'American Tabloid' Looks for Its Stars

                             

In 1995, Alfred A. Knopf published James Ellroy’s American Tabloid. Let’s rephrase that: Alfred A. Knopf unleashed James Ellroy’s American Tabloid. It’s a staccato fever-dream of a novel that plunges the reader into the seedy underbelly of American politics during the five years leading up to the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

The very first page of the novel promises that it will be a paean to the “bad men and the price they paid to secretly define their time” – and Ellroy delivers. The Mob, Communists, assassination attempts, heroin, the Klan, Teamsters, Cuban ex-pats, FBI skullduggery: all these and more are presented in a narrative that’s as propulsive as it is dizzyingly complex. The outline of the book ran to 300 pages. It increasingly looks like a high-water mark for Ellroy’s fiction. The two novels that followed in the trilogy – 2001’s The Cold Six Thousand and 2009’s Blood’s a Rover – largely failed to replicate its balance of chaos and coherence.

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