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A review by andyc_elsby232
American Tabloid by James Ellroy
5.0
Why do I keep rereading this? Why am I so drawn to the Underworld USA trilogy?
When I go back to these books, it feels as though I am experiencing everything. Ellroy's pace-of-prose unlocks something in my mind that sends me places. These are, for me, novel equivalents to mysticism, to the steepest levels of ponderous drunkenness, and to the highest peaks of caffeine-induced-rushes. We aren't gathered to these mindstates by cryptic, oblique language, but by somebody who is in total control of their art.
Ellroy wants you to read these books for as long as you possibly can in one sitting, and if your mind begins to blur over the details, that just means you've entered the hyper-driven mindsets of these rogue spirits; as readers we are conditioned to believe that, if we fall off the train, we have to disrupt everything and find our way back on. That without every answer, we cannot go on. To do this would be to break the spell of any first encounter with an Ellroy masterpiece, such as this. To clear the fog, you eventually end up reading these books again, like me, and not out of a sense of obligation, but a yearning for that dangerous thrill these deranged, painstaking sentences keep triggering. The details zip by like bullets, but are also so exact that they bubble to the forefront of your consciousness, both in sleep and in waking.
All the great moments of revelation didn't occur to me as I was reading them, but as I was living my daily life and turning over scenes I'd read earlier. I've had thundering astonishments that have caused me to disengage with reality and nearly drop what I was holding, a la Usual Suspects.
I wish I were exaggerating, because there are so many slurs used in these books it is almost unbearable. But never has hate looked or sounded this way on the page. So much fiction urges us towards redemption. Ellroy shows us what it's like to be so far away from it that even we, the reader, feel guilty for being privy to so much information that would sound so fucking batshit if you laid it out for a newcomer.
But as you tackle these works, nothing seems impossible.
I see many readers describing this book--this series--as a wearying kind of complicated. I think it is deliberately so. We are processing insane amounts of information at inhuman levels, and so much of the awe of this series--this novel in particular--is watching his three leads actually cope with it for a while, only to spend the hellish last laps surviving under the weight of so much unbearable knowledge.
To see these characters overindulge on control and get choked by the tangles of the lies they devised to protect themselves is unlike anything else. It is this experience that, troublingly, brings us nightmarishly close to feeling bad for these broken, violent, hateful characters. Ellroy's storytelling mastery taps into the places in us that have been conditioned to feeling satisfaction at seeing a good plan come together; the ingenuity is that none of these plans are good, they're horrifying, but we're still hearing in our heads the satisfying clicks of some pieces fitting together, and the rub of other pieces being phased out to make room.
It is less Ellroy's fascination and attachment to his interpretation of the LAPD that I'm drawn to and more the vast moral (and immoral) landscapes of his characters, and the ever-shifting dynamics between all of them (and there are a Faulknerian number of them, each of the fictional becoming like the sleazy real life legends they grease beside), which is why the grand, worldwide scope of the Underworld series commands my return far more often than the L.A.-based Quartet
I can easily see myself at the end of my life respecting these books, and their spellbound creator, more than any other written during my lifetime.
When I go back to these books, it feels as though I am experiencing everything. Ellroy's pace-of-prose unlocks something in my mind that sends me places. These are, for me, novel equivalents to mysticism, to the steepest levels of ponderous drunkenness, and to the highest peaks of caffeine-induced-rushes. We aren't gathered to these mindstates by cryptic, oblique language, but by somebody who is in total control of their art.
Ellroy wants you to read these books for as long as you possibly can in one sitting, and if your mind begins to blur over the details, that just means you've entered the hyper-driven mindsets of these rogue spirits; as readers we are conditioned to believe that, if we fall off the train, we have to disrupt everything and find our way back on. That without every answer, we cannot go on. To do this would be to break the spell of any first encounter with an Ellroy masterpiece, such as this. To clear the fog, you eventually end up reading these books again, like me, and not out of a sense of obligation, but a yearning for that dangerous thrill these deranged, painstaking sentences keep triggering. The details zip by like bullets, but are also so exact that they bubble to the forefront of your consciousness, both in sleep and in waking.
All the great moments of revelation didn't occur to me as I was reading them, but as I was living my daily life and turning over scenes I'd read earlier. I've had thundering astonishments that have caused me to disengage with reality and nearly drop what I was holding, a la Usual Suspects.
I wish I were exaggerating, because there are so many slurs used in these books it is almost unbearable. But never has hate looked or sounded this way on the page. So much fiction urges us towards redemption. Ellroy shows us what it's like to be so far away from it that even we, the reader, feel guilty for being privy to so much information that would sound so fucking batshit if you laid it out for a newcomer.
But as you tackle these works, nothing seems impossible.
I see many readers describing this book--this series--as a wearying kind of complicated. I think it is deliberately so. We are processing insane amounts of information at inhuman levels, and so much of the awe of this series--this novel in particular--is watching his three leads actually cope with it for a while, only to spend the hellish last laps surviving under the weight of so much unbearable knowledge.
To see these characters overindulge on control and get choked by the tangles of the lies they devised to protect themselves is unlike anything else. It is this experience that, troublingly, brings us nightmarishly close to feeling bad for these broken, violent, hateful characters. Ellroy's storytelling mastery taps into the places in us that have been conditioned to feeling satisfaction at seeing a good plan come together; the ingenuity is that none of these plans are good, they're horrifying, but we're still hearing in our heads the satisfying clicks of some pieces fitting together, and the rub of other pieces being phased out to make room.
It is less Ellroy's fascination and attachment to his interpretation of the LAPD that I'm drawn to and more the vast moral (and immoral) landscapes of his characters, and the ever-shifting dynamics between all of them (and there are a Faulknerian number of them, each of the fictional becoming like the sleazy real life legends they grease beside), which is why the grand, worldwide scope of the Underworld series commands my return far more often than the L.A.-based Quartet
I can easily see myself at the end of my life respecting these books, and their spellbound creator, more than any other written during my lifetime.