{"id":7264,"date":"2017-02-09T22:33:51","date_gmt":"2017-02-10T03:33:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/najc.ca\/?p=7264"},"modified":"2018-01-17T16:03:01","modified_gmt":"2018-01-17T21:03:01","slug":"perfidia-by-james-ellroy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/najc.ca\/perfidia-by-james-ellroy\/","title":{"rendered":"PERFIDIA by James Ellroy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Perfidia<\/a>PERFIDIA
\nby James Ellroy
\nAlfred A. Knopf, 692 pages, 2014
\nby David Fujino<\/p>\n

It\u2019s December 6, 1941 \u2014 America is on the brink of World War II \u2014 and among the police and public service denizens of L.A. (Los Angeles) the coming of the Japanese internment and its inevitable land grabs already dominate the general mental chatter.<\/p>\n

Dominant Asian populations are routinely referred to in abrasive and popular racist language as Japs and Chinks. The LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department) heedlessly follows their own code of conduct while ostensibly observing the law. The lives and daily exploits of the LAPD are fuelled by murder, booze, criminal activity, rapid chain smoking, amphetamines and opium. Concurrently, saturnalian encounters abound and the Hollywood set embroiders L.A. life with its passing-through-luminaries like the actress Bette Davis, conductor\/composer Leonard Bernstein, and the singer and political lightning rod, Paul Robeson.<\/p>\n

Such is the feverish world of American novelist James Ellroy\u2019s PERFIDIA which covers 23 days from December 6, 1941 to December 29, 1941 \u2014 the paranoid hectic days before, during, and after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The country is staring into the abyss and is simultaneously poised high, quote, on \u201cthe precipice of America\u2019s ascendance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Conceived as the first book in the Second L.A. Quartet, PERFIDIA is an ambitious fictional history of LA during World War II. In this proposed Second L.A. Quartet, Ellroy takes characters from his original L.A. Quartet and trilogy (set between 1946 and 1972) and portrays them in their much younger years.<\/p>\n

PERFIDIA\u2019s sprawling and self-indulgent narrative typically mixes real-life and fictional characters \u2014 for example, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Joseph Kennedy (the patriarch of the Kennedy political dynasty), and J. Edgar Hoover of the F.B.I., are among this book\u2019s dramatis personae, along with created characters like the closet gay chemist Dr. Ishida and his mother, Mariko. It can be categorically stated that no one, no one in this book is innocent, law-abiding, nor angelic.<\/p>\n

In Ellroy\u2019s striking short hand prose, we are introduced in Chapter One to the brilliant LAPD chemist, Hideo Ashida, who is on the job after a robbery: \u201cLos Angeles \u2014 Saturday, December 6, 1941, 9:08 am. There \u2014 Whalen\u2019s Drugstore, 6th and Spring streets. The site of four recent felonies. 211 PC \u2014 Armed Robbery.\u201d Notice Ellroy\u2019s especially active and audacious staccato prose.<\/p>\n

Then, one day, the shocking death of the Watanabe family sets off certain segments of the LAPD on high alert. This central incident, around which the plot largely pivots, is the gory death \u2014 is it a murder? or ritual suicide, seppuku? \u2014 of the well-off Watanabe family (father Ryoshi, Aya the mother, daughter Nancy, son Johnny) who live in Highland Park and not Little Tokyo.<\/p>\n

The four main characters in this novel are Hideo Ashida, a bilingual Nisei LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department) chemist; Kay Lake, a dilettantish young adventuress and keeper of a scandalous journal; real-life Captain William H. Parker of the LAPD; and Sargeant Dudley Smith, an Irish-born (Dublin) and L.A.-raised ex-gun runner, who are brought together during these 23 days as lovers, rivals, partners, and history\u2019s pawns, only to be torn apart and finally left exposed under the unforgiving, bleak light of reality.<\/p>\n

At this point, it seems entirely appropriate to quote the epigraph to this novel:
\nEnvy thou not the oppressor,
\nAnd choose none of his ways.
\n\u2014 Proverbs 3:31<\/p>\n

And further consider this: While Ishida hides crucial evidence found in the Watanabe murder investigation, he\u2019s also promised a delayed internment from Dudley Smith, and upon release, will receive preferential treatment for himself and his mother. And after Kay Lake\u2019s vividly chronicled diary entries of her intimate actions and interactions with Ishida, Captain William Parker, Sargeant Dudley Smith, and the leftist lesbian documentary filmmakers whose films condemn the rise of the Nazi and Axis powers, Kay Lake herself is never investigated and goes scot free, for these are heady times and normal rules don\u2019t apply.<\/p>\n

The reader can see why Ellroy has been described as \u201cthe lap dog of the LAPD\u201d. Ellroy practically rhapsodizes over the free-wheeling, cruelly murderous impulses of his characters who no longer operate in a rational world, and in his scandal sheet allegations about Eleanor Roosevelt\u2019s sexuality and her female comrade film makers, he exhibits considerable prurience, for Ellroy is, above all else, a highly personal novelist.<\/p>\n

PERFIDIA is a true rampage of language. All the niceties of most written language are ignored: in comparison, Mickey Spillane reads like a fine belle lettrist, and, like it or not, enjoy it or not, James Ellroy\u2019s latest novel depicts L.A. and its citizens, including the Japanese Americans, as never before, and that\u2019s oddly refreshing \u2014 and finally, to give readers a clear sense of this novel\u2019s intriguing \u2018tone\u2019, I offer the following dictionary definition: Perfidy = treachery, disloyalty, deceit, duplicity, betrayal, lying.<\/p>\n

\u2022<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

PERFIDIA by James Ellroy Alfred A. Knopf, 692 pages, 2014 by David Fujino It\u2019s December 6, 1941 \u2014 America is on the brink of World War II \u2014 and among the police and public service denizens of L.A. (Los Angeles) the coming of the Japanese internment and its inevitable land grabs already dominate the general […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7448,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,38],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/najc.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7264"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/najc.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/najc.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/najc.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/najc.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/najc.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7264\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/najc.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/najc.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/najc.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/najc.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}