Paranoia Strikes Deep

American history is to the contemporary American novelist what a bowl of apples was to Cezanne. American fiction writers have, from time to time, repaired to the past. Yet they have not always concerned themselves with historical events. Since the ‘60s, however, there has been a rising flood of American novels that seem to be searching for a formal structure beneath historical events as the key to understanding what we are living through in the present.

From William Styron’s “The Confessions of Nat Turner” to Robert Coover’s “The Public Burning” to Norman Mailer’s “Harlot’s Ghost” to E.L. Doctorow’s “Ragtime,” to (relatively) recent novels by John Updike, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, Robert Stone, Russell Banks and Joyce Carol Oates and dozens of works by lesser-known writers, old events have become the point of embarkation for new imaginings. Maybe we didn’t feel vexed by history until the ‘60s broke the present in half. Or perhaps the tumult that drives present events is so obscured by our prosperity, so efficiently hidden behind our computer screens and television screens and movie screens, that many writers feel it is easier to grasp what happened than what is happening.

But writing about the past poses special problems. The imagination often runs panting behind remarkable occurrences. Putting invented words in real people’s mouths can degrade innovation into vicarious fantasy. Mountains of uncontainable information sometimes tempt the novelist into imposing trite thematic structures. Fact ends up leading fiction by the nose.

Among the techniques invented over the last half-century by American writers to re-imagine the past, one formal curiosity stands out: The Joycean techniques with which Dos Passos plied the American present in his “U.S.A. Trilogy” are now applied by novelists to the American past. Literary collage, verbal montage, crosscutting between newspaper articles and dramatic dialogue and interior monologue and third-person exposition are the order of the day. James Ellroy is exemplary in this respect.

“American Tabloid,” published in 1996, was Ellroy’s foray into the big American historical picture. It portrayed with manic intensity the private and public events leading up to the assassination of JFK. To accomplish his end, Ellroy perfected a blunt, staccato, rapid-fire style that he had begun experimenting with in milder form in his novel “White Jazz,” which appeared in the late ‘80s. He wrote in the preface to “American Tabloid” that “it’s time to demythologize an era and build a new myth from the gutter to the stars.” Beyond the demythologizing, what he really seemed to mean was that it was time for the language of historical fiction to stop taking history so seriously, to take on an independent life of its own, as in this excerpt from “American Tabloid”: “He read wall scratchings. He swiveled his neck to stay limber. He broke the world’s record for holding a piss.” “American Tabloid” was historical montage--from high to low, public to private--wrapped in a pastiche of literary styles and artistic mediums: It was Mickey Spillane meets Georges Braque meets Dizzy Gillespie meets Hemingway meets Abraham Zapruder. It flew. It jived. It rocked. It verged on the unreadable.

Hard to believe, but “The Cold Six Thousand,” “American Tabloid’s” sequel, has a style that is even more syncopated and pared-down. At the same time, it is not a real enough departure from the plot and the incidents of the previous novel to extend the story into an autonomous new dimension, as a sequel must do. More’s the pity. Catching this book’s larger purposes is like trying to catch sight of the license plate on a speeding getaway car. Once you do, you get a glimpse of breathtaking artistry.

On the aesthetic level, Ellroy has found a literary means for capturing unwieldy events. A longtime chronicler of the ethical meltdown when good and bad collide in a single human personality, he builds his artistic structure also along oppositional lines. When history looms large, he goes minimal. When historical personality threatens to overwhelm, he disdains the trap of accuracy and stylizes ever more vigorously. Where another writer might deploy historical irreverence too solemnly, Ellroy undercuts his own undercutting.

“The Cold Six Thousand,” as is typical with Ellroy, has a Byzantine plot. As in “American Tabloid,” there is an unholy trinity of main characters, each one on his own profane quest. From the earlier novel, we again meet Ward Littell and Pete Bondurant, the first a former Jesuit seminarian, ex-FBI man and anguished liberal working for Howard Hughes, the Mob and J. Edgar Hoover; and the second a former CIA operative and specialist in extortion, presently employed by the Mob, by rogue CIA elements in Vietnam and--unbeknownst to him--by Hoover. Just about everyone in this novel, in fact, is working, consciously or not, for Hoover, whom Ellroy deliciously presents as a dapper Mephistophelean nut case and the mastermind manipulating 40 years of American public events.

The third member of this trio is a new character, Wayne Tedrow Jr., a fairly incorruptible LAPD cop and the son of Wayne Tedrow Sr., a sadistic right-wing tycoon committed to the destruction of the civil rights movement. Wayne Jr. embodies the novel’s moral tensions as well as its tense dialectic. The “cold six thousand” is the bounty hunter’s fee paid him by a group of Las Vegas casino owners to kill one Wendell Durfee, who knifed a twenty-one dealer and cut out his eye.

Note that Oedipal eye. The novel’s odyssey is the journey of this estranged son back into his father’s orbit and then out again. Accepting the money from the casino owners, who are all in the Mob, is an act of moral blindness that will lead Wayne Jr. into historical and human truth. (Ellroy is unsurpassable on the impossibility of money remaining morally neutral.)

Wayne Jr. is sent by his Vegas employers to Dallas, where Durfee has absconded to, just at the moment that JFK is about to be assassinated. Wayne Sr., who has helped orchestrate the assassination with the Mob, along with Hoover’s tacit approval, orchestrates his son’s trip in order to draw Wayne ever further into his father’s sordidly compromised world. The father’s machinations pan out.

Wayne, deeply sympathetic to blacks and to the cause of civil rights, catches up with Durfee only to let him escape and take the $6,000. Durfee, wrongly assuming that Wayne really meant to kill him, has his revenge by raping, horribly mutilating and then killing Wayne’s wife in one of this novel’s many laid-back scenes of incredible violence. Wayne, in turn, kills three black drug dealers in a moment of blind rage. Expelled from the LAPD, he searches for Durfee while sinking deeper and deeper into the conspiracy that has killed JFK.

Wayne has become his father, all the while still hating his father. He commits one atrocious act of violence after another, hurtling toward the revelation of his true identity as he betrays his own nature. The stories of Littell and Bondurant run along the same lines. Littell, working for Hoover, sells out the civil rights cause on his way to helping save it. Bondurant, who has promised Barb, his lounge-singer wife, that he will give up the Life, gets himself deeper into it the harder he tries to extricate himself.

What keeps these characters in thrall to the dark powers is their involvement in JFK’s assassination. And what drew them into the plot to kill JFK was, as “American Tabloid” depicted it, the destructive reach of JFK’s desires. All the places “The Cold Six Thousand” goes, and all the intrigues it describes are malignant outgrowths of private appetite: running shakedown operations through a taxi service in Las Vegas; cooking heroin in Vietnam and sending it to dealers in Vegas; killing Communists in Cuba. Ellroy writes: “Wayne lived to WATCH .... He watched in Vegas. He watched in L.A. He watched in Vietnam. The war escalated. The war was the Life uncontained.”

The Life contained is pure appetite. That is why everyone in this novel sooner or later gets entangled with everyone else. Appetites bring people together. Then history happens. Indeed, in Ellroy’s vision of things, when appetites get big enough, they stop being called appetites and start being called historical events. What might seem like a theory of conspiracy in Ellroy is really a story about the fatal velocity of human entanglements. And yet it is Ellroy’s achievement never to lapse into a fashionable relativism.

Hoover is urbanely witty and psychotic; his adversary, Martin Luther King Jr., is saintly and unheeding and concupiscent. Yet Hoover oversees King’s cold-blooded murder. Littell and Wayne Jr. “hate good” and Hoover and Wayne Sr. “hate bad,” and the reader never doubts the moral discrepancy between the two species of loathing. (“Hate strong. Hate brave. Don’t hate like Mr. Hoover.”) The cold six thousand is a neutral payoff yet also a snare to Wayne’s mind and soul. Improvising on the Ku Klux Klan, Ellroy will misspell words like “kall,” “kold” and “kode,” as if the American language itself carried the seeds of American volatility.

Given such deeply wrought entertainment, it is a small tragedy that the barely readable style in “American Tabloid” has become an incessant tapping on the reader’s brain. As Mickey Spillane created a character named Mike Hammer, Ellroy has now invented a style named Hammer. That’s not to say that his screw-loose irreverence and playful language do not offer plentiful delights.

The survival of Pete Bondurant is so implausible that Ellroy portrays the reunion with his wife at the end in an implausible puff of Malamudian magic realism. As they walk toward each other, “Pete took one step. Barb took two steps. Pete [after two heart attacks] jumped and took three.” Not only that, but with arch and purposeful anachronism Ellroy has Pete chewing Nicorette gum in the late ‘60s. And his tough-guy repartee is better than ever: “You’re overqualified for a life of leisure.” His use of homey Yiddish expressions in extremely violent circumstances is a scream: “Chuck exits a closet. Chuck has two guns. Chuck aims and fires. Two hammers click. Chuck ... plotzes.” (Plotz: to collapse from fear or exhaustion.)

Ellroy’s weird feral wit unfortunately does not save the novel from its self-sabotaging style. But as the echo of an uncanny intuition, that style has an extraordinary resonance. For with his simple declarative sentences, Ellroy has taken a primal American literary expression and transformed it into a vision of cultural and social destiny. He has located the unthinking brutality of the irrepressible American libido in an elemental innocence, the simple declarative innocence of a child’s “Dick and Jane” reader. Indeed, there really are a Dick and a Jane here. This ingenious artifice perhaps explains why Ellroy emphasizes that Wayne Jr. and Littell wish they could simply watch events go by, like children content to “watch Dick run.” It is perhaps why this is not so much a book that is read as a book that is watched while it rushes by. Ellroy’s super-ambitious and thrilling semi-failure is more triumphant than the cautious successes of more “serious” novelists. Read this novel and plotz. But read it anyway.