Word: prose
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Being the author of the hit-novel-turned-even-bigger-hit-movie is that for which James Ellroy is most celebrated. A sort of Raymond Chandler of the 90s, with a prose accordingly jacked up and acidified to match these less enchanted times, Ellroy is one of the most respected crime writers today to sling out stories ripped from the underside of American history. His heroes and villains crawl through dark worlds of dirty secrets but secrets which are paradoxically laid bare to a piercing, raking intellect. The subtext of the scandal sheet is that nothing is secret; everything...
...Ellroy's prose is hard-hitting and relentless. His self-revelations are just as unflinching. From the non-fiction side of the book, "I hated and lusted for my mother and went at her through postmortem surrogates. I buried her in haste and burned flames for other murdered women. My mother's death corrupted and emboldened my imagination....I majored in crime and minored in vivisected women." It becomes difficult...
almost cruel, to enjoy the no-nonsensecertainty of the prose in the fiction when, justthe page before, one sees the near-necrophilictendency which powers his writing...
...bureaucratic confusion this side of Kafka. After all, McGough's client was, in Malcolm's evocative retelling, a veritable genius at the art of the con: layering stories upon stories and constantly filing equally believable, contradictory documents in legal offices across the country. Without Malcolm's intelligent and clear prose as a beacon, anyone would be lost trying to understand the intricate activities presented in the work: shuttling funds among bank accounts, filing counterfeit documents, forging signatures, inventing associates, and selling bogus companies to a gang of equally disreputable businessmen...
...cover of Memoirs ofa Geisha, the novel begins with a translator'snote, convincingly signed by "Jakob Haarhuis,Arnold Rusoff Professor of Japanese History, NewYork University." The story begins from there asthe ever hopeful, bitterly realistic voice ofSayuri takes over, and the reader finds himself sotaken by the enveloping prose, quietly blendingthe "superlative degree of comparison" present inDickens's opening in A Tale of Two Citieswith the seducing party-haze of wealth and a longafternoon that Fitzgerald so successfully employsin The Great Gatsby, that he soon sheds hiscritical eye and sinks deeper into the sofa for along, delicious read. This...