I have an ongoing love affair with
noir fiction. For about six months, I poured through the works of
Raymond Chandler and
Dashiell Hammett, and I loved every minute of it, every serpentine subplot and planted holdout piece and surly dame. Chandler and Hammett wrote some great schlock, and I was often impressed with how concise and powerful their prose could be, especially the dialogue. However, once I'd read a few of their books, I felt like I'd read them all. Both authors established a basic blueprint for their plots early on (and for the genre at large), and then rarely bothered to stray far from its boundaries. More recent noir derived fiction tends to mess around with the genre conventions Ray and Dash layed out, and that's where I've found some really good reads. Here are a few that stand out.
The LA Quartet, by James Ellroy (Various Publishers, 1987-1992)
In spirit,
James Ellroy is probably the author on this list that is closest to Chandler and Hammett in style and sensibility. In fact, Ellroy has said that he doesn't allow himself to read any contemporary fiction, lest its influence creep into his writing, and that Ray and Dash are two of the only authors of fiction that he enjoys. Ellroy's writing goes down darker, deeper holes than Ray and Dash's, and-at the risk of being painfully cliche- he's much "grittier"(sigh). Ellroy's fascination with crime began at a young age, in the aftermath of his mother's murder in 1958 (which he documents in his memoir
My Dark Places). Ellroy has amassed an extensive body of work over his career, uniformly set in Los Angeles in the 40's and 50's. His earlier works are typical noir, albeit with a bit more craft than most, but it wasn't until he rammed the LA Quartet (
The Black Dahlia,
The Big Nowhere,
LA Confidential and
White Jazz) down America's throat that he started to receive serious attention in critical circles. The quartet follows a loosely defined plot arc, with a few overlapping characters and events that recur throughout all the books, but what joins the books as a quartet is not so much a plot or characters, but the setting of Los Angeles and Ellroy's fascination with human weakness, Machiavellian political maneuvering, and of course, sex, drugs and violence.
What I like the most about Ellroy is how compact and powerful his prose is, even more so than the sources it is derived from, more in line with masters of minimalism like Hemingway than the old masters of noir. Ellroy also has an eye for human weakness and a way of describing it without overtones of condescension or moralizing that I admire almost as much as his minimalism, and themes of weakness and corruption permeate everything that he writes. The way Ellroy renders his Los Angeles and the socio-political context of the early 20th century is also incredibly comprehensive and vivid, as is the way he weaves historical events and personalities into his plots (
The Black Dahlia murders,
Howard Hughes,
Mickey Cohen and the
Chavez Ravine controversy among others).each of the novels could easily be read and enjoyed by itself without the need to establish context by reading all of them chronologically. Indeed, I feel that readers who try to read the books in order might do themselves a diservice, as the first two novels are probably the least impressive. Out of the four, I feel that the latter two, LA Confidential and White Jazz, are the most impressive and readable of the bunch. For someone looking to get their feet wet, I'd read Confidential first, as it is probably the easiest and punchiest of the bunch to burn through. Even if you've seen the movie, you have no idea what kind of ride you're in for. White Jazz is my personal favorite, and it is stylistically much different than the other novels-Ellroy's original manuscript of it was 900 pages, but upon being asked to shorten it by his publisher, he clipped it to 350
by removing all of the verbs. The result, combined with Ellroy's already scant language, is incredibly coherent and powerful.
Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson (Putnam, 2003)
If I had only one word to describe
William Gibson's appeal and significance as an author, I would choose "prescience". Gibson is arguably best known for his first novel,
Neuromancer, which won the
Hugo award for best science fiction novel (basically the Pulitzer for Sci-Fi) and predicted the creation of the internet years before it actually took place. In his later works, Gibson would go on to
predict cultural phenomena like reality television, cyber sex, and the death of the nation state (well, we're still waiting on that one...), and he's contributed a boatload of neologisms to the Oxford English Dictionary as well. Just how prophetic and original a writer Gibson actually is has been the subject of heated debate, but regardless of how well he's able to see into the future, nobody contests the fact that he's a damn good wordsmith. Gibson's understated dialogue and lush imagery are his most impressive tools, and in those respects he's drawn several critical comparisons to Chandler. He also has a facility with describing settings, particularly cities, that showcases his impressive understanding of all the myriad factors that determine what a place was, is, and could become.
Pattern Recognition is Gibson's first book that isn't science fiction, and in a way that makes it all the more impressive a novel, because it manages to be just as bizarre and thought provoking as his previous works while remaining within the realm of plausibility. The protagonist, Cayce Pollard, works as a freelance "coolhunter", who tracks social and economic trends to predict emergent consumer preferences. Cayce is unique in that she reacts physically to corporate trademarks and imagery in the same way other people's bodies do to allergens (rashes, itching, difficulty breathing), and she is able to use her psychosomatic condition to aid her in her work, as an indicator of how distinct and powerful a product or image is. Pollard spends her time outside of work on her hobby, trying to discover the origin of a set of mysterious internet videos collectively called "the footage". Eventually, Pollard finds her life consumed by the pursuit of knowledge regarding "the footage", and that is when the plot starts to take off. The thematic density of this book is astounding, and I couldn't do it justice in a few sentences, but its core is the same as every noir or detective story, a search for meaning and significance in a world that readily offers neither. Even the name, Pattern Recognition, suggests this process. Over the course of the book, Gibson touches on his perceptions of the impact of 9/11, a "nodal point" event after which the world is never the same. He also suggests that in the wake of the chaos caused by 9/11, Cayce's search for the meaning of "the footage" and a more all encompassing understanding of reality becomes a difficult, if not impossible task. Uh oh.
The Yiddish Policemen's Union, by Michael Chabon (HarperCollins, 2007)
Michael Chabon? The guy that writes "sensitive guy with glasses" fiction that wins big awards? Yes, he has a book on the list too. Unlike Ellroy or Gibson, Chabon is diverging from his larger body of work into the noir motif with
YPU, and his style is significantly less "hard boiled" yet equally enjoyable. Chabon's sentimentality and his character focused narrative style combine with the basic elements of noir in a way that only occasionally feels forced, and Chabon's efforts at brevity in contrast with the sprawling sentences and lavish descriptions of his previous works add an interesting element to the novel, and the moments when he truly accomplishes "more with less" are worth the trip through this book. Chabon also takes some time to play around with linguistics here, combining Yiddish with the lexicon of noir slang to create neologisms of a humorous bent (the Yiddish slang for gun is Sholem, the word meaning Peace). The persistent themes that Chabon established in his previous works (Judaism, homosexuality, the burdens of exceptionality) are all present here, albeit with a dramatically different method of presentation.
YPU is set in the present day in an alternate timeline where the United States granted land in Alaska to displaced Jews in the wake of World War II. The novel is set in Sitka, the largest city in this "safe zone", during the last few months before the zone is to be repatriated to the United States. Chabon's protagonist, Meyer Landsman, is a detective for the Sitka police department who stumbles into a web of conspiracy when he investigates the death of a man who lived in the same apartment complex as him. Landsman is a fairly typical detective protagonist of the Marlowe/Spade variety, with predictable demons like alcoholism and martial problems dogging him, but Chabon's attempts to breath some complexity into a fairly straight forward "jaded tough guy" trope worked well enough. The storyline is ambitious in scope, and to me felt a bit unfocused at times, but the magnificent set-piece sequences and occasionally masterful wordplay that Chabon puts to work in the novel overcame most of my qualms, and I enjoyed reading this book quite a bit. I'm not necessarily a huge fan of Chabon's sentimentality, and there were certainly moments in
YPU that were a bit too saccharine for my taste, but if you can get past the wishy washy parts there's an interesting noir hybrid here that's worth your time as a reader. Interestingly, the book has been optioned as a screenplay and
is currently in pre-production with The Coen Brothers set to direct, on the heels of A Serious Man, a work that was itself focused on issues of Jewish identity. Yow-za.
