When the reviewer called
this book the Finnegan’s Wake of crime novels, they really weren’t completely off
base. While it is not as scattered and confusing as that novel (nothing is), James
Ellroy’s The Cold Six Thousand is still a hard novel to follow that really acts
on a purely emotional and aesthetic level and not so much narrative as an experience.
It is also a novel that would be really cool in audio form because of its
direct, almost aggressive prose style and many different character voices. But
even though it seems to be written and acts on an emotional level, it is very
hard to be invested in what is happening around the three main characters, not
the least of which is because you don’t have a clear idea of the action. But on
a sentence-by-sentence basis, this is a very memorable book, easily quotable,
with many phrases that will stick to the tip of your tongue. It follows two of
the three main characters from the first book in the Underworld USA trilogy,
and begins right after JFK’s assassination. Ellroy does a great job with
explaining the darker side of history, even if it isn’t quite as true or as downbeat
as he would like us to think. Wayne, a crooked cop on the tail of a ruthless
pimp, Ward, a sleazy lawyer, and Pete, a hit man with ties to violent revolutionaries
who finds himself in the jungles of Vietnam. All three act as unseen architects
to the kind of history lesson we weren’t supposed to learn. This is a violent
book, filled with violence that begins and ends quickly, leaving the reader
breathless, but unchanged in emotion or feeling. It is still a cool book for
conspiracy buffs whose view of things is a little more skewed than the rest of
us.
Rating: 4/5
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