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A review by ethorwitz
The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
3.0
A very fast read at the beginning, but it begins to bog down in the middle.
I came into this with certain expectations of hard-boiled crime and the noir films they inspired: that they were a consciously created genre following rigid narrative rules. An anti-hero in an unjust world navigating a set of common plot devices and stock characters as archetypical to the American psyche as anything out of Plato or Jung. Perhaps this is true of neo-noir aping the past, but original noir was entirely spontaneous. Nobody intended to go out and make a new genre. The crime novelists and experimental filmmakers who created these works were already cynical people, fascinated by the cracks on the surface of postwar American prosperity and by the kinds of people who fell into them. These movies and books were produced independently of each other and only later someone happened to notice that they shared similar themes and styles. This is evident reading The Long Goodbye, which seems designed as an outlet for Raymond Chandler to complain about everything wrong with society. I found the actual murder mystery was much less interesting then the bizarre and contemptible characters who the PI protagonist, a clear author stand-in, would interact with on his way to solving the case. These characters seemed to be oversized and overstated caricatures of practices the author didn't approve of, people the author didn't like, and professions the author was deeply cynical about. Cops are all violent and corrupt, newspaper journalists are opportunists and liars, nobody ever became wealthy honestly, etc etc. Such a tell-it-like-it-is narrative always runs the risk of spouting some awful misogyny or racism, but beyond a handful of stereotypes this was barely present at all.
This book also taught me how to make a gimlet, and now it's my favorite drink.
I came into this with certain expectations of hard-boiled crime and the noir films they inspired: that they were a consciously created genre following rigid narrative rules. An anti-hero in an unjust world navigating a set of common plot devices and stock characters as archetypical to the American psyche as anything out of Plato or Jung. Perhaps this is true of neo-noir aping the past, but original noir was entirely spontaneous. Nobody intended to go out and make a new genre. The crime novelists and experimental filmmakers who created these works were already cynical people, fascinated by the cracks on the surface of postwar American prosperity and by the kinds of people who fell into them. These movies and books were produced independently of each other and only later someone happened to notice that they shared similar themes and styles. This is evident reading The Long Goodbye, which seems designed as an outlet for Raymond Chandler to complain about everything wrong with society. I found the actual murder mystery was much less interesting then the bizarre and contemptible characters who the PI protagonist, a clear author stand-in, would interact with on his way to solving the case. These characters seemed to be oversized and overstated caricatures of practices the author didn't approve of, people the author didn't like, and professions the author was deeply cynical about. Cops are all violent and corrupt, newspaper journalists are opportunists and liars, nobody ever became wealthy honestly, etc etc. Such a tell-it-like-it-is narrative always runs the risk of spouting some awful misogyny or racism, but beyond a handful of stereotypes this was barely present at all.
This book also taught me how to make a gimlet, and now it's my favorite drink.