ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 3, 1996 TAG: 9603010105
SECTION: BOOKS PAGE: F-4 EDITION: METRO
TYPE: BOOK REVIEW
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY NEIL HARVEY
AMERICAN TABLOID. By James Ellroy. Ivy Books. $6.99.
After James Ellroy's brutal, infinitely disturbing "American Tabloid" was published last March, Time magazine's praise for the novel was tempered with the claim: "Pushing such stuff to total strangers could get a person arrested." Then, this January, it named "Tabloid" the best book of the year.
That's a pretty good notice for a blood-soaked imagined history in which the protagonists are hired goons, crooked Federal agents and C.I.A. spooks who extort, murder, torture, traffic narcotics and, eventually, choreograph the Kennedy assassination.
Using a stark, choppy, hipster-Hemingway style, Ellroy presents a speculative version of the events leading up to November 22, 1963. He begins in 1958, following three fictional characters as their orbits intersect Kennedy's, documenting their encounters with viciously sketched historical figures: Jimmy Hoffa, Howard Hughes, J. Edgar Hoover, Sam Giancana and Jack Ruby. You know you've got a weird book in your hands when J. Edgar Hoover is one of the less twisted characters.
It's not necessary to buy into the author's politics, or his anti-Camelot zeal (which borders on hydrophobia), or his conspiracy theories (which border on convincing) in order to get absorbed by this strange, savage piece of work.
Neil Harvey is a Blacksburg writer.
LENGTH: Short : 36 linesby CNB