Tabloid Negative

Here’s reflexive enigma worthy of Joe Pesci: does Ellroy’s masterful novel (or Dillelo’s Libra) read like the nightmare forecast of David Kaiser’s voluminously detailed history or the other way around? Is history more like fiction or does fiction tend to anticipate and generate history? Was there ever an ambitious, womanizing young senator who saved the country from Nixon, or was he just an excuse for a cosmic horror that reverberates in the national psyche like a sliver of glass in our collective cornea? Would you rather read Kaiser’s review of Ellroy or Ellroy’s review of Kaiser? Would somebody please assign this piece as the next cover?