American Tabloid (1995)

Awesome! ( )

At first I thought there were way too many characters and sides fighting against each other. It made it difficult to follow or to understand the characters. But then I realised, that is exactly what you want in a conspiracy/espionage novel; every side trying to setup or double cross each other, people playing a few sides in an attempt to achieve this.

The reason why I enjoy reading Ellroy books is simply because he knows how make it feel like I’m reading a book from the era. The way they talk, the way they act and especially the way Ellroy adds little bits of known truths into the book. In this book there was so much history added to the book, it almost made this book seem plausible. The bad blood between J. Edgar Hoover and the Kennedy’s, Jack Kennedy been a really ladies’ man, the hatred toward Cuba and the Communists, etc. all these just added to the feel of the book. ( )

Fantastic, complicated thriller interpreting historical events through the eyes of a hardboiled crime novelist. Fast-paced, complex, extremely violent, and (unfortunately) all-too-believable. Takes a lot of nerve to depict powerful families and people in this way. One warning: try to keep track of the characters and their connections right from the beginning. There are so many and the crosses and double-crosses are so numerous you may need a crib sheet! ( )

Look, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that "American Tabloid" isn't a lot of fun. It's got gangsters and drug smugglers and revolutionaries and playboys and FBI agents and crazy millionaires and dancing girls. It's got blood and guts and sex and violence and betrayal and greed and double-dealing and politics and harebrained schemes and some very amusing period slang. It moves faster than a jacked-up sports car pushing towards sixth gear on a desolate stretch of Nevada highway. It's profane and chilling and shocking and scandalous, but I'm not sure it's a very good book. Let me explain.

When Ellroy does fiction, he's adding gore, slick prose, and some amount of psychological depth to what lots of readers consider a fairly formulaic, disposable genre. It's a good gig, and Ellroy's very good at what he does. "American Tabloid," though, isn't borderline-literary pulp, it's pulpy, hard-boiled historical fiction, and switching genres really exposes Ellroy's shortcomings as a novelist. Everyone, fictional or otherwise, in "American Tabloid," is an Ellory character: a rampant id attached to an obsession and a pair of gonads. That's fine if you're just juicing up stock characters, but it goes less well when you're talking about historical figures that might have had more sides than one. It doesn't matter who Ellroy's writing about here, though: John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, Sam Giancana, or one of a half-dozen FBI men, they all come off as horny, power-mad and thoroughly unscrupulous. Other writers have found real depth in some of these personages, but you'd hardly know it from reading "American Tabloid." I've always assumed that historical fiction tarts up the history it describes in the interest of a good story, but I'm thinking that real-deal history, would, in this case, would make Ellroy's schtick here seem pretty thin.

Not that "American Tabloid" is all bad. Ellroy's decision to skewer John F. Kennedy, who has become something of a plaster saint, might be described as bold, and he seems to have done some good research on some less-known aspects of contemporary political history. There's some wild, and perhaps vaguely factual tales of the Cuban exile movement and a cynical take on Camelot and the civil rights movement. Even so, "American Tabloid" is essentially a who-really-killed-JFK book, and there's never been a happier hunting ground for obsessives, crackpots and conspiracy nuts than that one. I don't know how much of any of this he believes, but I'm not sure it matters: Ellroy would probably be better served discussing the intricate, stylish dealings of fictional cops and robbers.

As it nears the end, the book seems to lose all sense of verisimilitude and the death toll hits Shakespearean, or perhaps Tarantino-an, levels. By the time I'd finished this one, I felt like I'd eaten three Thanksgiving dinners in a row and I'd had enough of Cuban psychopaths, speed-addled G-men, and J. Edgar Hoover for a little while. Oof! I'm beginning to suspect that Ellroy's stuff is basically catnip for adolescent males, romance novels for dudes who read "Bizarre." It's okay to read that stuff once in a while, but like all junk food, you want to make sure you get something else in your diet, too. ( )

I loved Elroy's LA Quartet (The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential, and White Jazz), so was looking forward to this book and really wanted to like it, so much so that I read it a second time to give it another chance after not liking it much the first time.

But American Tabloid doesn't work nearly as well for me as the Quartet, mainly because I bought into the noirish world of the first four books, but not into the interlocking conspiracies of American Tabloid. It was too over-the-top, and frequently seemed a parody of itself. How could Boyd, Littell, and Bondurant be in the middle of everything? American Tabloid also lacked the narrative drive and focus and the deeper characterizations of the Quartet. Elroy has written some of my favorite books, but this wasn't among them. ( )