Nick Tosches is a brilliant writer, a scrupulous researcher, and a skilled biographer. Sometimes he's even all three at once. With Hellfire, Tosches offered a whiskey-soaked Faulknerian take on Jerry Lee Lewis. With Dino: Living High In The Dirty Business Of Dreams, he found a soullessness resting beneath Dean Martin's devil-may-care attitude. These books were journalism of high literary caliber, channeling Tosches' investigative acumen through his inimitable prose and harnessing his cigarettes-and-sorrowful-musings voice in the service of history. In King Of The Jews, an ostensible biography of the famed jazz-age gambler and underworld figure Arnold Rothstein, Tosches-the-prose-stylist and Tosches-the-historian both appear. But they're rarely on the same page.
In fact, they often seem to be working on several different books, each only partly about Rothstein, who doesn't even make a proper appearance until almost two-thirds of the way in. These include long, fascinating, but puzzlingly out-of-place histories of dice and Judaism, an examination of the historical evidence of Jesus' existence, a digression on how New York's anti-smoking laws echo Nazi policies (by Tosches' reckoning, anyone who finds that comparison offensive is just another sucker), anti-Bush jibes, and a lot of lamenting the loss of the New York that was.
And, oh yeah, about Rothstein… Well, quite a few court transcripts are presented verbatim, along with a good accounting of Rothstein's parents' lives, plus a full autopsy report. There's also a fair amount of talk about how other Rothstein biographers got their facts wrong, followed by a lot of badly substantiated anecdotes. And then there's a short chapter that starts off "Why am I writing this, and why are you reading it?" A better question: Why didn't Tosches finish it? Writing about everything but Rothstein might be calculatedly perverse, but at best, King Of The Jews reads like a book rushed to meet a deadline, and at worst, the work of someone giving up and going out with a whimper. Tosches scares up some moments of brilliance, but they're only moments. Mostly, he writes as if writing has become another waste of his time. For his readers, the feeling could easily become mutual.