Ed wrote:
"Okay, there's one in the first five pages. But the force of
the narrative carries you along."
That's probably why I moved on. I liked the style and was
interested enough in the characters to overlook the terrible
coincidences -- the one that made me laugh to keep from
throwing the book down was the random cab driver recognizing
him and not only not turning him in, but having exactly the
connection he needed at that point. That was even worse than
the one you mention at the beginning.
"I'm curious, Mark. Which Goodis titles do you like the
most?"
My favorite is Street of No Return. There's something about
the circularity of it that really appealed to me. Only
slightly behind that I'd rate Cassidy's Girl or Down
There.
In fact, the only other one besides Dark Passage that I've
read that I would count as a lesser work of his is Wounded
and the Slain. I'm not sorry I read it, but found it more
interesting for how it relates to other of his books than for
itself. It has many of the usual Goodis elements, but it's
like he's still working them out. There are the fragile
blonde woman he loved, but couldn't make it work with and the
dark lower class woman he fights against being with, but he
dispenses with her pretty early on. Which is part of the
second element, upstanding middle class guy drinking his
career and sexual frustration away, but it's odd seeing the
process; in many of his other books, the guy starts at the
bottom, the cause seen in flashback.
And there was that '50s Freudianism that someone recently
mentioned about another book. I must admit, though, that I
was somewhat surprised by the open discussion of the female
orgasm in a '50s book, but the very slow rise of the
repressed memory got tired. And it led into some serious plot
manipulation in the last quarter to bring about a pretty
unbelievable "happy ever after" for the couple, as artificial
as those in films of the era. I have trouble even thinking of
"happy ever after" in reference to a Goodis book.
Mark
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 21 Jul 2007 EDT