Book review: The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit Of Women

Published on Wednesday 29 September 2010 14:35

James Ellroy Heinemann, £16.99

IN THE spring of 1958, ten-year-old James Ellroy wished the mother he lusted after, and resented, dead. Three months later, Ellroy got his wish. Jean Hilliker's battered body was discovered in bushes east of LA.

Thus began what became, for Ellroy, not so much an Oedipus complex as an Oedipus simplex. "I wanted one Woman or All women to be Her," notes the acclaimed crime writer in his first memoir since 1996's My Dark Places.

That earlier work was a lurid expos of Ellroy's dysfunctional young adulthood (drugs, prostitutes, flirtations with the American Nazi party) interwoven with the story of his attempt to solve his mother's murder. This latest book, in its own way as grimly fascinating as the first, shines a spotlight on Ellroy's "wildly passionate quest for atonement in women".

An unwitting collusion with his father's misogyny produced in the prepubescent Ellroy a willingness to accede to the hateful delusion that Hilliker, through her fondness for men and alcohol, deserved her death. Later, a love-filled, hate-saturated longing for his mother morphed into a nasty predilection for peeping, stalking and breaking and entering women's homes.

In 1977, at the age of 29, he cleaned up his act, went into Alcoholics Anonymous, got a job as a golf caddy and resolved to write. His strategy towards women matured.

"My saviour shtick and their capitulation to it - their vow to assuage my big hurt"- proved more successful than plain voyeurism, though the intention remained the same. They were all mirages, conjured projections, necromanced versions of the dead, sexually brutalised Hilliker.

And so it went on. In The Hilliker Curse, Ellroy guides us across the bleak, sometimes overblown territory of his doomed entanglements. In his sixties, Ellroy finally settles on "The One", a fortysomething redhead called Erika with a striking resemblance to his mother and whom he preposterously describes as having "earned her place as Her, She, The Other".

Long before The One's arrival, Ellroy's second wife warned him of his "eagerness to live in puerile fixation". This self-portrait of a man almost pathologically sexually arrested in adolescence makes for a seductive, uncomfortable but unputdownable read. It's a rare book that makes one spin with gratitude to be resident in the calmer, more companionable sexual suburbs of middle age.

This article was first published in Scotland On Sunday, 3 October, 2010