Many thanks to Mario Taoboda for his contribution to
"scholarly
study". Now that I have had time to brood and to have a
couple of brews (
like Marlowe, I do my best work this way), I feel adequately
prepared to
blast the prolific but rather dull JCO.
First of all, almost anyone who has ever gone through a
phase of
reading the NY Times Book Review can recognize a
pre-meditated hatchet job,
which is what we have here. Some of her criticisms may be
valid....I find it
hard to argue that _Long Goodbye_ doesn't have a dimension of
latent
homosexuality....but more often they depend on simple
assertions in place3
of real criticisms. Surely a statement to the effect that
_Farewell, My
Lovely_ is "a very bad book" until chap. 8_deserves a bit
more support?
Still more unfair is that she treats Chandler's complaint
that a mystery is
difficult to write in an artistic manner because the plot
requires that the
characters behave in unnatural ways. She offers as a
counter-example
Dickens's plotting - really? Most folks would concede, I
believe, that the
weak plotting in Dickens is in fact a major stumbling block
to appreciating
his books, After all, even Chandler never disposed of a
villain through
spontaneous combustion, as did CD. She does not appear to
believe Chandler's
(correct) assertion that a DA might employ an independent
investigator or
that a member of the Police force might be assigned to such
work. She
ignores completeluy the statement by Chandler that his works
were often
intednded to burlesque the genre, while apparantly according
Ellroys books
the post-modern tribute of being "parody" (demonstrating that
she has not
grasped much about Ellroy either).
Finally, I was rather annoyed that she resorts to the tired
old rap
that Chandler is little more than recycled Hemingway. While I
doubt that
anyone would deny that Hemingway was a gigantic influence on
the genre, and
one that continues to be felt, it also should not be
overlooked that he was
pretty old news to the reading public by the time that
Chandler wrote his
first story....reviews of the writers from that era
demonstrate that any
author who employed gutter vernacular was apt to be compared
to Hemingway.
Chandler used dialogue to similar effect to Hemingway -
albeit less
adroitly- but the lush descriptions for which Oates at last
finds reason to
justly praise in _The Big Sleep_ and others are actually an
example of
writing against the Hemingway style.... (incidentally,
Hemingway said that
Chandler was the only one of the "hard-boiled crowd" that he
could bear to
read. I suspect this was a put-down of Hammett, who he
appears to have had a
good deal of competitive feeling for).
At any rate, a very interesting essay. Explained a lot about
why I have
never warmed up to Oates's books. Her comments about othr
authors, such as
Poe and Melville, strike me as rash as her comments about
Chandler. It is
difficult to avoid the suspicion that she brings a bit of a
feminist agenda
(of the type that lately bears the "PC label)and that some of
her critique
is driven by what she perceives as misogyny and racism in the
stories. Small
wonder that she prefers the more "warm and fuzzy" Ross
MacDonald.
For myself, I have been hacking through Ellroy's _Silent
Terror_ ( mixed
feelings) and McGivern's _Rogue Cop_, whih is not all that
prettily written
but which was very hard to put down.
James
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James Michael Rogers
jetan@ionet.net
" I carried it too far, that's for sure" - Jeffrey
Dahmer
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