Reviews

MY DARK PLACES By James Ellroy Knopf, 1996 360 pages, $25 By Jamie Agnew Owner of Aunt Agatha's

I'm no New Critic - when I read I can't help but wonder how the text relates to the author's life - how much of it is "true." When I read James Ellroy I really have to wonder, mostly because it's no secret that his mother was murdered when he was ten.

When it was revealed that as an adolescent, Anne Perry had a hand in the killing of a friend's mother I was shocked. I would never have guessed, although now that I know, of course, I think I can see the cracks of an autobiographical pattern through the surface of her books' fictive veneer, the traces of the strategy she uses to deal with such a past. Perry's character William Monk is an amnesiac, and the more he remembers about his stranger self's history, the more unsettled he becomes. As she writes in her Iatest novel in paperback, "Cain His Brother": "He had no Idea what lay In his past beyond the last couple of years, and perhaps even more frightening than that, what lay In his character ... Memories of those awful moments were stilt there, buried in his mind, sometí mes troubling his dreams."

But instead of trying to dam up the rush of the past by classifying it as an unknowable country when the self was another person, Ellroy has submerged himself in the crime and the time, aspects of it playing out in all his books, but never more so than in his new crime memoir, "My Dark Places." Like Sylvia Plath, another great writer who lost an opposite sex parent at the vulnerable age between separation and adulthood, Ellroy has made a mythology out of his trauma, worrying the primal wound into a magnificent scar which gives power and distinction to his corpus.

"My Dark Places" is divided into four distinct parts. The first is a Jack Webb just-the-facts style cop-eye view of Jean Ellroy's murder, young James (or Lee Earl as he was then known) glimpsed in the third person periphery as a strangely unmoved ten year oId. After cutting through a cross section of lower middle class 1958 California USA, the investigation grínds to an inconclusive halt.

The second part is by far the strongest. In it Ellroy unleashes his autobiography, as wild a beast as any of his fictions. With a cold eye and frightening honesty he reveals all his twisted inspirations and sublimations, exposing the deepest roots of his wríting, his prose soaring and be-bopping to new heights. This is what his fans have been avid to read, and Ellroy doesn't fail them, testifying a true confession that fascinates even as its language astonishes.

The third part introduces Bill Stoner, the Homicide Detective assigned to the Unsolved. Ellroy presents Stoner as a prototypical Ellroy Cop, justice-driven and corpse-obsessed, a living, brílliant precis of contemporary LA crime.

The final part goes back into the first person, recounting Stoner and Ellroy's attempt to track down Jean's killer almost 40 years later. There's a second headlong race through the facts, faces and photographs of the case, this time with computers and 800 numbers, but it all hangs up into the same dead end.

In time, however, both Ellroy and the reader realize that the true mystery is not the identity of the putative killers, the "swarthy man" and his blond, pony-tailed accomplice, but the identity of Jean Ellroy herself. Unlike Plath who adored her father in life then grew ambivalent after his death, Ellroy disliked his mother at the time of her murder, preferring his slothful father and his negative Vision of his ex-wife. It's only through his process of cognition and research that he's able to not simply despise or idealize her, but begin to see her something like she really was, and through the reflection of her into his own real self. For a writer who has resolutely charted the heroic and destructive aspects of male behavior, it's a breaking out of the female anima, a reconciliation of the warring parts of his nature and our culture.

Just as all fiction has an element of autobiography, so all autobiography has an element of fiction; in the end "My Dark Places" is an amazing, mind-blowing, unclassifiable, incredible fucking book. James Ellroy's audacity, poetry and veracity are unparalleled in contemporary writing and this book is a magic key, not only to his life and work, but to the mysteries of our dark and violent society as well.