The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars “one great big suntanned hangover” At times Raymond Chandler’s penultimate Philip Marlowe novel The Long Goodbye (1953) reads like a hardboiled southern Californian Great Gatsby. There are references to F. Scott Fitzgerald and to T. S. Elliot and to hollow men and to corrupt American culture, and adjacent to the sordid real world (here smoggy LA) there is an exclusive community (here breezy Idle Valley) of amoral “pure gold” wealthy people who attend bacchanalian cocktail parties and abuse tranquilizers and commit adultery too often, and there is even a pair of former lovers who can’t be together and can’t forget each other. Of course, there is also Philip Marlowe, the bitter yet romantic, solo-chess-playing, liquor or coffee drinking, “shamus” (Private Investigator) knight stubbornly trying to do the right thing in the wrong situations, renting a small house on Laurel Canyon and a dusty office on Cahuenga in LA, “the big sordid dirty crooked city,” now 42 and feeling his age, still unable (or unwilling) to make much money, still single. Marlowe is more of a man of action than Nick Carraway and is more cynical about the rich (“bored and lonely people”), but as the common man outsider looking in at the lives of the rich (“I belonged in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana split”), he offers a similar vantage point in The Long Goodbye. The novel’s plot gets going when Marlowe sees a woman basically dump a drunk out of her car and decides on the spur of the moment to help the guy because there is something likeable about him, despite or because of his white hair, scarred face, weak charm, and peculiar pride. The man is Terry Lennox, and knowing him will soon have Marlowe driving around LA and vicinity, including once to Tijuana and several times to Idle Valley, not to mention being arrested, interrogated, insulted, beaten, threatened, hired, helped, rewarded, accused, used, tempted, confided in, lied to, and more. There will be murder and unusual jobs. There will be private investigation and media manipulation. There will be a $5,000 bill and surprising telephone calls. There will be seductive ladies and unsavory doctors and good cops and bad cops and eloquent thugs and an impudent Chilean servant and a “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” quoting black chauffeur. And a guilty and possibly suicidal alcoholic writer stand-in for Chandler himself, though Roger Wade is an author of best-selling sexy historical romances instead of hardboiled detective novels. This being a Chandler novel, it is enlivened by original similes and vivid descriptions: “Rich, strong, bitter, boiling hot, ruthless, depraved. The lifeblood of tired men.” (Coffee) “He looked at me like an entomologist looking at a beetle.” “Sparrows with rosy heads hopped about pecking at things only a sparrow would think worth pecking at.” “An hour crawled by like a sick cockroach.” “The air was warm and quiet and full of the tomcat smell of eucalyptus trees.” And by great lines of dialogue: “You’re a piker, Marlowe. You’re a peanut grifter. You’re so little it takes a magnifying glass to see you. . . You got no guts, no brains, no connections, no savvy, so you throw out a phony attitude and expect people to cry over you. Tarzan on a big red scooter.” “All tough guys are monotonous. Like playing cards with a deck that’s all aces. You’ve got everything and you’ve got nothing. You’re just sitting there looking at yourself. No wonder Terry didn’t come to you for help. It would be like borrowing money from a whore.” “You know something, Marlowe? I could get to like you. You’re a bit of a bastard—like me.” And by cynical life wisdom: “Drunks don’t educate, my friend. They disintegrate.” “There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.” “The most unlikely people commit the most unlikely crimes. . . We know damn little about what makes even our best friends tick.” It also features much social criticism of American culture and capitalism, everything from the lousy food of American restaurants and planned obsolescence of mass production to the corruption of media, politics, business, and law into essentially organized crime: “The law isn’t justice. It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer.” It sometimes almost reads like a McCarthy-Era apology for communism: “There’s a peculiar thing about money. . . In large quantities it tends to have a life of its own, even a conscience of its own.” The Long Goodbye is a page turning book without cheap suspense. There are some neat twists in it. I like how Marlowe will get irritated by a person who’s too snotty or thuggish or phony and then aggressively spew at them the analysis he’s been privately cogitating without narrating it. It’s effective storytelling, because we haven’t come up with Marlowe’s conclusions ourselves because we’ve been reading his exploits with rapt attention, so when he suddenly explains us up to speed while dressing someone down we experience a cool “Ah hah!” This being a 1950s novel, there is casual racism directed at Latinos and Japanese and blacks, but the worst people Marlowe encounters are white. Finally, does Marlowe protest too much when he says things like, “I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between the stars”? In any case, his narration sings with a terse sordid urban poetry: "Out there in the night of a thousand crimes people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick, bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness. "It all depends on where you sit and what your own private score is. I didn’t have one. I didn’t care. I finished the drink and went to bed." Fans of hardboiled fiction must read The Long Goodbye, but also people interested in well-written, unglamorous depictions of LA and America in the 1950s. View all my reviews
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