September 5, 2014

“Perfidia” by James Ellroy

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to the Seattle Times

James Ellroy can be ornery. “I hate hipsters, I hate liberals, I hate rock ’n’ rollers, I hate the counterculture, I hate movie people,” he said in an interview promoting his new novel, “Perfidia.” He also hates Presidents Clinton and Obama and has no use for the modern world.

Ellroy’s mother was murdered in Los Angeles when Ellroy was 10. The case was unsolved. “The Black Dahlia,” the first novel in Ellroy’s LA Quartet, was based on the unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short, which bore some similarities to the murder of Ellroy’s mother. Short’s body was found in an abandoned lot, mutilated, severed in half and posed. The press went crazy. Ellroy blended the facts of the case with fictional police officers and his own theories, which resulted in his 1987 breakout novel.

Three more novels completed Ellroy’s LA Quartet: “The Big Nowhere,” “LA Confidential” and “White Jazz.” Two of the books — “The Black Dahlia” and “LA Confidential” — were made into movies, and Ellroy became a literary celebrity of sorts. He followed the LA Quartet with The Underworld Trilogy: “American Tabloid,” “The Cold Six Thousand” and “Blood’s a Rover.” Writing about crime, corruption, greed, lust, brutality, drugs, madness and all the dark corners of the human psyche, Ellroy commingles fictional characters and incidents with historical characters and incidents, creating a weird pastiche of American life. 

His style, like his subject matter, is occasionally coarse.

“Perfidia” is a prequel to the LA Quartet and the Underworld Trilogy. Ellroy introduces us to younger versions of the characters who made him famous. Your appreciation of Ellroy’s unabashed attempt at the Great American Novel will depend, in part, on your familiarity with his oeuvre. I’ve read three of the seven books “Perfidia” riffs on and felt I was missing some pieces.

Still, the book is a compelling puzzle.

On the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor, a Japanese-American family is found dead. Either they committed a ritualistic suicide, or they were murdered. Los Angeles Police Department Police Chief William H. Parker from “LA Confidential,” who was the actual police chief of the LAPD from 1950 until 1966, appears as Captain William H. Parker and oversees the investigation. Hideo Ashida, a police chemist, and the only Japanese-American employee of LAPD, is assigned to work the case.

Kay Lake, from “The Black Dahlia,” appears as a 21-year-old adventuress learning her way around LA. “I wanted to run away to Los Angeles and become someone else there … I was equal parts innocence and lunatic grit.” Kay’s chapters, written in first-person diary form, were among the most engaging for me, illuminating the motives and desires of the men who are intertwined by the investigation.

Beginning on Dec. 6, 1941, and unfolding in 23 days of real-time narration, “Perfidia” is a murder mystery, a subversive historical novel, and a dark meditation on power, politics, race and justice.

Perfidia, a Spanish word meaning treachery or betrayal, is the title of a song from the big-band era. Ellroy used the song in “The Black Dahlia,” and it obviously still speaks to him. With “Perfidia,” he repeatedly returns to the scene of the crime.

Thanks to German novelist Alice Winter for this cool spring shot of the German edition of Carnival Desires. The English version is available on Kindle. Vanity Fair called it a “witty, minimalist epic.” Details magazine said it was “great postmodern literature.”

Published in 1990, it chronicles the adventures of a group of twentysomething friends in eighties Hollywood. I thought my life was pretty adventurous back then. And it was. It is more so now.

I’ve been in Indonesia and Chicago working on a case against Boeing. “Liability will not truly be in dispute here. Boeing is at fault. Their equipment failed. Their planes crashed twice,” I told Yahoo Finance.

Thanks for reading.

Happy Thanksgiving and Mahalo!

As Maya Angelou said, “Be present in all things and grateful for all things.”

Back from a holiday in Hawaii, the Lindquists are feeling the Mahalo spirit. You can see more pictures on my Instagram.

I’ve updated my Medium page and included a review of Carnival Desires, my second novel. It’s structured around holidays and other rituals. While reading, like gratitude, should be practiced year round, holidays in particular are a time for stories. I wish you all many blessings and books.

Thanks for reading.

In June of 1992, Atlantic Monthly Press published my second novel, Carnival Desires. Details magazine called it, “Great postmodern literature. Romantic and cynical, true and original, full of modern ideas and seductive moments … ” Vanity Fair called it, “a witty minimalist epic.” Now I’m older and it’s available on kindle.

In the future book category, here is the finale of “Zen Lawyer,” Chapter 18. For more updates, follow me on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram, thanks.

And thanks for reading.

Sunday, February 13, 1994

“Pool” by Ajay Sahgal

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Los Angeles Times Book Review, Front Page

“Pool” is one of the most authentic Los Angeles novels you are likely to read and the beauty of it is that not a single moment is set in L.A.

Emery Roberts, a twentysomething movie star, has walked off the set of “Sun City,” a $40 million dollar buddy cop thriller, and gone to Vermont. The reader has no idea why. Emery, the narrator, also has no idea why.

“Pool” could have been subtitled “Portrait of an Unexamined Life” or “Why One Should Avoid Hanging Out with Young Actors.” Pointedly anti-plot and with ciphers for characters, “Pool” is nonetheless compelling thanks to Sahgal’s spare, cryptic prose.

“Pool” is “Waiting for Godot” for a generation whose gods are celluloid. This first novel is funny, sad, and filled with shocks of recognition, particularly for those who have ever felt lost in the modern Sodom known as Hollywood. “I can’t go on. I must go on. I can’t keep writing screenplays. I must keep writing screenplays.”

In Vermont Emery joins other Hollywood expatriates who are holed up at a farmhouse: a screenwriter, a fired CAA agent, and the “Sun City” producer’s alcoholic daughter and useless son. Along with Emery is Danny, a USC film school grad, the “next Phil Joanou,” who films Emery’s every move on videotape. Emery is oblivious to Danny and his omnipresent camera in much the same way that normal people in, say, Seattle, are oblivious to rain.

Necessarily lacking the physical details of L.A. – no Santa Ana winds, no sweet eucalyptic wetness in the air, no wild-eyed coyotes to run over in a Range Rover -“Pool” proves that L.A. is merely a transportable state of mind. L.A. is convincingly, disturbingly, brought to life in the Vermont countryside.

There’s all the vernacular, banter, celebrity fixation, and barely repressed anger endemic to Los Angeles. And it is not limited to the expatriates. When Emery visits the local bars, townie
girls fawn senselessly over him and their boyfriends want to kill him.

When the group needs money, they have a garage sale and there are plenty of local buyers for Emery’s used Yamamato blazer, and his unread copy of “Ulysses” – for the musical version with a score by Michael Bolton.

Only one character in the novel seems to have a goal of any kind: the screenwriter. He is building a pool in the backyard. And it is not just a goal, but an obsession. Though this is ostensibly motivated by the snapping turtles that roam the nearby lake in menacing packs, there is clearly more at stake.

Building the pool is the screenwriter’s raison d’etre. He envisions a cool, turtle-less place, a thing of beauty. What he creates, mostly, is a big hole filled with mud. And then the snapping turtles invade. This is one of the smartest, funniest metaphors for a screenwriter’s life that I have ever read.

“Pool” is chock full of wickedly funny bits that will be especially appreciated by industry insiders. Characters make deadpan references to movies with hilarious titles and plot lines that are all the funnier because the joke-movies are no more absurd than, say, “Encino Man,” “Problem Child,” “Stop, or My Mom Will Shoot,” or any number of other wildly profitable movies.

“Pool” has plenty of set pieces that scriptwriters are paid to fill pages with: a brawl, a roman candle fight, a car crash, and the big production number when an entire movie crew invades the farm house. What’s interesting is that these scenes read like parodies of what one would expect. The idiot-proof drama that makes these paint-by-number scenes popular with studio executives seems to be intentionally filtered out.

The characters in “Pool” are so disconnected from what is genuine that they feel nothing. There is not much to be felt in a cliché. There is not much to be felt when nothing is valued. This valuelessness that kills the possible joy of these characters lives even creeps into the sex scenes. They’ve arrived young to what self involvement and constant indulgence invariably lead to: emptiness, burn out.

Hollywood, in the end, wins. Emery becomes resigned to his fate, and his fate is to fly first class, have beautiful strange girls beg to sleep with him, and make millions of dollars, without ever understanding anything about any of it. If this does not sound especially hellish, it will after you read this scarily convincing portrait.

Emery’s most redeeming quality is that he is mercifully free of the self-involved self-help posturing that substitute in Los Angeles for living an examined life. Even that requires more self-examination than Emery can muster. He does, however, perform Public Service Announcements for “Rock Against Fur.”

Pete Hamill, after hanging around drunks and actresses for too many years, came to a realization. Hamill recognized, as he put it, that he had been performing rather than living his life. He stopped drinking. This saved him.

The characters in Sahgal’s novel are light years away from this kind of realization, and probably incapable of the kind of action that might save them. Sahgal wisely knows what about this is sad, funny, and, at moments, even moving.

“Pool” will not be a bestseller. It may, however, be destined for cult-classic status in Los Angeles.

Mark Lindquist is the author of two Hollywood novels, Sad Movies and Carnival Desires.