American Tabloid (Paperback)

This is a 600 page novel with a world-famous ending, the assassination of JFK. So you think, why should I read it? Well, it will change your knowledge (or what you had been taught) about one of the most significant periods in American History, and it will tell you things you definitely didn't know about a whole string of household names : Jack Kennedy, kid brother Robert, their seriously bad-news father 'Irish Joe' Kennedy, J.Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, Jimmy Hoffa, Fidel Castro, Richard Nixon, Lyndon B Johnson, Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner and a colourful list of 'made-guy' underworld gangsters such as Santo Trafficante, Carlos Marcello, Johnny Rosselli and Sam Giancana. One of the low-life gangsters featured is a certain Jack Ruby, and I think we all know what he is best known for. In fact this novel is so daringly matter-of-fact about the lives (and loves) of most of the above-named that it makes me wonder how it ever came to be published at all. And it's no over-statement to suggest that you could write a book about this book.

It is, at the end of the day, a novel, which is to say a work of fiction, but I for one wanted to believe that every element of it was true because it helped me to understand so much more than I had been 'educated' to believe in the newspapers and other media down the years. But essentially American Tabloid surrounds the inter-twining lives of three men : hit-man Pete Bondurant, and two federal agents Kemper Boyd and his once protégé Ward Littell. Boyd devotes his career and in turn his life to the Kennedy cause and is nearly ruined when they ultimately turn against him. Littell dedicates his life, and takes life-threatening risks in doing so, to help expose the corruption behind the Kennedy family and the Jimmy Hoffa union rackets - and again gets trodden on by those he thinks he is working for. These two men end up in very different positions and with inverted political attitudes as a result. Meanwhile Bondurant flits between hits for Hughes, Hoffa, the FBI and the CIA and at times rightly regards himself as a CIA agent. Drugs abound, indeed heroin seems to be the leading if not traditional currency for the CIA in its financing of plans to invade Cuba and oust the new leader Fidel Castro.

The time period covered is 22nd November 1958 to the same date in 1963 - the two-year run-up to the 1960 US Election and the 1000-day tenure of JFK as President until his assassination in Dallas. But if like me you've always wanted to know who shot him, why he was shot, and many other questions surrounding his brief presidency, then American Tabloid must surely be the most eye-opening source of information even if it must presumably have its inaccuracies. The writing style may not be to everyone's taste (although I quickly became accustomed to it), but if you're only half interested in What Really Happened to JFK (and the Bay of Pigs disaster), you really must read American Tabloid. It truly is a revelation.

And if you love this, the great news is that you can then read The Cold Six Thousand, which is as instant a sequel as you could ask for, as it begins on the day of the John F Kennedy assassination and leads up to the killing of baby brother Bobby. Be in no doubt - James Ellroy stands tall among all peers and is, in my considered view, one of the very best writers alive today.

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Indeed I have no idea why American Tabloid is filed under Crime, except that that's where Ellroy's earlier novels most neatly fit. This is not a crime novel with a bad guy and a good guy and a crime at the start and a resolution at the end: this is a novel with hundreds of bad guys and some so-so guys and a bloody great crime right at the end: imminent, in fact, and offscreen. The crime is of course the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and in American Tabloid Ellroy sets out to offer up his own explanation, building in the usual suspects (Howard Hughes, Hoover, Hoffa and the Teamsters, Castro, the Mafia syndicates of Sam Giancana) all bound together with three fictional characters. Pete Bondurant is a hitman and hood working for Howard Hughes and Jimmy Hoffa; Kemper Boyd is an FBI car thief-ringer who gets sent by J Edgar Hoover to infiltrate the Kennedy brothers' investigations into organised crime (Hoover believes that as the Mafia cannot be prosecuted, they should be left well alone); and Ward Littell is another FBI man, a mousy loser who sees Kemper Boyd as his mentor and wants to make a man out of himself. These three men and their internecine crosscut of jobs and favours and "shakedowns" are instrumental in bringing about the death of "Bad-Back Jack."

What works about American Tabloid is the staccato prose which goes well with the scattergun violence and entirely amoral narrative. Sentences are rarely more than a line long, paragraphs rarely more than three lines. There are some blisteringly effective sentences which, more stiletto than stacatto, slip in almost unnoticed until you go back and see how much has been said in so few words. It works because the language is so compressed that it's almost in code, plain and unadorned but requiring full attention all the time. Ellroy combines his qualities in neat chapter openings. "He always shot up by TV light." "The amp made small talk boom." "Darleen Shoftel faked a mean climax."

What doesn't work so well is following the damn thing. The tendency to avoid explicit motive (when it's not fear or money, which it is 98% of the time) and have a hundred things happening on every page means that short of keeping crib notes, it's almost impossible to remember everyone's precise allegiances at any one time. Why does Littell hate the Kennedys again? So who's actually doing the hit now that the Mob have called it off? You tell me. There's also a feeling that all of the shakedowns and the bribes and the plots work too neatly for the three protagonists: there's never a sense that the whole thing might go off the rails for them, although perhaps that's the point, since Ellroy is presenting all this as a fait accompli.

Nonetheless I enjoyed American Tabloid's high octane delivery and for a six hundred page book it really did fly in. It's not altogether clear where the sequel, The Cold Six Thousand, will take us - where do you go from the murder of JFK? - but I suspect that I will be finding out before long.

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