Comments on and one correction to James Ellroy's American Tabloid

1) The item of jewelry one pins to one's clothing, sometimes as a fastener, is a brooch, no matter how many times American Tabloid spells it broach.

2) I don't like pat critical phrases, but American Tabloid really is compulsively readable. I've tried to get to bed early the past few nights, slipping under the covers by 2 a.m., intending to read a few pages, then get up early and work the next day, but I was still reading at 4 and 5 a.m. Here are a few examples of what makes the novel so much fun:

"Hoffa said ` ... don't make Kennedy sound like Jesus handing God the Ten Commandments on Mount Fucking Vesuvius.' 

"Ryskind said, `Santo was just making a point.' 

"Rosselli said, `It's Mount Ararat, Jimmy. Mount Vesuvius is in fucking Yellowstone Park.'"

*

— A list of Marilyn Monroe's lovers, as turned up by FBI surveillance, that includes "David Seville of David Seville and the Chipmunks," but not John F. Kennedy.

*

"Kemper sat down. `You speak excellent English, too.' 

"`I speak the slow and exaggeratedly formal English of the laboriously self-taught. Native speakers tell me that I sometimes lapse into hilarious malapropisms and mutilations of their language.' 

"Stanton pulled a chair up. `Would you mind talking with us now? We've got a nice apartment ready for you, and Mr. Boyd will drive you there in a little while.' 

"Paez bowed. `I am at your disposable.'"

See you soon. I have work to do.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Curzio Malaparte and James Ellroy: History, truth, and everything

A comment on Sunday's post about James Ellroy's "Underworld U.S.A." novels is pertinent to both the novels your humble blogkeeper is reading.

Dana King, that fine author, nice guy, and skilled horn blower, said Ellroy has:

"a keener understanding of American history, and of the true ethos that has driven American society and history, than do many others."

Not "grasp of the facts," but "keener understanding" of American history and the ethos behind it.  Were Ellroy's tycoons, FBI chiefs, and gangsters as deranged in real life as they are in his books? Do his killer protagonists have real-counterparts? Does this matter, as long as the fiction makes sense, or feels right? What truth must a historian serve? A writer of fiction? Is historical fiction the same as fiction that takes history as its theme?  Or is Ellroy just doing what all fiction arguably should do but so little does: portray real life, comment on real life, and entertain readers all at the same time?

Besides Ellroy's American Tabloid, the other novel that sparked these questions is Curzio Malaparte's The Skin. That shocking, dark, graphic, and very blackly funny 1949 novel, banned by the church, banned by the Neapolitans, tells the story of the American military and the misery of Naples toward the end of World War II. "The book caused a scandal," one commentator said, "because it was mistaken for a realistic work."

Here's a bit of The Skin:

"`We are the volunteers of Freedom, the soldiers of a new Italy, It is our duty to fight the Germans, to drive them out of our homeland ... It is our duty once more to hoist the flag that has fallen in the mire, to set an example to all in the midst of so much shame, to show ourselves worthy of the task that our country entrusts to us.' ... When I had finished speaking Colonel Palese said to the soldiers: `Now one of you will repeat what your commanding officer has said. I want to be sure you understand. You!' he said, pointing to a soldier. `Repeat what your commanding officer said.'

"The soldier looked at me; he was pale, he had the thin, bloodless lips of a dead man. Slowly, in a dreadful gurgling voice, he said: `It is our duty to show ourselves worthy of the shame of Italy."

"Colonel Palese came up close to me. `They understand,' he said in a low voice, and moved silently away."

I might not make American Tabloid the textbook for a course on twentieth-century American history or The Skin for a course on Italy during and after World War II. But both would make fine collateral reading.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

The golden age of paranoia

Alan Glynn, author of Winterland, looks back at the golden age of paranoia in an article on the Mulholland Books Web site. He traces the era from a morally serious period of high paranoia in the early 1970s, marked by Klute, The Parallax View, All the President's Men, Three Days of the Condor and The Conversation through a period of bloated, jokey weirdness (The X-Files), and on to a more recent revival.

These latter-day incarnations "take their nod from the golden age, and that's a good thing," Glynn writes. "Because at no time over the past thirty or forty years has that '70 sensibility seemed more relevant or, indeed, more necessary."

I was a bit surprised to read of Glynn's attraction to paranoia because, while Winterland impressed me greatly, I thought it more an amateur-gets-in-over-her-head adventure, albeit a violent, thoroughly contemporary one, than a paranoid nightmare. But what do I know? I can't read Glynn's mind — yet.

Glynn proposes an interesting division of post-1970s paranoia into the over-the-top school, whose representatives include James Ellroy's Underworld USA Trilogy, and more direct nods to the golden age (Peter Temple's Truth, Michael Clayton).

I'd have added Jean-Patrick Manchette to the roster of Golden Age paranoiacs and Dominque Manotti to the list of current practitioners, Manchette for how deeply power controls, warps and ruins the individual in his books, and Manotti for how widespread and ruthless the corruption is, and how high it rises, in hers.

What about you? Who are your masters of paranoia in crime and thriller fiction and movies?
© Peter Rozovsky 2010