A review by drinkingpondscum
American Tabloid by James Ellroy

5.0

“​​America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can't ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can't lose what you lacked at conception.”

A history of bad men. At a certain point this turns from a taut political thriller into an almost impressionistic portrait of the dregs of humanity, with wiretaps, double crosses, gossip, and sudden violence coming at you with such ferocity that it’s pretty much impossible to keep track of everything. All that’s left is the petty, vindictive, unapologetic social climbers at the heart of it all, and a plot that seems to count down, like a bomb, to a fateful November day in Dallas. Kennedy wasn’t a savior, just a doped up horndog with a bad back; and the CIA blew his head off because he fucked over too many people, or because he was just slightly too friendly to those third world dogs we were supposed to be subjagating, certainly not because he could inhibit their power in any way. And now we live in the world they built; we inhabit a castle with blood in the mortar and pulverized corpses in the stones, built by a handful of Yale-educated perverts who drank so much that their pores probably excreted whiskey instead of sweat. All so we could have thirty different brands of beef jerky to choose from at the store. It’s cool, I guess.