Steve Gregoris' Choice

James Ellroy, L.A. Confidential

This is about crime fiction. And for me, crime fiction means James Ellroy. Ever since I sunk my literary teeth into all 485 tiny-type pages of LA Confidential, his obssessive, noir, caffeine-injected, staccato prose has enthralled me. The most compelling crime fiction writer around, bar none, Ellroy had me from page 1, and I subsequently held on through 3 more novels in the space of a few weeks, works that seemed to me to be the truest reflections of the world they were coming from: The Black Dahlia, My Dark Places, American Tabloid. I even recorded an Ellroy documentary from TV and listenend to him talk about his childhood, his mother’s homicide, his life in an LA boading house (or maybe it was a skid row hotel, can’t remember), his marriage, and the blunt psychology that underpinned it all. He was great, an idol, a writing god. And so it remains. Read him.

But also:

Michale Connelly, The Poet

The new guy, for me at least, is Michael Connelly. This summer I bought his The Poet at the Salvation Army Second Hand shop in Bern because it was in English and I like browsing bookshelves and I was on holiday with time on my hands. And it cost a Franc.The cover was awful, more like a greeting card – I mean, just look at it – and I was hoping it didn’t contain the crime-fiction equivalent of that absolutely forgettable computer-generated greeting-card verse. Plus it had the huge, block-letter no-no of the author’s name in huge block letters (you know, “buy this book because whatever this guy writes has just gotta be good.”) As if Led Zeppelin never gave a bad concert. (Did they?) Anyway, everybody knows the axiom about books and covers. Plus, an English friend had told me that Connelly’s stuff ‘had something’.

The Poet is nothing like Ellroy. Or Chandler, another fave. It isn’t filled with the husky voices of elegant blondes or wisecracking cops on the beat or private dicks who’ve seen it all and don’t mind taking a few licks to get at the truth. And plotlines so convoluted convolutedness becomes what the book is about. But it’s not meant to be. And it’s not that poetic, either. There is some poetry, but it’s Edgar Allen Poe’s and it’s all in the killer’s notes. It’s the fairly discursive account of reporter Jack McEvoy, who does crime features for a Denver newspaper. It does, however, seems to exist on the edge of convolutedness looking in, with so many believeable plot twists and turns that you don’t quite get lost, but manage to follow the investigation, and more importantly, want to follow it carefully, believing McEvoy’s ever-changing take on things as he zig-zags aroung America on a believable quest for his brother’s killer. I even found myself moving out of ‘entertain-me’ mode and thinking up plausible murder theories along with him. And there are enough to make you keep reading the 480 pages without laying it aside for something else that you’ve been reading (which – admit it – happens a lot when you’re reading a book you can weigh rather quote the number of pages of). And okay, it is a bit Da Vinci Code-like (though more gratifying), and the ending is Hollywood (and just as gratifying), but what the hell, the getting-there is fun. Not everybody can write like Chandler.

And finally:

Henning Mankell, The Dogs of Riga    and    Sidetracked

The other two books in English at the Salvation Army were by Henning Mankell: The Dogs of Riga and Sidetracked. Kind of unfair, I guess, including two books originally written in Swedish, but this guy can write. As for me: I devoured them in a couple of beery afternoons in the backyard. Maybe it’s my age – around Wallander’s, which means that I can sympathize with a personal life replete with those damn, middle-age insecurities and doubts, and that nagging struggle to get perspective on the world around you. It’s all in there. There must be more, though, because Mankell sells all over the world, to everyone, not only insecure, middle-aged, perspective-less males. Maybe middle-aged males are just more interesting than we think we are.

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

Anne Carson, The Beautiful Husand

I have to admit, I like Anne Carson’s mixing of genres and subgenres to create works with titles like The Autobiography of Red, A Novel in Verse, or Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera, or The Beauty of the Husband; A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos. Carson is a literary freewheeler, and if you aren’t ready to put aside preconceived notions and be accepting of – among other things – de- and re-creation, don’t bother opening any of her books. Her synthetic attitude allows for the creation of new literary space, which she does, and does brilliantly (if you appreciate language and erudition) and entertainingly (if you get see the humanity of it and don’t take it all too intellectually).

This particular work is about a husband-and-wife relationship: the guy’s been a prick and the woman is a suffering victim. And he knows it, and she knows it. And about what happens then. 

Terry Eagleton, After Theory

Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine

Okay, I admit I haven’t finished it yet, but this one still goes on the list. In it Naomi Klein exposes what she calls disaster capitalism – capitalism that exploits or creates disasters in order to apply ‘free market’ principles to national economies. She starts with CIA-funded shock therapy research on human guinea pigs at McGill University in Montreal in the 1950s, and illustrates how this psychologically destructive technique was considered a success and later adopted – in spirit, at the very least – by the US military in its ‘shock and awe’ strategy used most notably in Afghanistan after the World Trade Centre attacks, and currently in Iraq.

She doesn’t stop there though – and this is what she does so well, not stopping but always going further, digging deeper, making connections. She ties shock therapy and military ‘shock and awe’ into economist guru Milton Friedman’s equally unscrupulous and destructive ‘free-market’ theories, showing how Friedman and his disciples went forth and basically destroyed emerging developmentalist economies with a vengeance and relish known to blinkered dogmatists. And how political conpiracy and military force backed it all up in the form of closed-door deals, repression and torture.

It outlines how graduates of the University of Chicago Economics Department (Friedman’s intellectual fiefdom) obtained positions of power with the IMF and World Bank, using them to force poor, debt-ridden countries to ‘restructure’ their economies by privatising nationally-owned companies, slashing taxes, opening up to private investment, disreagrding the poorest members of society . . . I don’t have to go on, do I?

The book ought to be mandatory reading for every WR student. At least.

ATTENTION: Naomi Klein's book is the basis of a recent movie. Click here to get the trailer.