home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
Media Share 9
/
MEDIASHARE_09.ISO
/
mag&info
/
e_form11.zip
/
OVERBYTE.EXE
/
BOOKS.DOC
< prev
next >
Wrap
Text File
|
1992-09-16
|
13KB
|
218 lines
ON PAPER: REVIEWS OF RECENT BOOKS
THE TRUELOVE, by Patrick O'Brian. W.W. Norton, $19.95, 256
pp.
What would you do if you suddenly discovered the
best novelist in the world? You'd try to tell all your
friends about him, of course. "His name is Patrick O'Brian,"
you'd begin. "He's a 77-year-old Irishman who has written 20
novels and lives in the South of France." Their eyebrows
would lift ever so slightly. "Twenty novels? Why haven't we
ever heard of him?"
"Well, his books were originally so badly published
in America that they were almost invisible," you'd start to
explain. "In the last few years, though, Norton has been
doing a fine job of correcting that." "And just what kind
of novels does this O'Brian write?" they'd interrupt.
"Umm... sea stories, actually. His recent books have been a
series of grand adventures set in the British Navy beginning
in Lord Nelson's time, around 1800."
"Did you say sea stories?," they'd bark. "Like those
Hornblower books, you mean?"
"Yes and no. Forester was a good adventure writer,
and his stories have some fine action scenes. O'Brian has
those, too, but they're only a small part of the whole. His
books add up to a portrait of an entire world, containing
every single aspect of human life. What he's done, you see,
is to split his main character in two. One half is a hearty
man of action called Jack Aubrey, who has a splendid career
at sea but a chaotic, debt-ridden life on land; the other is
a weedy intellectual surgeon and spy named Stephen Maturin,
fascinated by science and philosophy. Their only real shared
interest - music - brings Aubrey and Maturin together, and
their friendship is forged by a series of adventures in
love, war and history."
You stop for breath. Have your listeners' eyes begun
to glaze ever so slightly? "I know it sounds a bit hard to
believe," you persist. "But please trust me on this. Start
anywhere - with the first book in the series, MASTER AND
COMMANDER, where Aubrey and Maturin meet in Minorca; or leap
right in, say, with THE FORTUNE OF WAR, set in 1812, where
Jack and Stephen survive a fire at sea and a long struggle
in an open boat, only to be rescued by an American warship
and taken as prisoners to Boston..."
The truth is that I - a 54-year-old urban Jew who
gets seasick on the trip to Catalina - am probably the least
likely person in the world to become a missionary for a
series of sea stories. But O'Brian hooked me a few pages
into the first book of his I ever read, and I've made many
converts since then. Now comes THE TRUELOVE, the 15th novel
in his Aubrey/Maturin opus, and I'm delighted to report that
it's a pure joy to read - on its own or as part of the
glorious whole.
It was published in England as CLARISSA OAKES, which
probably sounded too Jane Austen-ish to American editorial
ears. But it's a perfect title, because the slim and lively
girl who stows away on the HMS Surprise as it sails from
Botany Bay is the real heart of O'Brian's moving and
more-than-usually erotic story. Her surprising and
mysterious past threatens the calm of Captain Aubrey's tight
ship, and the effect her presence has on everyone else
aboard gives O'Brian a chance to explore their characters in
exceptional depth.
Forester fans shouldn't worry: there's plenty of
action, too, including a remarkable battle with a band of
cannibals in which O'Brian sums up all the horror in one
unforgettable image. But what lifts THE TRUELOVE into the
highest ranks of fiction past and present is what it shares
with the rest of its author's writing - page after page of
unmistakably original insights into the mysteries of the
world. - DICK ADLER
DEFENDING BILLY RYAN, by George V. Higgins. Henry Holt;
S21.95
Remember those first George V. Higgins novels - "The
Friends of Eddie Coyle," "The Digger's Game" and "Cogan's
Trade" - when he seemed to be reinventing or at least
revitalizing the language before our eyes? Like David Mamet
in the theater, Higgins made us believe that this was the
way a restless, raffish, occasionally criminal kind of
people talked among themselves.
It's hard to sustain that level of invention and
energy, of course, but there are flashes of it in "Defending
Billy Ryan," Higgins's 24th book and his third novel about
the faded but still resourceful Boston lawyer Jerry Kennedy.
At the end of what reads like a hyperextended saloon
narrative, you might find yourself asking, "What in hell was
that all about?" The outcome is never in doubt: you know
from the getgo that Kennedy manages to keep his client - a
totally crooked but well-connected politician - from the
jail sentence he so richly deserves. But in spite of the
lack of suspense or anything really resembling a plot, I
found myself hooked early on and delighted almost all the
way through - thanks largely to Higgins's uncanny ear for
the macabre rhythms of seedy lives. - CAROL BURNSIDE
WHITE JAZZ by James Ellroy; Alfred A. Knopf, $22; 349
pp.
James Ellroy's novels are violent and profane,
as black as noir gets before it crosses over into lunacy.
Taken as a whole, they are a roar of rage against a city,
the Los Angeles of the 1940s and 50s, where his mother was
murdered and he was sent spinning through years of poverty
and pain until his writing rescued him.
But if that explains why Ellroy writes his
books, why do we read them with such growing fascination?
Starting with "The Black Dahlia" and moving on through "The
Big Nowhere" and "L.A. Confidential," swelling legions of
outwardly gentle readers have stumbled down his meanest of
streets, littered with hacked-off limbs, flayed corpses and
punched-out teeth, where sex is mostly sick and corruption
is a crust in the corner of every single shining eye.
"White Jazz," the final volume in what has been
described as Ellroy's Los Angeles Quartet (Lawrence Durrell
and Paul Scott are probably spinning in their graves), goes
a long way toward explaining Ellroy's popularity and
illuminating his talent.
His central characters - usually rogue cops -
have always been seriously flawed, but Lt. David Klein makes
them look like Dick Tracy. A former World War II hero and
lawyer, Klein heads up the LAPD's Administrative Vice
section in the autumn of 1958. He's also known to the likes
of Mickey Cohen, Sam Giancana and Howard Hughes as The
Enforcer - a stone killer who for a fee will break up a
strike, maim a man or shotgun him into eternity. In his
spare time, Klein and his sister Meg - the narrowly
unfulfilled love of his life - are major slumlords in
minority neighborhoods like Chavez Ravine, where the Dodgers
want to build their new stadium by evicting poor Mexican
families.
Now it looks like Klein's luck has finally run
out. A U.S. Attorney named Welles Noonan thinks he's dirty
just because he tossed a punchy boxer out of a hotel window
as a mob favor and spoiled a Federal probe. His boss at the
LAPD, the seemingly straight arrow Chief of Detectives Ed
Exley, insists he take over a weird no-win burglary/dog
mutiliation case involving the Kafesjians, a nasty family of
drug dealers enjoying LAPD protection in return for selling
their wares to blacks only. His partner, Junior Stemmons,
appears to be running wild, intent on abetting Klein's
destruction. And he's fallen in love with Glenda Bledsoe,
the former hooker he's supposed to be snooping on for Howard
Hughes.
The fact that Ellroy makes us care what happens
to Klein as he fights to stay out of jail and alive is one
measure of his book's success. In a time in the life of Los
Angeles when corruption and racial hatred pollute the air
worse than any smog, Klein has a kind of bent purity of
vision that is at least partially redeeming.
Another measure of his success is that Ellroy
appears to have invented a whole new language with which to
reveal his visions of crime and corruption. "White Jazz" is
written in a wired, terse, stripped-down mixture of brain
flashes and adrenaline, occasionally broken up with
clippings and headlines from newspapers and a magazine
called "Hush Hush" which echoes the infamous "Confidential."
It's Dos Passos on speed - with Celine peering in through
the keyhole and writing everything down while hot jazz plays
in the background.
Here's a sample from very early in the book, yet
already so packed with references that it makes no story
sense unless you've paid attention to what went before:
"New money - spend it smart. Think smart:
"Nail Glenda Bledsoe fast. Let Junior carry some
Kafesjian weight - hope his f...-up string ended. Figure out
that Darktown tail, stay tailless.
"Instinct: Exley wouldn't rat me on Johnson.
Logic: he destroyed the coroner's file; I could rat him for
a piece of Diskant. Instinct: call his Kafesjian fix
PERSONAL. Instinct - call me bait - a bad cop sent out to
draw heat..."
A few pages later, the jazz refrain enters:
"Bido Lito's, 68th and Central - closed. Mark
it: a lead on crazy man Junior.
"I staked the parking lot - no suspicious sh.t -
music out a door down the block. Squint, catch the marquee:
'Club Alabam - Art Pepper Quartet Nitely.' Art Pepper -
'Straight Life' - a Tommy K. smashed record.
"Strange music: pulsing, discordant. Distance
distorted sounds - I synced a beat to people talking on the
sidewalk. Hard to see faces, easy to imagine them: I made
all the women Glenda. A crescendo, applause - I hit my
brights to get a real look. Too bright - jigs passing a
reefer - gone before I could blink.
"I pulled up and walked in. Dark - no
doorman/cover charge - four white guys on stage, backlit.
Sax, bass, piano, drums - four beats - not music, not noise.
I bumped a table, bumped a left-behind jug.
"My eyes adjusted - bourbon and a shot glass
right there. I grabbed a chair, watched, listened..."
You might think that 300-plus pages of this kind
of stylistic shorthand would prove wearing and distracting,
but in fact for me it makes "White Jazz" Ellroy's best book
so far. By squeezing down every act of violence and
depravity - and there are many such acts - into essential
images, he makes them bearable and even understandable
without sanitizing them out of existence. By speeding up the
time between the stations of Dave Klein's cross, he
increases the feeling of pressure on him - from outside as
well as from the tiny part inside him that can still feel
uncorrupted emotion. - DICK ADLER
ENDS
Copyright (C) 1992 by OVERBYTE