American Tabloid

Review

I purchased this book after hearing Brian Koppelman recommend it on the Ringer’s JFK Rewatchables episode. I’d heard of it before, but safe to say it was never on my radar. It sat on my shelf for a few months and as I was winding down the final chapters of Moby-Dick I walked over and stared at the shelf and picked it up. It’s hard to argue with a first page that starts like this:

America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can’t ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can’t lose what you lacked at conception.

Five more paragraphs introduce the reader to Ellroy’s biting cynicism (nihilism?). Later, “The real Trinity of Camelot was Look Good, Kick Ass, Get Laid.” Quite surprising that I never heard, “It’s called Cumalot” at any point.

I don’t think there are any chapters longer than 7 pages. A paragraph sprawling past that many sentences is rare, maybe non-existent outside a long bit of speech or a “document insert.” Our three perspective characters, Pete Bondurant, Kemper Boyd, and Ward Little, are like Dark Forrest Gumps, brushing up against mobsters, politicos, guerillas, and common dope dealers. Prostitutes, wannabe wiseguys, cops. Billionaires and the dirt poor. It is an Epic. With possible exceptions of some bystanders, not a one of the characters is endorsable or likable, and yet I like more or less all of them. Some of them, the more monstrous the more fun to read.

A lot of this is down to Ellroy’s voice. I’ve never read anything quite like it. “On Hughes’ timecard: find out who’s hawking subpoenas for the TWA antitrust divestment case and bribe them into reporting that Big Howard blasted off for Mars.” That’s on the first page of chapter 1. “He made ___ the new day dispatcher. He considered it a political appointment.” The early Little chapters are especially fun, as we hear his informal training in his head, “Kemper Boyd always said COW YOUR INFORMANTS.” Ellroy is happy to emphasize with CAPITAL LETTERS and to eradicate subtext with them. How fun to have a long teletype that the in-book reader knows boils down to FIND YOUR OWN SNITCH and have it stated as such. It is fun! I’m not sure I’ve recently seen someone enjoy pulling their words out for emphasis, like waaaaaaay out. It all gives things a great vocal quality.

It’s worth mentioning for readers new to the text, and perhaps the time period, that the late 50’s/early 60’s were not a period of great social enlightenment. Most slurs you can name while counting on your fingers are somewhere in these pages, and probably you could count all your toes as well. A lot of racism, a lot of homophobia. Sometimes I bump pretty hard on that, especially the homophobia, especially when it feels gratuitous and like the author is just using a thin veneer of fiction to throw out some hate. Nothing in the book does not ring true, for better or worse.

I cruised by Ellroy’s Wikipedia page (quite the origin story), curious about his ultimate political beliefs. It doesn’t seem like anyone has much of an idea, including potentially Ellroy himself. He states that he stopped following contemporary politics in 2022. Generally when people say this they’re full of shit. This would be in character for Ellroy; if you randomly pick a few interviews he seems like someone that Kemper Boyd, if he were living in 2010, might call an OG TROLL.

This is certainly one of the best books I’ve read recently, though for much, much different reasons than most of my favorite books.

Notes

I didn’t take many notes, but I flagged two things towards the end.

• p3 - America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can’t ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can’t lose what you lacked at conception.
  • TB: Emphasis in original.
• p532 - “I’m sayiing it’s so big and audacious that we’ll most likely never be suspected. I’m saying that even if we are, the powers that be will realize that it can never be conclusively proven. I’m saying that a concensus of denial will build off of it. I’m saying thatpeople will want to remember the man as something he wasn’t. I’m saying that we’ll present them with an explanation, and the powers that be will prefer it to the truth, even though they know better.”
• p564 - Powerful men are children.