back when...) and, what is more, this baby's in hardcover. Ow! Look out! So, naturlich, we would needs speak in terms of scads of gravitas gathering centrifugally round this work, yet... I've proven to be particularly resistant to Eisner's inarguably plentiful charms. His exploded-panel camera work, mastery of lighting design, sui generis, evocative lettering drippin' wit' onomatopoeia and feathering technique are, to be sure, world-renowned. But, Will's always seemed like the Rod Steiger of comics to me--possessed of a stunning narrative verve that's employed too often to power the most bathetic melodramatics. Nevertheless, while I preferred the scope of his "Life on Another Planet" mini-series in The Spirit mag during the 80s, the four "true" stories of Depression-era Jewish tenement life that make up Contract give Will's chops ample stretchin' room.
To put it mildly, they're all bummers, especially "The Super" wherein Lolita and The Bicycle Thief do the slow death-dirge grind during The Children's Hour (no, no lesbian erotica, sport, sorry...). "Cookalein" tells the story of a virginal teenager named, yeah, "Willie" (handsome bloke, he, like a young masked Denny ye may ha' come across in WE's oeuvre) who's inducted into out-and-out strangeness of sexual relations and marital discord during one summer sur l'herbe. The title story is classically elliptical in form, ironically hopeful/doomed in theme. What can I tell you? An American Classic. What can I tell you? American Classics so rarely do it for my endocrine system... --J.K.
(first appeared in Reign of Toads #3)
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James Ellroy
The Black Dahlia/The Big Nowhere
Mysterious Press, 1988/1989 (paperback, 358469 pages) [FICTION] [PULP] [NOIR]
Actually I never finished The Big Nowhere, Ellroy's sprawling, multiple-perspective, ultraviolent pulp noir about the Red Scare in 1950s L.A. I bailed out on page 126, right after a completely gratuitous scene wherein ambitious young cop Danny Upshaw questions a hick pit bull breeder about how to get a dog to attack a dead body ("`...I'd get me a rubber glove and tweak his dick until he just about got there, then I'd clamp his balls so he couldn't shoot. I'd get me some doggie menstrual blood and spray it in his eyes and nose for a week or so, till he came to think of it as food and love.'"). Call it the last of many straws. Grotesque moments of Freudian violence are Ellroy's particular gift, but here they're way too high in the mix and become annoying almost immediately. Everything about this novel, in fact, reeks of formula. Ellroy's clipped, hardboiled-pastiche prose is either fast and clean or incredibly stupid. In The Big Nowhere, it is far too frequently the latter ("Danny thought 'Shit'; said, 'Shoot.'"). That coupled with a bloated plotline, endless pages of clichéd cop procedural lingo, and boring soap opera characterizations (like the cute police dispatcher Danny keeps leading on with promises of a swanky dinner so she'll do his dirty work), forced me to abandon this purple tome for Flannery O'Connor. The Black Dahlia, however, is both lean (100 pages shorter) and mean (as opposed to merely brutal) enough for me to forgive Ellroy's cheesier excesses. Its tense, first-person narrative (another ambitious young cop) has the same inside police work data, dirty pool politics, and contorted interpersonal conflict as The Big Nowhere, but here supporting the story instead of replacing it. And the docudrama historical angle ("Hollywood's Most Notorious Murder Case") informs the novel with unearned but undeniable authenticity. Ellroy's chief gimmick is to deconstruct the noir aesthetic and rebuild it using souped-up parts from the modern canon. The racism, sexism, corruption, perversion and violence are all exaggerated to spectacular levels. Where original practitioners Chandler or even Cain were restrained in their portrayals of these elements, allowing the power of reading between the lines to engage the reader's brain pan, po-mo Ellroy fires up the chainsaw and starts hacking away (no pun intended). I have a lot of problems with Ellroy, both in his writing and his apparent worldview (homosexuality, for example, comes across as the sole domain of child-kidnapping perverts), but in a tighter construct like The Black Dahlia, his work is interesting and disturbing enough to actually provoke thought. --K.S.(first appeared in Reign of Toads #3)
Mysterious Press
last update 7/30/97
Reign of Toads PO Box 40498 Albuquerque NM 87196-0498 USA
info@rtoads.com
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