Carrie wrote:
"All of the characters besides the Op are totally static and
basically flat. They don't change and only in a few instances
does the progress of the story reveal anything new about
them."
Why must a character change? (Yes, I know it's one of the
textbook traits of the novel.) To me, some of the nbest
hardboiled and noir revolves around a character who does not
change, who may even be actively fighting against changing,
trying to hold onto himself no matter what comes.
You seem to contrast the Op and Spade, but how does Spade
change. He is the same person at the end of Falcon as he was
at the beginning, an amoral man defined by his job, who gives
up the possibility of change, through love, to remain the
same man.
Goodis was a master at this. Although some of his characters
try to change, they are almost always in exactly the same
spot at the end of the novel as at the beginning, sometimes
literally, as in Street of No Return, but often figuratively,
as they return to women who are bad for them, turning their
backs on the women who had offered them a chance for a new
life, as in Blonde on the Street Corner, Cassidy's Girl and
Moon in the Gutter.
Or as Paul Kavanagh first rule puts it: Do Nothing. It can be
quite a challenge to do nothing, to evade change.
Mark
ps -- Carrie, Touch is very good, but it is very atypical of
Leonard (a strange little book, but strange in a good way).
Offhand, I think you would probably do better going to his
books before Cat Chaser. He started writing very different
books after that, after he left the locales of Detroit and
Miami. As someone else noted, it was around that time that he
seems to have begun writing more for the movie adaptation
than for the novel. Get Shorty is definitely in the latter
period.
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