What the real Los Angeles possesses, amid all its fiery disintegration, is what Mr. Ellroy's latest novel keenly lacks: a coherent narrative line. We may not have been pleased about what was happening this spring, but we knew why it was happening. In "White Jazz", I was lost by page 56—the page on which the author explicitly reveals whatever plot the novel is going to have. ("Instinct—call me bait—a bad cop sent out to draw heat," Klein correctly guesses.) For the next 300 pages it was just a matter of waiting out the body count and wishing for a more interesting variety of subject-verb combinations. Mr. Ellroy, in order to pack "maximo" action into "minimo" pages, has developed what he clearly views as a whiplash telegraphic style. No doubt the violence done to the English language is meant to mirror the violence done to humanity by its fellow humanity (I'm being charitable here). But we can't really begin to care about characters who never even get to inhabit a complete sentence.