WE’RE in Marilyn Monroe’s bedroom with one Freddy Otash – ex-cop, ex-PI – as he spies for union boss, Jimmy Hoffa. Freddy finds her dead body and checks the pill vials by the bedside. Here’s that permanent cure for insomnia Marie Darrieussecq writes about, as mentioned in last week’s review.

Freddy notes: “Nembutal, Seconal, chloral hydrate. Instant dreamland. That shit promotes deep sleep.”

Freddy knows his pharmacology; he’s an amphetamine enthusiast. He’s one wired hepcat. He lives on Dexedrine and candy bars and cruises the LA streets at night before a bit of B and E – breaking and entering – in order to bug unsuspecting celebrities.

The Enchanters is a roman-à-clef packed with A and B-list celebrities – here’s Ava Gardner and Carole Landis; there’s Peter Lawford and Roddy McDowall.

The National: The Enchanters by James.

It’s the early 1960s, the time of John Kennedy’s Camelot, an era arguably overfamiliar, overwritten – think of Don DeLillo’s Libra, Norman Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale, Stephen King’s 11/22/63.

And then there’s Marilyn herself. Writers can’t get enough of her too – think Truman Capote, Joyce Carol Oates, Mailer again, our own Andrew O’Hagan who wrote about her pet dog, Maf. Oh, and Elton John, of course, saying she never knew who to cling to when the rain set in.

It pours down in The Enchanters. Ellroy masticates with glee over his usual obsessions – peepers and perverts in the sordid underbelly of Hollywood and how everything connects with fame and Big Politics. We’re with Jack and Bobby and Marilyn wondering: Is there anything we don’t know about them in 2023? Has Ellroy anything new to say about the Kennedys? Maybe they had pets too. Didn’t they keep ferrets?

And Marilyn: Would you really have liked to know her, even if you were just a kid? Freddy Otash (and, one suspects, Ellroy too) has his doubts:

“I didn’t like her. I didn’t get her. Her acting chops and alleged va-va-voom hit me flat.”

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All too often Freddy/Ellroy has her “zorched out of her gourd”. Which brings us to Ellroy’s language. That he is a supreme patter merchant remains evident. Laughs are “yukks” or “yoks”, cuckolds are “Mr Cornuto”. Speaking of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor filming Cleopatra in Rome we read: “Paparazzi bird-dog them down the Via Veneto.”

The Enchanters even has a glossary up the back featuring terms used by the Californian fuzz. Here we learn about Bait Girls: “Young women hired by sleazoid divorce lawyers and corrupt studio bosses to entrap cheating husbands.” Marilyn, Ellroy alleges, was once a Bait Girl.

Freddy has had a fling with one of the Kennedy sisters – Patricia – which gives Ellroy the excuse he doesn’t need to reiterate his own fetishistic take on female fashions – all those crewneck sweaters and navy blazers.

Freddy loiters in private bedroom spaces. At times, The Enchanters feels like you’re stuck in some 3-D computer game as Ellroy moves you from room to room while Freddy cases the joint; this is tiresome, like watching a bored streamer.

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Freddy’s endless driving around LA with its repetitive street naming might appeal to Angelenos but this reader felt trapped, as if virtually embedded in Google Maps with signs telling me: No Exit from Brentwood.

Ellroy’s incessant use of punchy lines reminds you of some rap artists, like Twista with his pulverising polysyllables. You crave down-tempo moments of sensitivity, a bit of calm, relief from Ellroy’s all-embracing paranoia that squeezes tightly as a rogue pet python.

Speaking of pets, Ellroy was often photographed with his bull terrier, a grim-looking beast. Joyce Carol Oates once said Ellroy was the Fyodor Dostoevsky of American letters, but The Enchanters has little of the Russian’s psychological subtlety or depth.

Ellroy’s more the XL Bully, the American Bully of American fiction, a brutalised soul who’s never recovered – how could you? – from his mother’s appalling murder. His prose has all the aggression of said mastiff; it bites, it threatens, but ultimately, it’s extremely exhausting to handle.

Ellroy’s focus on America’s fascination with trashy, celebrity gossip is deliberately unsettling, deliberately provocative. He exploits our voyeuristic interest and then mocks our susceptibilities, our complicity in degradation.

Seriously disillusioned by the American dream, Ellroy skewers the myth of Kennedy’s Camelot; there’s no happily-ever-aftering here. Not even for their ferrets.