How Jordan Harper Reinvented Noir for the Epstein Era
As I approached the end of Jordan Harper’s “A Violent Masterpiece,” this year’s buzzy crime novel, I was surprised—slightly disoriented, even—by the presence of an unexpected feeling on the page: hope. The feeling is unexpected because of all that has come before it, including in “Everybody Knows,” Harper’s previous novel, to which “A Violent Masterpiece” is a sequel of sorts (though perfectly readable on its own). The world of these books is a bleak, fallen one: a grotesque, Day-Glo Los Angeles where the rich and powerful do whatever they want, aided by armies of flunkies and stacks of N.D.A.s. Both stories burst at the seams with corrupt cops and politicians, private mercenaries, concierge peddlers of drugs and sex and plastic surgery, lawyers who stop charges from sticking, and “black-bag publicists” who stop dirt from surfacing. One central character is a monster clearly cobbled together from recent-ish headlines of American depravity: part Weinstein, part Epstein. (In “A Violent Masterpiece,” he quickly winds up dead in jail.) The novels’ Boschian background is full of people whom the powerful no longer have any need for, or never cared about in the first place—discarded child actors, assistants who couldn’t hack it, addicts who live in encampments.
Harper has been widely fêted by both critics and his fellow crime writers. (“Everybody Knows” was, according to the detective novelist Michael Connelly, “the book everybody’s been waiting for.”) When “A Violent Masterpiece” came out, in April, the Times Book Review dubbed it “the noir novel for our times.” In the noir tradition, Harper’s writing trains us not to set our hopes too high. Again and again, he shows us how would-be rebels who fight “the Beast” (as a few of them call L.A.’s power structure) get defeated and punished, often violently. His prose radiates an ecstatic pessimism, as if lit up from within by the relief of not having to sugarcoat things with comforting lies. “This wicked truth that moves under everything rises to the surface,” he writes, describing an outbreak of police violence against protesters. “The serpent that circles the world shows itself.”
But, as the new book hurtles toward its climax, it starts to seem as if at least some of Harper’s characters might eke out some kind of victory against the Beast. Is Harper, like so many noir writers before him, raising our hopes for the express purpose of dashing them against the rocks? Or is hope really in reach? If so, what kind?
“Noir,” a term originally coined by French critics to refer to certain American films made in the nineteen-forties, now refers to all manner of stories, onscreen and off, with a wide variety of preoccupations and stylistic tendencies. If there’s a single unifying fixation, it might be the contrast between surface and reality, and especially between superficially happy cover stories and subterranean despair. In the forties and fifties, noir stories of criminality thumbed their noses—with style—at the enforced cheeriness of postwar American life, dissenting from the era’s sunny master narrative: that the U.S. was always and forever a beacon of progress, an unambiguous force for good in the world, a place where hard work and upstanding behavior were always rewarded, and crime never paid. In the decades since, more recent variants have adapted this schema for other settings. West Coast noir insists that the sun-drenched beauty and free-spirit mythology of California hide a world of corruption and greed. Nordic noir suggests the presence of violence and hatred beneath the tranquillity and order of the Scandinavian welfare state, just as Southern noir peels back hospitality and charm to reveal repressed family secrets and moral decay.
Noir always means darkness—but how much of it, and how completely, in “true” noir, it blots out the sun has always been a debate among connoisseurs. In essays accompanying their co-edited anthology, “The Best American Noir of the Century,” published in 2010, the genre masters James Ellroy and Otto Penzler insist that literary noir has to mean total bleakness: stories exclusively about desperate people doomed to lose it all, because them’s the breaks. The genre, Ellroy writes, is “the nightmare of flawed souls with big dreams and the precise how and why of the all-time sure thing that goes bad. Noir is opportunity as fatality, social justice as sanctified shuck, and sexual love as a one-way ticket to hell.”
Harper is a well-known fan of Ellroy’s; he spent years working up a TV adaptation (never picked up by CBS) of Ellroy’s 1997 novel, “L.A. Confidential,” and, in the afterword for “A Violent Masterpiece,” he thanks Ellroy “for carving the path.” So, as expected, he has gloom to spare. His books are pervaded by depravity of all sorts: casting agencies that funnel desperate young actors to powerful older men; little Weinsteins everywhere; rich kids who get off on launching explosives in homeless camps. There’s even a human-tissue business that scouts the morgue, looking for corpses to process into the stuff of butt lifts and plumped lips. If you’re thinking that a human-tissue business sounds like a great way to hide evidence, you’ve probably been reading too much noir; you’re also right.
“A Violent Masterpiece” alternates between the perspectives of three characters. None of them lose their innocence in the course of the story; they lost it long ago. (Ellroy again: “America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets.”) Kara Delgado works as a fixer at L.A.’s premier concierge service, catering to the outré tastes and perversions of the city’s élite. Doug Gibson, the novel’s closest thing to an idealist, is a pugilistic criminal-defense lawyer, the kind with ads on bus-stop benches. He has a well-worn speech about the value of due process and can speak trenchantly about all the ways the system is stacked against his clients. But somewhere inside he knows that the status quo has made him a wealthy man, while he hasn’t changed the status quo a bit. Jake Deal, formerly employed to dig up secrets for a gossip website, now works for himself as a live streamer; he drives through the city, using a police scanner to track down scenes of chaos and carnage, feeding his viewers’ appetite for vérité gore. If the photos are good enough, he can sell them to his old employer.
All three characters know exactly what’s wrong with the world. If they were in the mood, they could articulate a cogent critique (and, in the next breath, a plausible minimization) of their own contribution. All three are shown enjoying what they do, at least some of the time. Each, in a way, gets to be up close to the gears that make the real world turn. Each gets to enjoy the adrenaline rush of making the world bend to his or her will, at least a little bit: Kara when she gets every rule rendered moot on her clients’ behalf; Gibson when he gets his clients out, or their sentences reduced; Jake when he gets the right footage or finds the right words for his live stream (called the Creepy Crawl) and sees his followers go wild. Here he is, talking to his audience:
In interviews, Harper has described prepping for the novel by driving around L.A. Jake-style, police scanner and all. The live streamer feels like a stand-in for the author’s own ambivalence about crime writing. In one charged scene, Jake—moonlighting as an investigator for a celebrity-blackmail outfit—films through a window as a famous actor becomes increasingly violent with a woman he’s just picked up. At first, Jake is worried mostly about the poor quality of the video he’s capturing. But the worse the scene unfolding through the glass gets, the more troubled Jake becomes—by the celebrity’s actions, yes, but also by his own. Almost by reflex, he punches the window, smashing it. The intensity of Harper’s writing, especially in his grisliest depictions of violence, can feel like the prose equivalent of trying to smash the glass. At other times, the book embodies an awareness that glass-smashing isn’t in the cards.
What is the line, you can sense Harper asking, between documenting the horrors of the world and profiting from them, packaging them—like Jake, like Harper, like almost all crime writers—for an audience safe at home? In one of the novel’s eeriest moments, Jake is driving around the city, talking into his microphone, as usual—only now it’s intentionally unplugged and he isn’t live-streaming, because what he’s up to (fighting the Beast) is secret. He’s trying, I think, to figure out what he sounds like when just describing the world isn’t enough, and when he’s not putting his description up for sale. It’s as if Harper, too, is trying to figure out what kind of noir he’s really writing, and why.
Around the novel’s halfway point, one of Harper’s characters dares to change, or try changing, his relationship to the Beast. They receive a brutal noir comeuppance, in a scene of terrifying violence. Reading it, I felt that trademark quicksand feeling of the most hard-core noirs: that every action, no matter its intentions, is sending its characters in only one direction—down, closer to the heart of darkness.
But then the book keeps going. If your preferred experience of reading crime fiction relies on knowing absolutely nothing about how things pan out, stop here. Harper’s characters live to fight another day. (Well, some of them do.) More than that, though, they transform into people who are resolved to fight, with new weapons in their arsenals and new feelings in their hearts. “I’m thinking, maybe there’s another way of being,” one of them says fumblingly, in a rare moment of direct sincerity. “I’d like to find out if there is.”
Is this still noir? Partisans of the Ellroy and Penzler definition probably wouldn’t say so, except perhaps as a diss, proof of a contemporary inability to face misery without slapping on some good cheer at the end. Or perhaps one might say: It’s not really noir—and that’s fine! Ellroy himself, in the nineteen-nineties, declared, “Noir is dead for me,” because its world view was too simple, and left no room for him to explore subjects such as love, redemption, and self-knowledge without forcing them into a predetermined script.
But there’s another way of looking at the noir-ness of Harper’s writing, one that draws on the genre’s history without using it as the basis for an essentialist definition. If traditional noir drew much of its energy from sneering with style at America’s sunny master narratives, those narratives have largely broken down, as has the homogenous mass-media ecosystem that endlessly recirculated them. There’s no significant cultural prohibition against pointing out that things aren’t going so well. (“Things Aren’t Going So Well” is easy to imagine as the title of a Times op-ed, a viral Substack post, or a new A24 movie.) In the era of Trump, Epstein, and all the tentacular corruption they represent, pointing out that there’s rot beneath the surface, or a repressed truth behind the smile, isn’t edgy; it’s rote. Now the rot is right there on the surface; the people smiling are less likely to be clueless optimists than the people who are happy about the rot, or profiting from it. A network of particularly depraved men in “A Violent Masterpiece” has a name for itself, one that speaks not just to its members’ impunity but also to their delight: the Kids in the Candy Store.
Maybe it makes sense that a noir for our current era would dare to find its way to hope, albeit hope of a very noirish variety. If Harper’s voracious hunger for piling on details of Hollywood depravity can seem exploitative, the noir framework suggests another way of looking at it. In order to point—against the prevailing mood of our times—toward a sliver of optimism, he needs his readers to know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that he’s fully aware just how hard that optimism is to find. The risk, of course, is that he makes the depravity so convincing that hope can only pale in comparison. Readers will have to decide for themselves what to believe. Doing so will mean asking just what they think about the world today and our prospects within it. These are questions that can be discomfiting, even disturbing. Which is, in its way, pretty noir. ♦