(2 of 3)
Then there is Kemper Boyd, a corrupt FBI agent from a once illustrious and then bankrupt Tennessee family ("My father went broke and killed himself. He willed me ninety-one dollars and the gun he did it with"). Recognizing an accomplished sneak when he sees one, Director J. Edgar Hoover persuades Kemper to tender a sham resignation from the agency--while retaining his salary--and to hire on with Bobby Kennedy's Senate investigative team as a spy. Hoover hates the Kennedys. But Kemper, who gets the job, takes to the brothers, especially Jack, in whom he recognizes his own libidinous tendencies slated for greatness.
Finally, there is Ward Littell, another FBI agent and Kemper's protege, a former Jesuit seminarian who works in the Chicago office tracking drab, hopeless domestic communists and hungering for a chance to put his massive idealism to better use. Kemper gives him the chance to do some sub rosa snooping for Bobby Kennedy, thereby condemning a number of people, including John F. Kennedy, to untimely death.
Ellroy sends these three rogue enforcers off on a bizarre fictionalized trek through five years of U.S. history: the pursuit of Hoffa, the Mob's unhappiness over the triumph of Fidel Castro in Cuba and the loss of the Havana casino revenues, the 1960 presidential campaign, the long debacle of the Bay of Pigs. Pete, Kemper and Ward play hair-raising roles in all of this, and much more besides.
American Tabloid is history as Hellzapoppin, a long slapstick routine careering around a manic premise: What if the fabled American innocence is all shuck and jive? To underscore his thesis, Ellroy uses spurts of unimaginable violence the way other writers deploy commas and periods: "Sal burned a man to death with a blowtorch. The man's wife came home unexpectedly. Sal shoved a gasoline-soaked rag in her mouth and ignited it. He said she died shooting flames like a dragon."
It can be argued rather persuasively that such descriptions are now unconscionable, that fiction should be a genteel escape from the encroaching horrors of contemporary life rather than a blueprint for more of the same. The weakness of this case is that it denies narrative art its taproot into the muck and mire of the subconscious; it forgets that private nightmares will fester in solitary confinement instead of finding cathartic company in the public community of stories.
Ellroy, 47, is a 6-ft. 2-in. walking testimonial to the redeeming power of reading and writing fiction; his life has been, in patches, as rough and messy as many of the scenes in his books. His parents divorced when he was six, and he shuttled between them for four years until his mother, a registered nurse and an alcoholic, was found murdered near a high school playground in a small town east of Los Angeles. "At the time, my bereavement was ambiguous," Ellroy says. "My mother was a volatile woman, and I thought she'd been mean to me. It took me years to understand that thinking of her in that way did us both a disservice." The crime was never solved, but Ellroy has spent the past five months investigating it and plans to write a book about what he discovers.