Well, he's comfortable in an urban setting, anyway (though he
also seems pretty comfortable in the woods). But he was
always too old to be a proper yuppie, and I'm not sure if
private detective is one of the "in" professions. And one of
the highlights for me, anyway, at least in the early books,
was the frequent shots he took at the vanity,
self-centeredness and ridiculous obsession with following
trends of the then-emerging yuppie lifestyle, as in his
frequent gripes about gentrification and being
"urban-renewed" out of his office, and his and Hawk's running
commentary on Henry's new clients at the gym.
To me, even with the annoying dog and the cozy lifestyle he
now has, Spenser is still too stubborn and iconoclastic to be
a real yuppie, even if he does enjoy cooking and good
booze.
Now, Susan, on the other hand (and despite her age) really
does seem sort of yuppie-ish.
Mind you, I guess it depends on how you define "yuppie." Is
Marlowe a yuppie? How about Elvis Cole? Or V.I. Warshawski?
(Think about her obsession with Italian footwear!) How about
the upwardly mobile Easy Rawlins? Is he a proto-buppie? Is
Kinsey Millhone a suppie, since she lives in the
'burbs?
--
Kevin Burton Smith The Thrilling Detective Web Site http://www.thrillingdetective.com -- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 12 Jan 2003 EST