Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Books | August 14, 2025
White Jazz by James Ellroy
To be honest, 2025 has not been a great reading year for me. I’ve felt so unmotivated to finish the titles I pick up. Everything feels a little off, just not what I’m craving, but I’ve also no idea what it is I want to give myself over to for several hours. In these harried times, I’m seeking clarity, but ironically, the author who has helped me to overcome my reading block is one who deals in pure feverish conspiracy.
James Ellroy’s work is darker than black, the kind of hard-bitten noir that descends into hell and laughs in the face of utmost carnage. The cops are crooked and the politicians are worse, the crimes are disturbing, and there’s no true salvation from this irrevocably broken system. I started off my Ellroy spree with The Black Dahlia, one of his most accessible books, then made the perhaps ill-advised move of jumping into White Jazz, which is the fourth part in the L.A. Quartet (although you can read them out of order) and the most stylistically challenging of the collection.
It’s 1958. Dave Klein is a Lieutenant in the LAPD as well as a goon for hire and slumlord. He’s got a law degree and moonlights as a killer for hire for the mob. Howard Hughes hires him to dig up dirt on an actress on his payroll. A local drug dealer sanctioned by the LAPD has been murdered. Gangster Mickey Cohen is out of jail and trying to go straight. Nobody is innocent, but justice must prevail.
My description of the plot is deliberately vague in part because White Jazz is a story that screws with your memory. Its machine gun-firing rat-a-tat-tat prose takes the noir trope to its limits and, while fascinating to read, is easy to get lost amongst. A lot happens, and you’re barraged by death at every turn. Reading White Jazz reminded me of another book I love, Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice. In that, you read along with this increasingly convoluted and hallucinatory investigation, keeping up with every step, but the moment you stop to recall what’s happened, you find yourself questioning everything.
Ellroy is excellent at capturing the strange satisfaction of a conspiracy theory. A lot of his work, I’ve been told, feels like every tinhat theory you’ve heard about American politics from the 1950s and ’60s came true. White Jazz isn’t quite that overwhelming in content but its prose makes you feel like you’ve uncovered something intense and nobody will believe you. Soon, you feel as defeated as his rotten protagonists, self-loathing men who see no way out that isn’t through the barrel of a shotgun.
Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis
I haven’t read Bret Easton Ellis since I was a teenager and caused a minor scandal in high school when people started passing around my copy of American Psycho. I’ve always viewed him as a writer akin to Chuck Palahniuk, someone whose work would probably only work on me before I reached the age of 18. I’m not sure what drew me to read Less Than Zero, but I’m glad I did.
Written when Ellis was only 21, the novel is both achingly of the 1980s and surprisingly prescient. Clay is a bored rich college student who goes home to Los Angeles for winter break and falls back into a cycle of booze, drugs, and sex with his circle of sort-of friends. Everyone is spoiled, alienated, and high. His ex-girlfriend, Blair, may or may not want to get back together with Clay. Julian has fallen into addiction. Trent is a model who is giving up on the whole morals thing. Things only get worse from there.
American Psycho remains Ellis’s most controversial novel for obvious reasons, but Less Than Zero was still shocking to many. The New York Times review declared it to be ‘one of the most disturbing novels I’ve read in a long time.’ Much was made of its portrayal of undiluted nihilism in a world of rich narcissists, with critics claiming that people this callous and privileged didn’t exist. Ha. It’s fascinating to see a story about a group of people who have never experienced consequences before. Some cannot handle it while others remain unbothered to the point of pure evil. One character falls into prostitution and an abusive relationship with their pimp while another rapes a child simply because he can. I think that’s what disturbed readers: not just the cruelties and self-destruction but the notion that there are people out there so cushioned by money and power that they’ll never be forced to confront it. I can’t imagine why this book would feel so horribly relevant in 2025.
Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell
Hey, why don’t I talk about another of my all-time favourite books? Writer and NPR favourite Sarah Vowell is obsessed with Presidential assassinations. Four American Presidents have been murdered while in office: Abraham Lincoln, James A. Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy. Eager to learn more about the first three, Vowell took a holiday, travelling across the nation to pay a pilgrimage to many places of presidential importance.
I love Vowell’s voice: dry, sardonic, informed but not smug, fascinated by history but not in thrall of it. Reading her work reminds me of listening to one of my favourite podcasts, You Must Remember This, in that they both rely on smart and enthusiastic women who share facts and anecdotes with the witty joy of your best friend at the bar with a tray of martinis. Vowell is cheekier than Karina Longworth, but it does not dampen her eloquence. The history of presidential assassinations isn’t just an intriguing personal obsession, and another way she finds herself fascinated by death, but the Trojan horse through which she routes a new path through her dismay with contemporary America.
‘I am only slightly less astonished by the egotism of the assassins, the inflated self-esteem it requires to kill a president, than I am astonished by the men who run for president,’ she writes at one point. Through her travelogue of rambling humour and cockeyed optimism, Vowell delves into America’s dark past and finds herself curiously hopeful about its future. Granted, this was written in 2005. We need a new Vowell book. It’s been 10 years since her last one. Come on, Sarah, it can’t all be Incredibles stuff, right?
