Red Sheet — James Ellroy’s lacerating, liberal-baiting vision of McCarthyite America
Diving into James Ellroy’s Red Sheet — a novel that is both lacerating and mesmerising in equal parts — is an experience that will leave the reader with metaphorical bruises. But one would expect no less from the self-styled “Demon Dog” of American literature, author of the magnificent LA Confidential, ever ready to deliver violent, unsparing narratives involving benighted protagonists often drawn from real life. The author is a dyed-in-the-wool contrarian, always primed to attack (in raw language) the comforting notions of the status quo — a quality his many followers relish. Ellroy’s cynical alternative history of his country is shot through with corruption, sleaze and sex, a bloodstained American canvas that would have the Founding Fathers spinning in their graves.
There is, however, a new element here that will conjure even more of the liberal outrage that Ellroy relishes. One of his targets is a group that is currently a paradigm of American liberalism. But who are these villains, this source of negative influence? In the 21st century, one would think that the Hollywood Ten and left-of-centre victims of the House Un-American Activities Committee anti-communist investigations have been vindicated by time, while red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy and his associates (along with such Hollywood figures as Elia Kazan, prepared to name names) are now tarnished by their ignoble actions. But . . . no! The absolute reverse is true, according to Ellroy.
Following on from his last novel, The Enchanters, Red Sheet is set in October 1962, with the Cuban Missile Crisis on people’s minds. Attorney-General Robert F Kennedy is convinced there will be repercussions from US communists, and instructs the LA police department to inaugurate a “red probe”. As always, Ellroy’s cast of characters rivals Tolstoy in sheer weight of numbers, with Marilyn Monroe (of course) referenced — her early, still debated, death remains talismanic for Ellroy, whose own mother was murdered in an unsolved case.
Los Angeles, as ever, evokes all of Dante’s nine circles of hell — a sprawling, lubricious hotbed of high- and low-level malfeasance. We are reminded of Richard Nixon’s unsuccessful campaign to be governor, the ambitions of future Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, and trade unions perfectly prepared to act as muscle for the Communist Party. Also on board are Playboy magazine magnate Hugh Hefner and Nixon fixers HR Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, with, needless to say, generous amounts of opprobrium rained down on all. And neither is Ellroy’s slippery, drug-addicted protagonist spared the author’s undiscriminating death ray. We are once again in the abrasive company of Hollywood detective Freddy Otash, whose criminal past is no disincentive to him becoming lead investigating officer in Bobby Kennedy’s red hunt. Obsessively flipping every stone in a world of degenerates and losers (as he perceives virtually everyone around him), Otash finds a crooked interconnectedness in a variety of organisations from across the social scale, and no one escapes his contempt (“He’s a jazz club comic . . . He does anti-fuzz/anti-honky schtick and insults un-hip Negroes and self-flagellant white squares”).
In the novel, Otash and various other characters are tasked with reviewing 20,000 “red sheets” — classified documents on suspected Communist Party members and sympathisers — to identify potential targets; in real life, according to Ellroy, there was an actual plot to subvert America and deliver it into the hands of Stalin, which was countered by those individuals now in bad odour with the liberal intelligentsia. But in the final analysis, does Ellroy believe in the heroism of the disgraced McCarthy and co? Despite his vituperation against liberal viewpoints, the evidence of Ellroy’s books indicates that he hates the more ingrained shibboleths of the conservative American establishment just as much. A closer reading of his work may suggest that, when it comes to political ideologies, his real motto is Mercutio’s “A plague o’ both your houses.”
Red Sheet by James Ellroy Hutchinson Heinemann £22/Knopf $35 544 pages
