Country: USA
Genre: Thriller/Noir
Pages: 576
The documentary Feast Of Death: The Dark Places Of James Ellroy has been shot in the very middle of his Underworld U.S.A Trilogy period, at the high point of his curiosity about the past and his enthusiasm for re-writing history. He said (not word for word): "If you can take a historical event, a drama and properly fill in the blanks, you can end up with a damn good story". American Tabloid exemplifies this statement. It's structure around the five first years of the Kennedy era. The most glorious ones. People often think that the Kennedy family stopped being politically relevant on November 22nd 1963, but the reality is that they lost their face on that day, but the heart and soul of the clan was still alive. James Ellroy does a great job at exposing the mechanics of post-war America while telling a damn good story, proving once again that there's nothing more efficient than a well-told work of fiction.
There are no real main characters in American Tabloid, but you end up following Pete Bondurant, Kemper Boyd, Ward Littell, J. Edgar Hoover, Bobby and John F. Kennedy. The three first are fictional, but instrumental to the displays of power of Hoover and the Kennedy brothers. The first words you will read are: "America was never innocent". It's something you have to keep in mind while witnessing the rise to presidency of John Kennedy, powered by the efforts of his brother Bobby, who was looking for the necessary leverage to fight organized crime. American was never innocent, it was built on blood and religion, but Ellroy sure made the Kennedy brothers to look like two kids who have ventured into a bad neighborhood when they decided to play cowboys against Hoover, Jimmy Hoffa, Carlos Marcello and the underworld who has had free reign under the vigilant sight of the FBI director.
Ellroy spends a lot of time on the U.S/Cuba problematic. Fidel Castro, the bay of pigs, the missiles situation. American Tabloid points at an active participation of the American government in the Cuban events, somewhat rationalizing the anti-american stance of Fidel Castro. During the sixties, it was some kind of hot zone for the U.S and their organized crimes who ran casinos up there under the rule of dictator Fulgencio Batista. When he was overturned by the communist guerilla, the land became up for grabs to the nearest power. American Tabloid follows the efforts of Bondurant, Boyd and Littell, playing every possible angle in the situation. The Kennedys, the organized crime, the FBI, the CIA. It sometimes becomes very complicated to follow what's going on because of the proliferation of characters and the lack of focus on any of them. You're always plunged into an intense action scene where somebody is getting interrogated, beat up or on the location of an all-out massacre. Everything goes extremely fast, it's bloody and extremely dark. It's the James Ellroy we all love to read.
When I finished American Tabloid last Tuesday, I felt inexplicably frustrated. It was a great, action-packed read, but I felt like I read about half of the novel correctly. It's skipping narrators faster than the editing of a Much Music video. It lead me to ask myself what do I like in fiction. Characters, sure. We live through them many dreams and impossible lives. But the best characters of American Tabloid are the Kennedy brothers and J. Edgar Hover, who is not often present, but is an hilarious wisecracker. The fictional creations, Bondurant, Boyd and Littell are a little...flat. The relationship in between the latter two is somewhat intriguing, but never goes into details. I could never get into the big Bondurant's storylines or get passed Kemper Boyd's arrogance. American Tabloid was plotted with great attention to detail and with a completely insane pace, but it felt like an incomplete masterpiece to me. I would have preferred a slower, more focused book, a bit like L.A Confidential was. Great read if you like Ellroy, but it's really a whole new world after the L.A Quartet. It's a novel that I'm sure, sinks its hooks in you more and more after multiple readings.
