Book Reviews
Books Reviews
Crime Fiction
American Tabloid
by James Ellroy Knopf, 576 pages, $25
Reviewed by Jamie Agnew
Owner of Aunt Agatha's, a mystery & true crime book store.
(Left Image Citation) American Tabloid James Ellroy
As long as I can remember Baby Boomers have tyrannized the cultural landscape. Americans have been forced to endure a stale repetition of Boomer icons (Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Jim Morrison) and Boomer preoccupations (sex, drugs and rock and roll - all O.K. for them but not for you). Part of this cultural myopia is a certain ahistoricism - the events of their wonder years are conceived of as unique, pumped up by hypers like Oliver Stone into mythic significance. Who would have thought that Robert McNamara's tepid, belated misgivings about Vietnam would somehow become front page news? Part of this nonsense is the claim that the Kennedy assassination was some kind of watershed event in American history, a sort of "loss of innocence," on par with that suffered by Adam and Eve.
As a true student of L.A., that very American city, Hames Ellroy knows better. The greatest American novelists (Hawthorne, Melville, Poe) have all known, as Ellroy says, that "we popped our cherry on the boat over." How could there ever have been real innocence in a land founded by misfits and convicts, its greenbacks printed with the blood of Indians and slaves. Since that primal assassination, double dealing, illusion and murder have been business as usual here, and it's our groove as much as anything Chuck Berry ever laid down. Which brings me (finally) to Ellroy's wonderful new novel "American Tabloid."
Make no mistake about it, Ellroy is quite simply a great American writer, and this book finds him in the prime of his power. in typical Ellroy fashion, it begins with several characters - Pete Bondurant, hard-guy killer; Kemper Boyd, infiltrator chameleon; and Ward Littell, bug-and-wire man - threads who are woven into an increasingly twisted pattern, wracked on the loom of history until they create a fictional fabric so strong that the reader can actually forget how it's all going to come unraveled. Along the way there are major players like Howard Hughes, who "always shot up by TV light"; J. Edgar Hoover; various Mafia bosses and toadies; RFK; and, of course, his equally doomed brother, "Bill Clinton minus pervasive media scrutiny and a few rolls of flab."
Like most great writers, Ellroy is also a great stylist, and here he perfects a spare, slang-peppered prose that zings and swings like the coolest lounge lizard that every hung. He takes his own dark territory and obsessions and grafts them onto the body of history, taking a shot at the head of a national fixation and making it indelibly his own. Anyway, I hope you get the idea that I think this is a great book, much better than whatever sentimental and/or flatulent "work" they've presented with the Pulitzer lately. It's not a tidy, open-and-shut mystery, but a sprawling pop-top Pandora's box that, once open, will continue ot haunt for some time.