Adam Rivett

‘In the scattered and incoherent set of margin notes that constitutes a critic’s initial response to a text, a certain word can appear often enough to force a method of interpretation. The first ‘paradox’ I scribbled on Joanna Walsh’s short story collection Vertigo appeared on its second page. A second note – this time modified to ‘paradox (again)’ – appeared soon after, in the margins of the second story. Numerous others followed. By the time I’d moved on to the second of three books published by Walsh in 2015, Hotel, I was merely gathering evidence in a case already decided.’

While Ellroy works on a big canvas – war, love, unsolved murders – his narratives do not have a long novel’s turning circle. They burn through plot, through false leads and easy answers and obvious betrayals. The first 100 pages of Perfidia are likely denser and more knottily arranged than most crime novels are in their entirety.

All That Is is both sweeping – a man’s entire adult life is covered, beginning from the age of eighteen and ending in old age, just before serious illness might begin – and minute. Despite the span of time covered in the book, it is under 300 pages. It is a book of small breaths.

During my formative years, when I was still a baffled undergraduate, this was a magical name amongst the friends I counted as readers, and even to older acquaintances a generation removed from our contemporary gods but not so dismissive of the notion of greatness as to not bend at the knee to the prowess of a novelist in the highest flight.