"The numbers don't matter. It's not a body count, a scratch-pad list or a boast." So James Ellroy begins this very list-like and unavoidably boastful memoir of a lifetime of I was going to say, relationships with women, but I think I'll go with his own word, with all its implied connotations of breathless hounding: pursuit. A lifetime's pursuit of women.
And what a breathless piece of writing this is. When it comes to pinning down the most startling possible word collision, Ellroy's acrobatic pizzazz is beyond doubt. In fact "pin" is probably too weak a word. This is literary knife-throwing at its most exhilarating and dangerous. But to what effect? Because I can't remember when I was last so bored, exhausted and annoyed by the supposedly honest outpourings of a fellow human being.
The story goes roughly like this. Caught up in his parents' bitter, sometimes violent divorce, Ellroy finds himself, at 10, with conflicting feelings for his tall, red-haired mother. Certainly they verge on the sexual: "I hated her because I wanted her in unspeakable ways." In a drunken rage, she clouts him. He wishes her dead. Three months later, she is murdered by person or persons unknown. Consumed by guilt and shame, he spends the next 50 years seeking out women who look like her, and (almost literally) begging them to love him. This is a life and a book - haunted by tall redheads. They appear fleetingly in bars, in dreams, even at readings on the many book tours as he becomes more as he does not neglect to tell us famous and successful.
As the chronology of the memoir becomes ever more opaque you can only blame Ellroy's ferociously staccato prose it's hard to keep up. But we start with the inevitable childhood and teenage crushes, moving on to encounters with prostitutes, drug addiction, breakdown, rehab, brief marriage, second longer marriage, and several serious, if doomed, relationships with (often red-haired, sometimes married) women. In the final pages, we get to Erika, whom Ellroy seems to have prised from her husband a relatively short time ago and who remains (to date anyway) the love of his life. And yes, she is tall and has "reddish blonde hair".
I did want to like this book. I'm genuinely interested in how men feel about women whether their mothers, wives, girlfriends or prostitutes and it's not often that a man stands before you, apparently prepared to bare his soul's failure to create lasting relationships. So it's a shame about the two - for me anyway - huge obstacles.
First, this knife-throwing prose. Yes, you do hold your breath as the blades are chucked, but once you've got used to the act Ellroy's self-conscious slangland strutting it all starts to feel a bit contrived. Again and again you suspect words were flung together simply because they sounded good. Lines like "They met, they sizzled, they shacked" or "I was frayed, fraught, french-fried and frazzled" start to irk. You can almost see Ellroy trying them on for size, then standing back to get a better look, to preen. The effect, sadly, is not to pull you closer but to shove you right away.
Most of all, though, the show-off prose leaves no room for insight or self-revelation or crucially the smallest touch of vulnerability. A marriage is evoked thus: "I proposed to a longer term sweetheart. She said yes. I ran from her as we said our vows and settled in Hancock Park East." How you long for him to unpack things a little, to slow down, forget the razzamatazz and investigate events and himself a little more deeply. You suspect his women might have wished it too.
Speaking of whom, he claims that his "agenda was women as muse". I don't believe it. Self as muse, more like. And the same goes for the sexual act itself. For a man who claims to love and want women "I ached for the kinship of the body I wanted every touch, taste and breath I could have" this is a perplexingly sexless book. "Sex was an unending surprise and an ever-replenishing joy" is about as sensuous as it gets. Again, this seems to be all about Ellroy himself, rather than anything warm or sticky or credibly human.
In fact, Ellroy himself concedes, when speaking of his latest love, that "our collective friends think we'll flame out". I hope for his sake that they're wrong, because certainly one of the ways you could read the book is as an impassioned love letter written by a man who does at least sincerely believe he has now found The One.
But as I finished reading, a slightly depressing possibility settled on me. This is not really a book about women, or any sort of physical or emotional connection at all, whether love or sex. It's a book about obsession. Between the relentless crowing about how "brilliantly" he performs at this reading and what a "sales smasheroo" that book is, you sense a lonely and baffled man, repeatedly floored by anxiety, hypochondria and a still-raw response to a long-ago violent loss none of which are likely to be solved simply by demanding that women line up to love him. Does Ellroy himself know this about himself? Can he see what we see? The honest answer is I'm still not sure. But I did find myself cherishing a tender hope that I'd misunderstood the whole thing, that a different, more generous reading might be possible.
Ultimately, I felt that the person who perhaps understood him best was Helen his likeably direct second wife. According to Ellroy, she "urged me to create a less rigorous style and shape it with greater emotion". She was referring to his writing, but she might just as well have been speaking about his emotional life. He should have listened to her on both counts.
