip em". They seem to be enjoying sounding like criminals, which of course menas that they are not real criminals. They are the work of a cuss-happy author delighted by all the evil he can shock us with. Ellroy is something else in this regard. He recognizes that corruption, for whatever reason, is more inherently attractive then goodness in fiction. His characters speak the language that most readers will believe is the language of criminals, then imbues their world with such loathing that the language seems merely functional. Not comedic. His characters are all slaves to their lives, some happy, some dead. But almost all, incapable of change. If you consider White Jazz, the only one that seems to be at peace is the that joyously eloquent scoundrel Dudley Smith. He is distinguished as villain in a world of villains only by the apparent cheerfulness with which he goes about his nastiness. If you're interested in the dark corners of Ellroy, you may want to check out Irvine Welsh's appetizingly titled FILTH. That novel achieved a magnificent scatological poetry of self-mutilation from which Ellroy deliberately eschews.

Ellroy's style is ofcourse an integral part of all his work. You'll find it mimicked and explained in almost all the reviews, a source of both complaint and admiration. I personally felt that it was a two edged sword. On the one hand his bizarre stream of police form consciousness, with those one, two or three word sentences is often disorienting and opaque. It is always a relief when a character speaks, complete sentences for a change. It resembles a departmental form, ambiguously filled out by the narrator and understood by the few who have had similar experience. Soon enough, you get used to the rat-a-tat rhythm, recognize the names, but White Jazz remains, to the very end, exhausting to read. On the other hand, the style adds to the realism of the whole thing. If you have to exude such effort to get into this world, then it becomes that much more vivid. Your enjoyment of the novel will depend almost exclusively on your acceptance of Ellroy's prose. Once that hurdle (or blessing) is bypassed (or embraced), your are left with an uncensored stream of shocking facts. JUST THE FACTS as that TV show in LA Confidential used to advertise. And they're incredible.

Situation: Ellroy at his most unflinching. Chaos: meth-charged wordfury, fed through the wood chipper. Result: diamond-hard shards of rage. Every line spat out. Ellroy in the absolute, logical extreme.

Setbacks: goes down hard, best in very small doses. Relentless pounding. Always off the beat. Respite: dialogue means a little break. Not much.

Progress: time off, eyes refocus. Hammering lets off a bit. Later: return to the scene. Synapses screaming. Masochist: back to playtime.

Done. Fadeout: brain circuits, dark. Rest. Brutal.

I'm a big fan of a wide variety of fiction. Regardless of genre, I admire bold experimentation with prose technique. It doesn't get any better than Nabokov or Faulkner for me. I also like writers who tell far more conventional stories but do so with a flair for language, like Robertson Davies or, in the detective fiction area, Chandler and Hammett.

The bottom line? Ellroy deserves to rank not only among Chandler and Hammett for quality of his crime fiction, but, with White Jazz, among Nabokov and Faulkner for the style of his language. White Jazz mainlines the experiences of the protagonist straight into your nervous system, white hot and unfiltered. It takes some adjusting. For the first thirty pages or so, my head hurt. Then something clicked and I was utterly blown away. Perhaps the most visceral read I've ever experienced. And aside from the style, the story is a gripping descent into the dark side of human nature, as typified by the crime and police world of 50s La. This is really as good as crime fiction gets, and some of the best writing from any author of the 20th Century.

American Tabloid may be his most satisfying book in a lot of ways, but White Jazz is a work of art. Grim, disturbing art, to be sure, but I find that necessary at times.

The final showdown that LA Confidential promised us comes together in this novel. Ed Exley and Dudley Smith finally go at it through a most unusual go between who doesn't know what hes getting into between these two, Dave Klein. Klein is a corrupt Vice cop in every way. He's out for himself. But when he gets drawn into the big chess match played by Exley and SMith he starts to question what hes been doing and who he is. A great finish to the authors LA crime novels. Don't be afraid of the style and prose. You'll get used to it quick.

I really liked the style this novel was written in and I agree that it should not be a reader's introduction to Ellroy. His rat-a-tat-tat narrative and dialogue is at it's most efficient and elliptical. True, it is sometimes hard to follow. But never in a frustrating way. My god, I read too many reviews on this site that slight a book for being hard to follow. This is hard to follow and I'm thankful for it. It challenged me, forced me into a closer reading. If I have any criticism of the book it is that the style overwhelms some of the characters. By the end, I wanted the main character's behaviour to reflect the manic, fragmented tone of the story he is narrating... it never quite got there for me. Still, it's one of Ellroy's most engrossing books. Better than Black Dahlia, not as good as LA Confidential.

This is a great, almost experimental, work of noir fiction. Like Ellroy's other great books in the L.A. series, the protagonists are all either good/bad guys or bad/good guys. No one is simple and nothing is straightforward, but if you can hold out and get into the spirit of the prose - which is no mean feat - the story becomes a rollercoaster of driven excitement. Ellroy always experiments with language and stylistic devices in setting his story properly in time and place, but this book is somewhat extreme in that regard and reading it requires some attention and a willingness to surrender to the language.

The pace of this book, both in terms of stylistic intensity and in densley plotted action, is more hurried and frenetic than previous Ellroy novels. The territory and characters, though, should be familiar to anyone who has read The Black Daliah or L.A. Confidential. This is some great writing for all those who like their crime fiction on the gritty and harsh side of truth.

Just spent the past three weeks devouring the LA quartet. Oddly enough, the two books I expected to like the best (LA Confidential and Black Dahlia) were my least favorite. Not that they weren't good, I was just pleasantly surprised to enjoy White Jazz and the Big Nowhere as much or more.

These books were just awesome. Gritty, compelling, page turners. I haven't watched tv in weeks. All I want to do is read the next book by James Ellroy.