American Tabloid
By James Ellroy
Arrow, 1995, 585 pp., $12.95 (pb)
Reviewed by Phil Shannon
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/11877
Home of the brave, land of the free: whoever penned that didn't want us to know about the dark side of the United States — the CIA, Hoover's witch-hunting FBI, the Ku Klux Klan, the Mafia and every other piece of corrupt, vicious right-wing nastiness that has been the underbelly of the US throughout its history.
In James Ellroy's latest novel, he displays all these dregs circa 1958-1963 and traces the political infection all the way up to the leading liberal lights of JFK and the other Kennedys. His aim is to demythologise an era, especially JFK's undeserved "sainthood", and to focus on the rogue cops, "shakedown" (blackmail) artists, wire-tappers and soldiers of fortune who played more than bit parts in the unfolding of US domestic and international history.
There is Pete Bondurant, who by book's end has clocked up more than 300 murders (mostly pro-Castro Cubans), the crooked LA ex-deputy sheriff, CIA hit man, Mafia enforcer, drug runner and fixer, pimp and dope conduit for Howard Hughes.
He runs with Kemper Boyd, CIA provocateur, Mafia associate and organiser of sabotage and invasions of Cuba, always looking to grease his own palm with profits from his activities, including the former Mafia casinos in Cuba and "Agency-aligned pharmacological sources" (drugs).
Jimmy Hoffa, corrupt leader of the US transport union, the Teamsters, blasphemes his way through collusion and side-deals with trucking bosses, and murders of rank-and-file Teamsters who threaten to expose his abuse of union funds and Mafia links.
Right-wing Cuban exiles, southern racists and other low-life also appear in this panorama of corruption, violence and the dirty dollar.
A loose cannon FBI agent finds that "respectable" money also smells. Joe Kennedy, millionaire loan shark, buys his son the presidency of the United States with profits from a secret Teamster slush fund which provides high-interest loans, "laundered, hidden, obfuscated, tax-sheltered and funnelled" for the schemes of "labour thugs, dope pushers, shylocks and mobbed-up fascist dictators".
Ellroy's world is a display of truly appalling bottom-of-the-barrel evil and greed, told with unsparing profanity (averaging the "f" word about a dozen times per page) in a racy, frenzied, ultra-hard-boiled style. Jane Austen, it isn't. Gripping and instructive it is.
Yet the novel is unsatisfying, too, in some respects. It climaxes with the Kennedy assassination, which, according to Ellroy, was a Mafia-CIA hit because of their perception that JFK meant reduced profits for the mob, weakness on Cuba and other left-wing deviations. But this is Kennedy mystique, not the real history of JFK, who was as orthodox and right wing as any US president.
Psychological depth, too, is lacking. This may be because right-wing nuts and psychopaths have no depth, but the problem is more one of the novel's structure. The novel lacks a hero, and thus lacks a focus for raising psychological and moral tension. Ward J. Littell, the liberal FBI agent, could have been the hero, however ambiguous, for his initial anti-mob, anti-Hoover views and his friendship with a leader of the CPUSA, but he winds up as a lawyer for the outfit and Hoffa.
Most missing, however, is a wider view of what else was happening beyond the world of the underground scum. "Bad men defined their time", says Ellroy, yet it was the Berkeley Free Speech movement, the Cuba defence movement, the democratic opposition to mob-linked bureaucrats in the Teamsters and the civil rights struggle in the south which were making history and preparing the way for major redefinition of the times, symbolised by the radical icon of 1968. These historical factors receive only fleeting attention from Ellroy.
Perhaps mixing it for nearly 600 pages with gutter life has jaundiced Ellroy's view of anything that was good and progressive in the US during those years.
Nevertheless, if you like your entertainment hard, dark and furious, with the style of a shoot 'em up TV script rather than Sense and Sensibility, then American Tabloid is the go.