Annals of the Defense of Marriage
"The numbers don't matter. It's not a body count, a scratch-pad list or a boast." So James Ellroy begins this very list-like and unavoidably boastful memoir of a lifetime of – I was going to say, relationships with women, but I think I'll go with his own word, with all its implied connotations of breathless hounding: pursuit. A lifetime's pursuit of women.
And what a breathless piece of writing this is. When it comes to pinning down the most startling possible word collision, Ellroy's acrobatic pizzazz is beyond doubt. In fact "pin" is probably too weak a word. This is literary knife-throwing at its most exhilarating and dangerous. But to what effect? Because I can't remember when I was last so bored, exhausted and annoyed by the supposedly honest outpourings of a fellow human being.
The story goes roughly like this. Caught up in his parents' bitter, sometimes violent divorce, Ellroy finds himself, at 10, with conflicting feelings for his tall, red-haired mother. Certainly they verge on the sexual: "I hated her because I wanted her in unspeakable ways." In a drunken rage, she clouts him. He wishes her dead. Three months later, she is murdered – by person or persons unknown. Consumed by guilt and shame, he spends the next 50 years seeking out women who look like her, and (almost literally) begging them to love him. This is a life – and a book - haunted by tall redheads. They appear fleetingly in bars, in dreams, even at readings on the many book tours as he becomes more – as he does not neglect to tell us – famous and successful.
As the chronology of the memoir becomes ever more opaque – you can only blame Ellroy's ferociously staccato prose – it's hard to keep up. But we start with the inevitable childhood and teenage crushes, moving on to encounters with prostitutes, drug addiction, breakdown, rehab, brief marriage, second longer marriage, and several serious, if doomed, relationships with (often red-haired, sometimes married) women. In the final pages, we get to Erika, whom Ellroy seems to have prised from her husband a relatively short time ago and who remains (to date anyway) the love of his life. And yes, she is tall and has "reddish blonde hair".
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