Did the mastiff file down his fangs? The cult author of
Black Dahlia now has God in his mouth and his faith slung over his shoulder. While the writer, known for his unpredictable moods and his rants, usually terrorizes those around him and the journalists who follow one another to interview him (duly briefed on his demands and prohibited subjects: Trump, the upcoming elections, his private life…), he appeared that morning smiling and warm in the Parisian offices of Editions Rivages. A miracle?
We simply connected him from the outset to his hero narrator, Freddy Otash, and that’s what matters most to him. Because his novel with its ironic title, the Enchanters, which plunges into the most sordid corners of the Hollywood Babylon of the sixties, is above all the journey of an ex-cop corrupt to the bone, a man possessed by evil (he commits an assassination from the opening of the book) and to which the novelist offers a redemptive gesture at the end of the more than 600 pages of his dark odyssey: in the very last lines.
If the chronology of the story is not trivial, centered on the summer of 1962 and the cross-investigations which followed the overdose of Marilyn Monroe, the death of the star is only the smokescreen which allows the writer to expose the vices that plague American society, whose innocence is forever lost. Bringing to the surface the most unspeakable sins of the post-war United States, letting its hero flounder in the darkest mud before he is finally touched by grace, that is the ambition.
And when the great James Ellroy talks about the moment of the shift from darkness to light, tears come to his eyes. The man had a trajectory equal in violence to that of his characters, a mother murdered when he was 10 years old. Freddy Otash is his dark side. And make no mistake: the novel is still as crude, trashy, the words are not
