White Jazz – James Ellroy, 1992 ★★

Losing the Plot

Life is a subjective, scattershot experience lived in the moment. How can a fiction writer present this on the page?

Most don’t, understanding reading is enough of a challenge without subjecting their audience to real-time fog of war. Others, most famously James Joyce, employ a method known as “stream of consciousness,” of an endlessly percolating series of wildly disparate thought bubbles.

Then there’s James Ellroy, who seems to craft his plots with butcher paper and Post-It notes, and shoves that into his typewriter wholesale for readers to dope out. Life comes at you fast and hard; so does Ellroy. At least that’s how White Jazz goes down.

The final volume in Ellroy’s “L. A. Quartet,” White Jazz introduces us to David Klein, a detective lieutenant in the Los Angeles Police Department who moonlights as a lawyer and mob hitman. In the second chapter, we watch him toss a federal witness out a hotel window, begrudging his dirty deed but doing it anyway. He’s also a slumlord who nurses an unslaked lust for his sister and spews racial and ethnic invective when he’s not actually beating people up, so a bit of a tough-love figure here.

Gangsters Tony Brancato (in the passenger seat) and Tony Trombino, after they were gunned down in L. A. one night in 1951. In White Jazz Klein explains he shot them after they abused his sister. In real life, their murders remain unsolved.
Image from https://calisphere.org/item/2b549a8c7c78d97c11ecd7a97adef08d/

What’s really tough about White Jazz? Making sense of what goes on:

Junior shook free. Foot thumps – window-storming plainclothesmen. Cover noise: I pulled my spare piece. Two ceiling shots, a wipe – evidence.

That’s a taste of how the narrative runs throughout the novel, and what made reading White Jazz unpleasant for me. Its jagged, staccato style never relents.

Ellroy is known for a terse, fragmentary style; you have to expect that going in. But White Jazz is more extreme, like looking through a shattered lens. Maybe it’s because the novel is presented as a single, first-person narrative from Klein’s viewpoint, rather than the third-person narratives split up among three characters which came in prior “L. A. Quartet” novels The Big Nowhere and L. A. Confidential.

With those novels, at least you can triangulate. Here you only get Klein, talking and thinking in shorthand throughout and not pausing to explain things as he pinballs through a city on fire.

Los Angeles in the 1950s. The city is its own character in Ellroy's novels, as colorful and mean as the rest.
Image from https://www.gettyimages.com/videos/los-angeles-1950s

The main thing White Jazz has going for it is wrapping up the story arc begun in The Big Nowhere and continued in L. A. Confidential, a power struggle over the Los Angeles Police Department between Homicide Captain Dudley Smith and Chief of Detectives Edmund Exley, both memorably introduced in the earlier books. Klein dopes out he is being used in this struggle by Exley as a pawn. He hates Exley, but fears Smith, so he’s not sure with whom to side.

Suspense also centers around a relationship Klein has with a Z-movie actress who was once involved with Howard Hughes, a family of aberrant drug dealers who have a cozy relationship with the LAPD’s Narcotics Bureau, and a federal probe into city police that threatens to air a landfill of dirty laundry. Klein has a partner even sketchier and nastier than him who goes rogue halfway into the book, shaking down homosexuals in a park between hits of heroin.

Centering all of this is the business of relocating one of Los Angeles’s largest Latin communities so the city’s new baseball franchise can build a stadium at Chavez Ravine.

“We’re all civilized white men who know the Dodgers are good for business, so let’s get to it,” says Klein as he agrees to the idea of framing a liberal city councilman opposed to the plan.

Chavez Ravine was a lower-class community where many of Los Angeles' large population of Mexican immigrants lived until the city fathers bulldozed it to build Dodger Stadium, beginning in 1959. In White Jazz the eviction is a plot point and one of many dirty deals. Image from https://www.chavezravine.org/blog

These are all solid storylines, and Ellroy’s bitter view of humankind infuses them with a compulsive cynicism that deepens a sense of the reader being right there with Klein. But Ellroy’s refusal to lay out a coherent narrative becomes a chronic problem:

Peeper/prowler/B&E man – all one man. Jazz fiend/voyeur – the noise fed the watching.

Noise/music – go, follow it –

Stray thoughts like these not only course through White Jazz, but at times engulf it. Ellroy seems more intent on communicating what Klein is feeling than what he is thinking or doing; it is a chore trying to deduce where the subjective ends and the objective begins.

The core relationship of the novel as it develops is between Klein and the actress, Glenda Bledsoe. Her own dark past, like Klein’s, involves murder. But she’s not Klein’s sister, making her something of a redemptive object of desire for him.

Conversation between them tends toward the ironic and elliptical:

“Why are you putting yourself to such trouble to keep me out of trouble?”

“I can appreciate style.”

“No, I don’t believe you.”

I didn’t, either. Since his relationship with Glenda brings him a lot of trouble, Klein’s interest in her needs to be spelled out better. All I got was that her beauty and sardonic approach to life intrigue him enough to pull him out of his incestual-obsessive rut, and that he likes the action she brings into his life, even (especially) when it nearly kills him.

A 1962 postcard of the Cocoanut Lounge at Los Angeles's Ambassador Hotel, where David Klein observes the famous and powerful mingle. It is one of several real-life locations used in White Jazz.
Image from https://www.ebay.com/itm/Cocoanut-Grove-Ambassador-Hotel-Dining-Scene-Los-Angeles-CA-Vtg-1962-Postcard-/273768960392

Other characters court death even more openly, which supplies White Jazz with a high body count and several unanswered questions as to motivation. A fair amount of the latter connects to sadism and drugs, though there is also a matter of the woman who prostitutes herself for kicks and her brother who gets off on tape-recording her trysts.

What worked for me is Dudley Smith, the one character who maintains the energy and vibrancy he had in the prior “L. A Quartet” books. For one thing, he’s the only person who speaks in complete sentences with a round, explanatory style and a sense of humor, qualities this book needs badly. For another, his menace gives White Jazz a focus it otherwise lacks.

His exchanges with Klein are unsettling fun:

“Lad, you surprise me. I had thought your homicidal tendencies to be strictly profit-motivated.”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to accept this new aspect of my personality.”

White Jazz represents a new aspect in the personality of the “L. A. Quartet’s” title city. Back when it all began, with The Black Dahlia, it was the postwar 1940s and Los Angeles was just starting to emerge as an economic powerhouse and destination, its fierce energy tamped down by repressive conformity and racism. By the time of White Jazz, a new progressivism was sweeping through the culture, threatening to expose what had been allowed to fester.

A film adaptation of White Jazz was in the works in 2006, with George Clooney (above) set to produce and star. But those plans fell through the following year, in part over concerns about reproducing the complexity of the plot.
Image from https://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/person/35763%7C0/George-Clooney/#overview

Given all that, White Jazz is bitter storytelling, concerned more with sin than salvation. In that way, it was for me a disappointment after The Big Nowhere, which despite a downbeat ending offers a glimmer of hope through last-act redemption; and L. A. Confidential, where some people actually get themselves clear of the carnage.

That is also true of The Black Dahlia, though other than setting and chronology, little connects that book with the other three. Black Dahlia does establish a structure observed in the other volumes in that it presents a horrific murder case to be solved, around which traditional police procedural/mystery rules are observed in a way to give Ellroy’s warped fantasia a kind of structure.

In White Jazz, though, a fractured narrative clouds the murder mystery to the point where the investigation is impossible to piece together. Often the information Klein develops is left unexplained. Time and again, he shows up at someone’s door and they either try to kill each other or fence around with cagy non-sequiturs that I am sure make more sense after a third or fourth reading I don’t have time for:

Strong and dirty: Exley. Strong/cautious/grasping: Noonan.

Use them both: fight/squirm/lie/beg/manipulate them.

Author James Ellroy and friend. When it comes to prose, his leash is anything but tight.
Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/555420566520118191/

If you are living this story as intensely as Ellroy is while writing it, the meaning of these words no doubt fall into place. But with Ellroy, the opaque nature of the back-and-forth accounts for much of its charm. More than in the other books, what you have here is an exploration in themes and tones suggested by its very title.

Intermittently, what you get does work. The resolution of the Exley-Smith conflict is exciting, satisfying, and intelligently plotted; Klein’s own fate works in a surprisingly quiet way. If you were as invested as I was in The Big Nowhere and L. A. Confidential, you want to read how their fluttering plot threads finally get tied up, and they are to a degree.

Yet too often I felt I was reading an outline for a novel, rather than the novel itself. This is a story full of passion and depth of feeling, yet at the same time pocked with plot holes and left-field character shifts which loose construction only partially conceals. White Jazz has an aura of magnificence about it, an arresting verve that is classic Ellroy, but I felt shortchanged by its execution all the same.