Crime fiction doesn't get much darker or more raw than it does in James Ellroy's novels. There's no notion of a brave man or woman walking down those mean streets, fortified only by a personal moral code. That's because moral codes can get you killed.
In his L.A. Quartet, an ambitious set of novels that concluded with 1993's "White Jazz," Mr. Ellroy explored the underside of his native Los Angeles in the 1940s and 1950s. The city as he described it was a cesspool, filled with the corrupt, the ruthless and the venal. And those were the good guys.
Now, in "American Tabloid," his 12th book, Mr. Ellroy has expanded his scope considerably. He still is obsessed with hoods and mobsters, and policemen who are no less crooked but happen to have a badge. But this novel is also interested in examining American society in the 1950s and '60s, particularly in the conflicts over power that inevitably occur when strong-willed men clash.
They include a highly fictionalized Howard Hughes, who hates Sen. John F. Kennedy and is in league with FBI Director John Edgar Hoover; Hoover, who despises Kennedy and his brother, Bobby, while keeping a hands-off attitude toward organized crime; Mafia members, who similarly dislike the Kennedys (is there a pattern here?) and do shady business with the corrupt Teamsters president, Jimmy Hoffa; and various other, Cuban exiles, hard cases and desperadoes.
Real-life Mob figures such as Santo Trafficante and Carlos Marcello and Sam Giancana are significant players in "American Tabloid." They fret about Bobby Kennedy's anti-organized crime activities and Castro's takeover of Cuba, which costs the Mafia millions of dollars in gambling revenues from its casinos.
And they see themselves as equals of the Kennedys -- after all, Joe Kennedy earned his fortune running booze during Prohibition, didn't he? So when Jack Kennedy is elected president, but disappoints and then antagonizes some quite nasty people, that black day in Dallas in November 1963 becomes not only understandable but predictable.
The plot of "American Tabloid" is dense and multi-layered, and Mr. Ellroy's prose style, as the title suggests, is simultaneously tTC stripped down and hipped-up. It's breezy and slangy, and at its best evokes an atmosphere of palpable sleaze:
"He drove to a pay phone and dialed favors. He called a cop buddy, Mickey Cohen, and Fred Otash, 'Private Eye to the Stars.' They said they could glom some 'goodies,' with D.C. delivery guaranteed pronto."
Such an idiosyncratic style of writing will either annoy you or draw you in -- I am in the first camp -- but there are other problems with "American Tabloid."
First, the wholesale placing of real-life characters into fiction may not bother some of Mr. Ellroy's fans -- he has done so in several other novels -- but I found it troublesome. Although he certainly is not the first author to do so (for example, E. L. Doctorow in "Ragtime"), Mr. Ellroy blurs real life and fiction on nearly every page. "American Tabloid" be comes much like Oliver Stone's movie "J.F.K." -- audacious and entertaining but ultimately dismissable.
Also, Mr. Ellroy is an acknowledged fan of the old Confidential magazine of the 1950s (Hush-Hush in this novel), which published lurid tales of movie-star dalliances and sexual
deviance among the well-known and privileged. But while appropriating that jazzed-up writing style and unsentimental tone gives "American Tabloid" a certain energy, it leaves the novel hollow to its core.
Mr. Ellroy doesn't flesh out many of his characters; we learn what they are, but not how they got to be that way. Tabloids, after all, are inherently unfair to their subjects.
A more serious problem is a world-view in which everyone is corrupt and no one is innocent. This universe is as inherently flawed as one in which evil is never acknowledged. What makes crime fascinating is that it is considered an aberration in society -- it becomes repulsive and seductive at the same time.
But when everyone is on the take and murder solves every problem, then criminal behavior becomes as interesting as a trip to the supermarket. There is no clash of ideals, no test of moral codes. There's no jarring juxtaposition, as suggested by Wallace Stevens in his line, "Death is the mother of beauty."
"It's time to demythologize an era and build a new myth from the gutter to the stars," Mr. Ellroy writes in his introduction. Perhaps so, but can he achieve a "reckless verisimilitude," as he describes it, by fudging the real-life so liberally? I think not. "American Tabloid" is undone by its own self-imposed limitations and conceits.
Mr. Warren's reviews appear Mondays in The Sun.
BOOK REVIEW
Title: "American Tabloid"
Author: James Ellroy
Publisher: Knopf
Length, price: 576 pages, $25