James Ellroy gets better as he gets older and more concentrated about power and its abuses. At his own site, he’s selling Red Sheet, his new novel, as ‘an anti-communist novel. It stands foursquare in the tainted tradition of Ayn Rand and Mickey Spillane.' He goes deep into the violent underbelly of various Soviet groups and fronts that have mostly disappeared from respectable conversations, esp. among folks anchored in Hollywood and tied to a very boring and incomplete narrative about all things commie-related. This book is an inversion of films like The Way We Were, which is far dumber than you possibly remember.

I’m starting to think of James Ellroy as an LLM trained on Whittaker Chambers (author of Witness and a confirmed Rand-hater, fwiw) and Leslie Fiedler (the great left-wing critic of CPUSA and its full-of-shit fellow travelers; read The End of Innocence for a clear-eyed view of deep Red America in the 1950s). It’s set in LA right after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Dick Nixon, Daryl Gates, Tom Bradley, Hugh Hefner, and a bunch of other real-life characters who improbably spilled over into the 1990s and beyond are here, along with lesser lights and made-up characters too.

In any case, Red Sheet is the best book, fiction or not, I've read in years, mesmerizing in its details and inventions; read it with your phone or laptio nearby to check out its references.

If you care about how power, ideology, and history operates in America, and have a strong stomach (and dark sense of humor), this is the book for you. There is no closure, no morals, no transcendence, just a thick, disgusting, ropey web of torn skin and tissue and blood and booze and jism that stains everything and liberates virtually nothing. Ellroy makes you look at it all in the glaring, blinding 3pm light of Los Angeles, knowing that it’s all just going to get hotter and more foul-smelling in the night to come.

On sale tomorrow.