Jacob Knowles-Smith sits down for a TV dinner with Tom Wolfe

Thankfully BBC Four hasn’t been demolished just yet. If it had been, we wouldn’t have had chance to enjoy its recent ‘All American’ season. They say that BBC 2 would absorb the channel’s role, but doubtless this would come with – if not dumbing-down – half as many documentaries as they currently produce. And, indeed, they’ve produced a near-dazzling array of films for this latest season focusing on US culture – but this is no paean to American hegemony, and the more I tried to absorb the schedule, the more I wondered if perhaps Tom Wolfe hadn’t been given some role at the Beeb. The subjects covered over the last couple of weeks have been like a cross-section of that writer’s brain; there’s been high culture, low culture, kitsch culture, surf culture, diners, journalism, nomads, hookers and civil rights. Any fan of Wolfe will no doubt be able to pluck a volume up and thumb through almost all of those subjects in one of his collections, but then I began to wonder, how would Tom Wolfe write a TV review? Well, for starters he probably wouldn’t title it anything nearly as banal as the above, but he might call it something along the lines of…

The Electric Blu-Ray Acid Mind-Bath: America is Over There!

‘Why’s all this paint here?’ You can see Andrew’s mind ticking over and his puppy-dog eyes begin to twinkle with his excitement – Yes! Pollock painted here! And they’ve preserved it, an encrusted monument to that great man’s drips. Great man? You can make up your own mind. Andrew Graham-Dixon has made his up in the Art of America and, as the BBC’s finest regular documentary maker – now that Attenborough stays out of frame, we can cut him a little slack. He deftly traces – with his infectious enthusiasm and never-patronising dulcets – the history of American art from pilgrims to present. All American art is here: Rockwell, Hopper, Warhol, The Simpsons?… and all of it, it seems, is about the loneliness of being one among many in a great big country full of people. After all, can’t Manhattan at rush hour be the loneliest place in the world?

Hopper’s popping up all over the place, and his most famous work – ‘Nighthawks’ – gives us a lead into the next show and the lonely fat-clogged heart of America in Stephen Smith’s America on a Plate: The Story of the Diner. This is where we sit down at that democratic counter and look across into America’s short-order soul… French fries pancakes sausages coffee doughnuts shakes steaks turkey clubs plastic seats – top you off? – cheeseburgers blueberries coffee onion rings eggs over easy – warm you up? – French toast roast beef meatloaf coffee gum chewing waitresses truck stop bacon coffee. What more can you say? What more can anyone ask for!?

Now this cat’s crazy, he’s touched the hem of death after all – or, at least, skirted around the edges – and who wouldn’t be a little spooky kooky cuckoo? James Ellroy’s Feast of Death (BBC 2) – with some strong language! – delves into the murder-centric mind of the author and we meet the embodiment of obsession. Kim Bassinger? She’s alright. But forget the movies – what the fuck good are we to him? Who are we to ask anything of this guy? This modern Beethoven! (Just ask him… why listen to anyone else?) Did the bitch overcook the steak again, James? Nah – It’s sexual power. That’s murder. Right there. If you don’t believe him, then why else do we care about serial killers? Men think about sex more than women, so they kill more. Ellroy is clearly obsessed by his mother’s murder; perhaps he sees himself as a failure – a not-quite-Beethoven – because he couldn’t protect her, but, if that’s not it, then he still has every right to be obsessed because, he says it, closure is bullshit. What’s a dyke bounty?

Now we’re with shutterbug Rankin in America in Pictures: The Story of Life Magazine. He’s indulging himself in a bit of hero worship – mutual snapshotting of these wily old coots that chronicled America. And, sure, maybe these guys aren’t exactly the man – but they were working for a Luce publication! Think Fortune, think Time. Think middlebrow America. But that’s, perhaps, not entirely fair, Life was, as Rankin’s film describes, a great unifier of the people – all of America could ooooooohhh and aaaaaaahhh at the pretty violent shocking beautiful celebrities/dead soldiers/famine victims but – look over here, America! – you could be looking at those photos next to this fridge, in this new kitchen or on this new lawnmower (in your fourth floor apartment) and, boy, now here’s Rita Hayworth. Call me an elitist or a cynical bum, but Life always seemed pretty cheap.

So, that’s all American, and, if that’s not enough for you, some of the most delightful chocolate chips to be found in this rich cookie came in Old Jews Telling Jokes. It’s pointless to tell the one about the rabbi or the gentile here, but these rascals have their own website and you have a few minutes to spare.

“We’re not your ordinary tour company,” suggests the website of Los Angeles-based Esotouric. Indeed. Rather than curb crawling around Laurel Canyon squinting at George Clooney’s house through binoculars, Richard Schave and Kim Cooper offer tours the rest of us want to see. There’s a gritty double-header this month with ‘John Fante’s Dreams from Bunker Hill’ (9th April, advertised as a “once-a-year bus adventure”), followed by ‘Haunts of a Dirty Old Man: Charles Bukowski’s LA Bus Tour’ (12noon-4pm, 10th April). The tour kicks off at Philippe the Original, Bukowski’s lunchtime hangout opposite Terminal Annex, the inspiration for Post Office, and includes coffee and donuts at the Pink Elephant Liquor Store (“many riders also pick up a little something stronger for the road,” counsels the press release). Schave’s narration takes in the sights, smells, and Barfly locales, relating the geography of Bukowski’s life back to his singular writing style. Esotouric round off the month with ‘In a Lonely Place: Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles’ (23rd April).

This is a brilliant idea, appropriate to a city saturated with cultural and seedy social history. In addition to the literary tours, there is a guide to Tom Waits’ creative life in LA (‘Crawling Down Cahuenga’, 28th May) and Esotouric does a nice line in architecture and true crime – in fact, their biggest coup may have been James Ellroy for Christmas 2007. Yes, the ‘demon dog’ himself with mic in hand, regaling a coach party with Grade A salaciousness. Other tour guides include social historian Joan ‘Red’ Renner (‘The Real Black Dahlia’) and Crimebo the Clown.

Esotouric mutated from Cooper and Schave’s online exploration of LA lore at the 1947project blog – a ‘crime-a-day time travel blog’. The couple decided to share these stories with others and hired a bus. After a few of these tours, they wanted to branch out according to their respective fascinations and the company was formally launched in May 2007. Both of them are involved in a bewildering range of interesting projects, most of which are collected under the umbrella of LAVA: the Los Angeles Visionaries Association. “Los Angeles is a city without a center, but with an unjustly bad reputation. It’s also home to fascinating people, places and happenings. But these wonders are dotted over a vast and confusing landscape, drowned out by media blare and corporate blather. You could easily spend years in hard searching to discover the real Los Angeles, those hidden gems and secret gatherings that give this city a soul.” LAVA aims to provide new ways of decoding this map.

For more info on Esotouric, visit www.esotouric.com

American Tabloid – James Ellroy

See all books by James Ellroy at
Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

The reader always mainlined crime fiction in front of the TV. He picked up the book. He rubbed his chin. The bristle made a noise like the crackle of fire spreading through a condo in the background . The reader said "It’s American Tabloid. It’s by James Ellroy." Cynical reader said it was just a violent re-working of Raymond Chandler. Inquisitive reader said there was more to it. He slumped into the armchair where he had whacked an American Psycho a couple of years ago. Opening the first page, he reached for a shot of bourbon and said "Impress me, Jimbo."

Such is life across the Ellroy page. Stark, occasionally violent and with a world weary smile. We’re still in America, still caught between the twilight of the fifties and the dawn of the sixties, but this time we’re at a more exalted level. American Tabloid sees Ellroy detailing the lives of the men in the background during the Kennedy years. As these men are mostly agents, shakedown men and bent politicians led with amoral example by John F. himself, they afford Ellroy plenty of opportunity to exercise his preoccupation with human frailty. If the publishers were looking for a quote for the back cover, they’d probably opt for "a conspiracy theory on speed", which would do injustice to a book whose simplicity flatters to deceive.

The figures picking their way through this network of conflicting allegiances are characteristic Ellroy anti-heroes. Boyd, Littell and Bondurant begin the narrative with clearly defined positions that gradually bleed into each other until all are on the same side. There are no good guys / bad guys here to give a moral locus – only the ones in seersucker suits who stay in expensive hotel suites, and the rest. The rest are defined by cursory but damning references to white socks, bad breath and cheap summer suits. The closest American Tabloid comes to a hero is Bobby Kennedy, and once Boyd has described him as a "chaste little piece of dogshit", you suspect where Ellroy’s true loyalties lie.

The climax is inevitable, as all are drawn in to the network of smaller conspiracies that build to create the greatest conspiracy of all ­ to bring the Kennedy administration to an abrupt end – but Ellroy ensures that the fates of his three fictional protagonists are not resolved until the last page. Loyalties change as fast as Boyd can change into successively sharper suits, shifting from FBI, to CIA to the Mob and back again as the competing factions jockey for power. It sounds like a bewildering Oliver Stone theorem, which it isn’t. The minimalism of the dialogue extends to the plot, and unlike JFK, it’s possible to follow events in American Tabloid without pen, paper and secondary source material.

With fiction as stylised as this, it is tempting to look for precedents elsewhere. You could find parallels with the casual violence of Bret Easton Ellis or the stylised minimalism of Raymond Chandler, but the raw power of Littell, Bondurant and Boyd could only be Ellroy. And his greatest achievement is to capture the prevailing sense of corruption seeping from all levels of society. There is a dizzying sense that you are adrift in a world where everything is remorselessly off-kilter. It has the same sensibility as the scene at the end of American Psycho where Ronald Reagan spouts banalities over the mantra "this is not an exit" – in this case, the banalities are those of Kennedy’s "New Frontier" programme.

The spare style does mean that Ellroy has created problems for himself when he needs to explain finer points of the plot without resorting to leading questions and huge chunks of cumbersome explanatory dialogue ­ "you mean J Edgar Hoover is in league with organised crime? Really? Tell me about it" ­ although the solution is equally unsatisfactory. The use of mock-official "document inserts" ­ clumsily presented in a typewriter font so you know that the credulous know that they are different to the rest of the book ­ quickly begins to grate. It seems oddly self-defeating to spend chapters immersing the reader in the stylish sleaze of Kennedy’s America only to yank them out of it abruptly with tape transcripts and interviews.

Although its simple, aggressive prose and lack of any paragraph longer than ten lines make it easy to dismiss American Tabloid with a derisory leer as lightweight, it is harder to dismiss once you’ve reached the end. Because by the time that Kennedy’s 1000 days in office have drawn to an end, it has seduced you. It has made you believe that you were reading some nice simple schlock-horror crime fiction while all the time you were reading a carefully enumerated rendering of the most complex and involving era in American history.