“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 exchanging his eternal flowered shirts for a medical examiner’s apron; and his pen – he always writes by hand – against a scalpel. For forty years, Dr. James Ellroy has tirelessly pursued his task: dissecting again and again the great cadaver of the American dream.
I had already done the autopsy on the Kennedy years in American tabloid (Rivages, like all his books, 1995), plumbed the depths of a brutal and corrupt police force in the 1940s and 1950s with his Los Angeles Quartet (1988-1991). And he even stripped away the myth of the serial killer, less a criminal genius than a bloodthirsty loser (A killer on the road1986). With The Enchantersthird part of a series of five planned works on post-war Los Angeles (after Perfidy2015, and The gathering storm2019), Ellroy sharpens his scalpel and punctures the abscesses of a Hollywood in its golden age, the capital of vice in advanced decomposition, where Orson Welles photographs the antics of movie stars to make porn card games sold in secret.
As a compulsive recorder of these vile deeds, here is Freddy Otash, expelled policeman and inveterate voyeur, famous cameraman who became Ellroy’s favorite character after having been the antihero of his novel. Extortion (2014) then General panic (2022). In the middle of the summer of 1962, while Marilyn Monroe’s corpse was still warm, after an overdose of barbiturates, Otash was charged 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 “suicidal sleeping hours” of his brother, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, of whom he was a lover. The investigation of “Freddy O” is recorded in a hallucinatory diary where his gaze, like that of a “human camera”Walk from opulent villas to “clandestine baisdromes” from the underworld.
Choppy delivery punctuated by alliteration
“I have a photographic memory. I see and print things that no one else sees”professes this expert in espionage and fatal gossip, a double author also worked for the attention to detail. A miniaturist of human passions and frustrated redemptions, Ellroy does not reinvent himself, and that is a good thing. When the soup is good, why change the recipe for a “revised” broth? we find in The Enchanters His staccato delivery was marked by alliteration. Or his rhetorical figures which, far from being feigned, parody the semi-clandestine cabbage leaves of the fifties and sixties to better immerse the reader in the excesses of the time. From this supposed license, the author draws the portrait of a Marilyn in “clumsy conniver”dam of “strange criminal fantasies”or correct that of “JFK”, a priapic president who “it goes off in two minutes” AND “allow an hour for meetings, Martini, club sandwich and small talk included”.
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