If readers haven’t encountered one of my schizophrenic reviews that litter my GR book diary here and there, I’m writing another one again. I always feel torn when I admire the talented writing and/or depth of research and ideas of a writer, and ultimately, the author’s tricky mind, but at the same time, I also think the subject/characters are despicable, horrible and unpleasant. One such book that I read previously was by Octavia Butler, ‘Fledgling’. ‘American Tabloid’ is another. Once again, I wish I had access to a gif which blinks back and forth between one star and five.There almost isn't a single character towards whom I felt anything but horror disgust dislike. Every antagonist, and they ALL are antagonists, are monsters abusers sadists murderers at the worst, and shallow selfish narcissistic lying bullies at best. They are all frenemies without an ounce of friendly feeling towards each other, but they seem to prefer avoiding anything like conspicuous killing out of self-preservation, except when they feel it's ok.Women are treated dreadfully. They are only sperm-inducing sex toys. They are either tissues for absorbing fluids or madonnas to be kept dusted and polished.Non-white races are all cannon fodder or pawns, never thought of as exactly human life, to the characters.This is one of those books I can tell men automatically adore and discuss and choose characters as avatars because they want to BE that guy. Probably the white males in particular will think some of the characters as cool as James Bond. From my actual experience with men, generally, they tend to ‘lean in’ about guns, pissing contests, hierarchical power plays and bloody force before any intellect is engaged. If you disagree, hang out with any gamer who will be blasting away happily and participating in the rape, mutilation and destruction of females along with opponents, children, animals, villages, etc. Of course, most of them would NEVER in real life, right? I’m reminded of another book which seems to attract men while dismaying women with the same divide of internal genetic compass - ‘On the Road’ by Jack Kerouac. Conspiracy fans will believe every word in this book is actually TRUE.The eastern US coast media employees, such as from news and high society magazines, organizations like Washington Post, Time and Vanity Fair, probably did not stop talking about, drop names from, giggle over and muse over, this book for days when it first was published. It’s an insider book. The novel not only is about a group of men vying for attention from the most famous family in America, the Kennedys, John Kennedy being often called the one President who was glamorously ‘royal’ in the eyes of American citizens, but in real life had a life of drama and trauma, including the worst thing, assassination, which cut his life short at a young age, leaving behind a beautiful widow and young adorable children, one still a toddler. At the time, people often felt it was the end of political innocence in the USA, with most of the population unaware of any dangers facing the world beyond the Cold War and the atomic bomb. Otherwise, we all were watching family sitcoms in which the white characters always dressed nice, never swore or drank, and the plots were usually about a young son who lied to his mother about visiting his friend to see a movie instead of studying for a test, with taped fake laugh tracks. This book is not about any of this manufactured innocence which was in force in the USA at the time, however. Instead, it is a fictional insider’s look at the men who populated the underbelly of politics and criminal organizations supported by out-of-control legal police organizations.The famous characters in the novel - John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Jimmy Hoffa, J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes - all are actually still heavily weighted with mythology and conspiracy theories in real life, with some of the actual tabloid stories written at the time having been proved true after all. The ‘heroes’ we follow in alternating chapters throughout - Pete Bondurant, Ward Littel, Kemper Boyd - are all fictional employees of the FBI during the actual non-fictional period when the FBI was worried about the Mafia and the Cuban Communist takeover by Fidel Castro. The years 1958-1963, which pass quickly for the reader despite the book being almost 600 pages (but not without a ton of grief, agony and dread for every person who has the horror of being blackmailed or coerced or tricked into secret associations with these fictionalized devils of 1963), were important to USA political history. This reader did not shed a single tear for anyone. They are all bad people in this story.The plot is amazing. It dazzles with political complexity, trickery, intelligence and plausibility. I kept thinking, ‘this scene actually may have happened somewhere at some time, even if perhaps not at this time and place with these characters.’ I am aware of realpolitik and I have seen it being applied. However, I found the novel’s endless stream of practical viciousness, indifference and avarice under the cover of realpolitik while the characters were actually trying to make themselves rich or powerful too depressing and disgusting. It was more than a touch of the same themes of the movie, ‘Pulp Fiction’, only from the viewpoint of people who have a badge and the authority of the FBI, CIA and the Oval Office. Also, while cinema seduces with quickly assimilated situations and simplified plots, accompanied with catchy music amplifying the manipulated feelings of the viewers, this was plain sad, creepy, horrifying and stomach-turning because of the waste of lives playing at dark criminality. I felt very bad for those characters who had a genuine desire to help the country or catch bad guys, but who end up embracing selfishness themselves with the noir requirements of surviving betrayals and lack of honesty and support. Still, I couldn’t feel a lot of love for anyone.The writing is experimental. The author has eliminated extraneous words. Sentences are choppy and difficult. To parse the meaning despite the short sentences and short paragraphs can take a second longer than usual to comprehend what is happening. I still can’t understand why the author did this, and I do not like it besides. Usually, an author plays with either language or writing conventions in order to enhance the themes or metafictional meanings, or it may express a sly personal irritation. Perhaps the author is expressing subtextually in a visual and verbal manner that all of these fictional, evil clever gentlemen are missing important things in their characters which would have rounded them out into being normal human beings, similar to the effect of missing words in the sentences, that would give warmth or sympathy to them.I truly hated this book. The dark sides of human nature are rarely captured with such plausible believability in a fiction novel. I also truly admired this book. It is thought-provoking and memorable. I’m sure it is already considered a classic for many people. Cartoon darkness is fun for me. This book, despite veering into almost a feeling of satire, is not fun. The satirical feel is due entirely to how actual criminality can be stranger than fiction.I did warn you that I was going to be weird about this novel….
James Ellroy has called me a panty sniffer to my face. Granted, he calls everyone at his book signings a variety of colorful names, but I still like the idea that I’ve been personally mock-insulted by one of my favorite authors. This is his best novel, and my love for it is pretty much unconditional. As proof of my devotion: My internet alias is from a character in it, and I’ve got an autographed copy of it sitting on my shelf along with an signed copy of the sequel, The Cold Six Thousand. The trilogy completes with the release of Blood's A Rover next week so I’m going back through the first two books, and it’d been a few years since I’d read American Tabloid. It was even better than I remembered.This is Ellroy’s freaky take on American history from the late ‘50s through the JFK assassination, and it features Jack and Bobby Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, and Jimmy Hoffa. It’s got the Mafia and the CIA, Cuba and Cuban exiles, the 1960 presidential election, the Bay of Pigs, the civil rights movement, and some heroin trade, just for laughs.Ellroy uses one of his unholy main character trinities of Bad White Men doing Bad Things, but instead of limiting the action to post-war Los Angeles like he did with the LA Quartet of crime stories, he uses his three fictional characters chasing their own twisted obsessions and ambitions to probe the darker moments of a particularly juicy slice of American history.Kemper Boyd is ex-FBI, who begins spying on the Kennedy’s for J. Edgar Hoover, and ends up devoted to Jack, even as he is moonlighting for both the CIA and the Mafia. He wants all his masters to unite in a play to oust Castro so that his behind-the-scenes schemes will make him wealthy enough to be just like a Kennedy, but he has to make sure to keep his loyalties compartmentalized.Ward Littell is Kemper’s former partner and friend, and is still with the FBI. He hates the Mob and wants nothing more to go to work for Bobby Kennedy to get away from J. Edgar Hoover’s obsession with persecuting harmless leftist groups. Even though he’s considered weak and cowardly, he shocks himself and everyone around him with the lengths he goes to fulfill his dream of being a Mob buster for RFK.Big Pete Bondurant is a former LA cop and works as a criminal handyman for Howard Hughes. He runs blackmail divorce shakedowns and does the odd contract killing for the likes of Jimmy Hoffa in his spare time. Once arrested by Kemper and Ward, he likes Kemper’s style but hates Ward with a passion. Pete thinks he can ride shotgun to history by becoming Kemper’s partner in his various Cuban schemes, and he likes the sound of that rather than being Howard Hughes’s errand boy.As all three of these men scheme and plot and commit horrible crimes to become more like the powerful men they are beholden to, they keep rubbing up against big events and desperately try to shape them to their will. What they all find out the hard way is that the people they’re dealing with didn’t become who they are by getting fooled by the men they regard as useful but inferior.One of the things I absolutely love is Ellroy’s complete lack of buy-in to the JFK/Camelot bullshit. The myth goes that JFK was a glorious leader who was cut down because he stood up to the Bad Men in the country who wanted to take us into Vietnam. (An odd story considering that JFK is the one who started committing troops to Vietnam.) Ellroy brilliantly points out that the reality is that JFK was the son of a rich and corrupt man, and in one of the weirdest twists every, probably owed his presidency to the very people that he then let his zealot brother prosecute. (In all likelihood, the Mafia helped JFK take Illinois because of promises from guys like Frank Sinatra that JFK was reasonable.) RFK hated the Mob but turned a blind eye to the CIA recruiting Mafia contacts for trying to kill Fidel Casto. The Cuban exiles felt terribly betrayed when not only did JFK not fully commit to the Bay of Pigs invasion, he turned on them in the aftermath by having the Feds bust their training camps in the South. If you believe in a conspiracy about JFK’s death, Ellroy points out that the guy might have brought it on himself by betraying so many people. And if there was a conspiracy, it probably wasn’t some Oliver Stone paranoid fantasy about some all-powerful military-industrial complex, it was probably a group of these type of guys, motivated by general JFK hatred that knew that all the embarrassing entanglements of JFK’s legacy would keep a real investigation from ever being done. (I personally don’t think there was a conspiracy, but JFK surely pissed off a lot of dangerous people by having his cake and eating it too and it makes for a great story.)This is Ellroy at his best. Fully in control of his crazy staccato-brilliant-writer-with-ADD- style, and wildly spinning plots and counter plots with over the top violence and history as the backdrop.Fair warning for those who haven’t read, there’s a lot of ethnic slurs in Ellroy’s work and he’s taken some heat for this over the years. He defends this by pointing out that he’s writing about evil white guys doing horrible things 50 years ago. They wouldn’t have been politically correct. He’s got a point, but it is pretty jarring reading in this day and age.
What do You think about American Tabloid (2001)?
The first volume in Ellroy's epic trilogy of 1960s America is an oft-nightmarish cavalcade of corruption and violence. Ellroy makes great play out of the fact that you can't slander the dead as everyone from Jimmy Hoffa to JFK emerges as venal, crazy or both. Although there is a lot of fun to be had in exploring the connections between history and Ellroy's fiction, the main narrative pull centres on the shifting alliances and machinations of three highly flawed central protagonists. Ideologies are abandoned and loyalties betrayed as our anti-heroes subvert, bribe and murder their way through a chaotic maze of gangsters, deranged Cuban exiles and the ultimately empty promise of redemption offered by the doomed Kennedy clan. One for history and crime buffs alike.
—Anthony Ryan
This is the first Ellroy I've read, and it will likely be the last. Mostly because I find it impossible to take this seriously.I don't doubt for a minute his portrayal of mobsters and G-men and teamsters run amok in the fifties and sixties; I'm sure they were just as violent and hellbent on mayhem as they're depicted here. His gloss on the Bay of Pigs jibes, too. There is one neat bit of business following a character's slow arc from soft-skinned do-gooder alcoholic into revenge-driven killer. But that character's evolution isn't near interesting enough.More the problem is the prose, which is written in a kind of Ellroy clipart style. Every time someone in this book gets punched, that person spits out a tooth. Or swallows a tooth. Or (memorably) spits out a bit of bridgework. If some guys are going to be taken out by shooting, and there is anything combustible nearby, the bodies, the car, the trees, the prose will all be set afire. Just about every time. If someone gets cut, it is always "to the bone." Nearly six hundred pages of this tedious, repetitive twaddle. The ridiculous "hard-boiled" voice keeps the characters from ever gaining more than two-dimensions and always at arm's remove. People love Ellroy, I get that. A friend recommended this book. But not this reader.
—Michael
On TourIn 1996, Ellroy toured Australia with one of my favourite bands, the Jackson Code.Ellroy did a number of readings from AT, then the band played and then he sang/narrated with the band.It was a great night, although I am hazy on the detail.It was an early date with my wife, and I didn't get as drunk as I would otherwise have done (and do now), but I am hazy nevertheless.I don't know how they got the idea to do a gig like this.I remember that Ellroy wore a great Hawaiian shirt.He looked like he had just given up alcohol, but still had a hangover.He was still hurting from his last hangover and he was now hurting from the abstinence as well.Sounds like Purgatory.Of course, my memory might have totally failed me and he might actually have been swigging from a bottle of bourbon the whole way through the gig.Snarski VoicesThe Jackson Code conjure(d) up beautiful geographical atmospheres that suggest early settlement Sydney Cove, France, California, anywhere noir where people are desperate to make a quid.Their singer, Mark Snarski, has one of the best male rock voices I've ever heard, if you're into David McComb of the Triffids and/or John Cale and/or Mark's nearly equally talented brother, Rob Snarski (Black-eyed Susans).I think Ellroy sang a few covers, as well as talking over the top of their soundtrack.If I said one of the covers was "Blue Velvet", I might be wrong, but I hope you get the drift.The gig was a unique opportunity to see a side of someone you wouldn't otherwise see.The GiftEllroy signed books and chatted after the gig.I already had a copy of AT, which I was reading and hadn't thought to bring to the gig.I decided to buy another copy for a friend and get him to sign it.I stupidly decided I would give the autographed copy to an ex-girlfriend.When I gave it to her months later, she grunted some sense of unenthusiastic recognition, but she ultimately thought the book was too long and the sentences were too short and never finished it.Don't you hate ungrateful gift recipients?Don't you hate ungrateful ex-girlfriends (or boyfriends)?One day, I'll break into her place and steal it back.How Dedicated Can You Be?Some readers might wonder why I didn't just keep the book.I wouldn't have to break in and confront her husband who's a bouncer.Good question.Well, I had made the mistake of asking Ellroy to dedicate it to my friend, Janet.He asked me what I wanted him to say and I said, "I hope this book doesn't remind you of your ex-boyfriend, because he gives me the shits."In Janet's eyes, that would be definitive evidence that I had actually met him and I wasn't bullshitting her.He looked at me quizzically, then he tittered politely like a Hollywood exec rejecting a pitch, and I could tell he wasn't going to comply with my request.Still, he scribbled away and handed the book back to me in a way that suggested that he and my ex had just signed a pact and maybe, perhaps, I shouldn't sneak a peek at what he had written.Obviously, my wife grabbed it when we got in the car (she was driving) and she exclaimed, "What's this all about?"I know better than to answer when she asks that question, so I signalled for her to show me the book.Inside I noticed that Ellroy had written:"Janet, you remind me of my mother, you've got really great tits. James Ellroy"I did get one side-benefit out of this experience, and that was I got to do a near-perfect replica of Ellroy's autograph on my copy of AT.But don't tell anyone.
—Ian Agadada-Davida
