In this savagely audacious novel, James Ellroy plants a pipe bomb under the America in the 1960s, lights the fuse, and watches the shrapnel fly. A young, insecure teacher embarks on a journey through Europe to Turkey, where he wants to see a woman again whom he believes to be his fate.Daniel is a young teacher in-spe, who in contrast to everyone else plans to stay in Hamburg for the summer. Ellroy instead inscribed her book, "Lady, this ain't a fucking mystery!" Short, clipped, fragment sentences. The three-to-five word sentences are assaultive and hardly informative after awhile. While that clipped style worked very well for me in White Jazz and--to my astonishment--even better in American Tabloid, I found Cold Six to be straddling almost Dick and Jane-like syntactical territory so often, it is almost sinful--makes Hemingway look like Henry James. The store had a customer who couldn't come to the event who liked to have all her books inscribed "Dear Mystery Lover" by the visiting authors.
While that clipped style worked very well for me in White Jazz and--to my astonishment--even better in American Tabloid, I found Cold Six to be straddling almost Dick and Jane-like syntactical territory so often, it is almost sinful--makes Hemingway look like Henry James. MLK, CIA, FBI. Vegas. Or, if you have a few minutes:This one gets the full-on review because I wrote one up a few years back in an attempt to understand whether I liked the book. Confidential standing out as wonderful works). But for those who do, the rewards are great. Welcome to the realm of James Ellroy books. I love this dirty poetry, so for an extra treat, I'm listenAnother breathtaking, snarled novel by Ellroy, filled with phenomenally unlikeable people doing despicable things, and you can't stop reading it. Probably my biggest problem with the novel was the way it was written. However, there are sAs excited as I was to read Ellroy's American Tabloid, I found this sequel a bit disappointing.
Much more fragmented and hard to digest than the brilliant American Tabloid. The action is more of the same from American Tabloid, and the characters don't have that grey love-hate quality; Mostly I just hate them. Style doesn't help. I cannot say that I find four words sentences very attractive and they are getting really tiresome after a few hundred pages, but I must admit that they do coAllow me to pat myself on the back a few times for finishing this novel. Which in a way is odd, as it also feels at points more style over substance. Publisher. Knopf.