“The Enchanters” by James Ellroy, translated from English (United States) by Sophie Aslanides and Séverine Weiss, Rivages, “Noir”, 672 p., €26, digital €20.
We can easily imagine him swapping his eternal flowered shirts for a coroner’s apron; and his pen – he always writes by hand – for a scalpel. For forty years, Doctor James Ellroy has tirelessly pursued his task: to dissect again and again the great corpse of the American dream.
He had already autopsied the Kennedy years in American Tabloid (Rivages, like all his books, 1995), probed the entrails of a brutal and corrupt police force in the 1940s and 1950s with his Los Angeles Quartet (1988-1991). And even dissected the myth of the serial killer, less a criminal genius than a bloodthirsty loser (A killer on the road1986). With The Enchantersthe third in a series of five planned books on post-war Los Angeles (after Perfidia2015, and The Coming Storm2019), Ellroy sharpens his scalpel and bursts the abscesses of a Hollywood in the midst of its late golden age, the capital of vice in advanced decomposition, where Orson Welles photographs the antics of movie stars to make pornographic card games sold under the counter.
As a compulsive clerk of these turpitudes, here is Freddy Otash, a defrocked cop and inveterate voyeur, a notorious junkie who became Ellroy’s favorite character after having been the antihero of his novella. Extortion (2014) then from General panic (2022). In the heart of the summer of 1962, while Marilyn Monroe’s corpse is still warm, after an overdose of barbiturates, Otash is tasked by Robert Kennedy, Attorney General of the United States, with a delicate mission: to discredit the actress even in the grave to erase all traces of the “suicidal sleeping” of her brother President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, whose mistress she was. The investigation of “Freddy O” is recorded in a hallucinatory diary where her gaze, like a “human camera”walks from opulent villas to “clandestine fuck arcades” from the underworld.
Staccato flow punctuated by alliterations
“I have a photographic memory. I see and imprint things that no one else sees.”professes this expert in espionage and fatal gossip, double of an author also worked by the attention to detail. Miniaturist of human passions and thwarted redemptions, Ellroy does not reinvent himself, and so much the better. When the soup is good, why change the recipe in favor of some “revisited” broth? We find in The Enchanters his staccato delivery punctuated by alliterations. Or his figures of speech which, far from being any affectation, parody the semi-clandestine cabbage leaves of the 1950s and 1960s to better immerse his reader in the excesses of the time. From this assumed license, the author draws the portrait of a Marilyn in “clumsy storyteller”prey of “bizarre criminal fantasies”or corrects that of “JFK”, priapic president who “gets laid in two minutes” And “plans an hour for his appointments, including martinis, club sandwiches and chit-chat”.
You have 34.88% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
