Re: RARA-AVIS: Recent read: American Tabloid (Spoiler)

From: Ed Lynskey ( e_lynskey@yahoo.com)
Date: 05 Dec 2007


Interesting, Mark. The last Ellroy title I read was CLANDESTINE
(1982) which was a pretty good police procedural. There were racist slurs/attitudes, but I didn't feel they were overdone beyond the context of the storyline. It sounds like that aspect changed.

Ed

--- DJ-Anonyme@webtv.net wrote:
> I had the opposite reaction to American Tabloid. It led me to
> swear off
> Ellroy, of whom I had once been a huge fan, turning all of my
> friends on
> to him. In my mind Ellroy's writing became schtick in this
> book, a
> caricature of his style. And that caricature led me to
> believe for the
> first time that Ellroy sets his books in the past so he can
> have an
> excuse for spouting racist, misogynist and homophobic speech
> and say
> "it's not me, it was the times"; for the first time, I felt it
> was him,
> as he spread the views too uniformly among characters, with
> little to no
> variation of viewpoint.

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