"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."
James Ellroy might as well be the bad boy of 20th Century Literature. But he is not. A "true crime" writer fails to summarize his talent for creating and maintaining a ground-level view of action most writers strive for. In fact, given the coarseness and rough terrain Ellroy likes to highlight (there's a funny word) in American history, Ellroy should be mentioned in the same breath as other highbrow writers. Yet, something tells us that he would eschew the place on the dais to drink out back with the wait staff behind the ballroom.
Ellroy is best in his rat-a-tat-tat two-word sentences that read like police blotter or coded notes scribbled on a notepad by a gumshoe. The final act of his L.A.Quartet, 1992's "White Jazz" ascends to hyperreality while mirroring the sheets of copiously written notes of New Journalists Tom Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson. (On the flipside, the followup to "Tabloid," 2001's "The Cold Six Thousand" resumes normal sentence structure at a more Hemingway-esque pace and length - yet is as refined as a kick to the head.)
"Tabloid" shows the tarnish behind a so-called Golden Age in American History, five years from 1958-1963. A modern reading of this first slice of his "Underworld U.S.A." trilogy plays well because it captures the overwhelming feelings of being under barrage by news and information. Amazingly, Ellroy is giving us three main characters to follow. The hard Pete Bondurant, a henchman and fixer for Howard Hughes, and a pair of smart, brash FBI agents in Kemper J.Boyd and Ward Littell. The overarching battle of wills between their guiding forces is enough to bring in Jimmy Hoffa, Fidel Castro, and the Kennedys. While the book concludes with an infamous assassination, Ellroy is steering us into the secret history of the Teamsters and the mob - namely in Miami and New Orleans.
This is dangerous turf, so having three former cops as protagonists helps to manage a world of subversive behavior. Colorful words are thrown around, never meant to offend - always there to capture the bitter reality of these days gone by. While the Fifties and early Sixties have long been synonymous with George Lucas' 1973 "American Graffiti" and Garry Marshall's "Happy Days" series, "American Tabloid" blows the roof off of a carefree "Grease"-style life. Told in journal-like dated accounts, dialogue is reduced to its bare minimum. We overhear conversation with no idea about the voices of "Man #1" and "Man #2." We are not meant to identify anyone but the person we are tracking as in the episode where Littrell drives to the South Side of Los Angeles to track "Mad Sal" D'Onofrio.
The man was walking. Littell ditched his car and foot-tailed him from thirty yards back.
Mad Sal entered apartment buildings and exited counting money. Mad Sal tabulated transactions in a prayer book. Mad Sal picked his nose compulsively and wore low-top tennis shoes in a blizzard.
Like the hardboiled pulp detective stories of Cornell Woolrich or Dashiell Hammett, Ellroy has us following Mad Sal only reporting actions and the most unique details. However, Ellroy can stop on a dime and put Littell in a phone booth calling home to hide from the winds in the warmth of those he left behind for this dirty job.
In addition to this, Ellroy can occupy a secondary character like snitch/comic-for-hire Lenny Sands. When Sands plays a paying gig for the Teamsters, like Littell, we can see how much he adds to make this a "corporate" routine. As he works the crowd into a frenzy, it is not a testament to his talent - it is rather a reflection of how much the Teamsters despised The Kennedys.
Crime does not pay. These three are party to some hidden possibilities in our history including election-level dealing with the Teamsters and the Mob was as influential as the political machine/"boss" systems of the day. However, even if you simply cannot buy into some of the conspiratorial connections Ellroy is dreaming up - the stories are as riveting as any clandestine revelations previously sowed by Oliver Stone.
"American Tabloid" is not history. Rather it is "a history." He has distilled it all down to its bare minimum (which again becomes a trilogy) that avoids the backstory of the larger events of the day to interconnect the smaller ones. It is a grim set of circumstances as well. There are no proverbial "good guys," all behavior past and present draws some serious moral questions. Nonetheless, this is the world that Ellroy submerges us into one where the depths of human existence are outweighed by doing what you must to survive. So let the words spill out onto the page and try not to leave your fingerprints behind.
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Mik Davis is the record store manager at T-Bones Records & Cafe in Hattiesburg.
