Tuesday, May 24: High-Heeled Gumshoe
BOOKS THAT STAYED WITH ME
by Melodie Johnson Howe
I was thinking about the books I chose for John’s column and why I chose them.
These books are like people from my past who have touched me, helped me, made me cry, made me see things differently. They opened up worlds that in my youth I could not imagine. Looking at the list I realize that most of these books were read though the eyes of a girl who wanted to say something, to be heard. In other words, a girl who wanted to be writer.
Look Homeward, Angel was the first book I read that truly swept me away. The young me loved the excess, the overwrought emotion, a heart laid bare. A stone. A leaf. A door. How beautiful those simple words were to me and what weight they carried. I will never forget the character Ben with his broken feet. And when I drive past a cemetery and glimpse the carved stone angels, that youthful feeling of discovery and anguish still floods over me.
When I finished reading Madame Bovary I could never look at women the same way again. And to this day when I walk into a department store I see contemporary versions of Emma grabbing the latest high-heeled shoe, lipstick, or necklace. When these Emmas stare at their reflections there is always disappointment lingering behind the expectation.
I never hoped to write as brilliantly as Flaubert, but I learned from reading Madame Bovary that a captivating story and complicated characters can convey the writer’s theme to the reader without once having to resort to the obvious or the polemic. And to this day I still wish Emma hadn’t killed herself, but I understand why she did. I guess I also learned the meaning of ambivalence from this book.
I was a freshman in college when I read The Great Gatsby. When I finished the book I read everything of Fitzgerald’s I could put my hands on, including all his short stories. The Pat Hobby Stories are still among my favorites.
Reading Gatsby, I learned how a first person voice can be used. How it doesn’t have to get in the way of the other characters voices, how it can stand back, observe, and then move in again becoming part of the story. Gatsby was the quintessential romantic figure, not unlike Emma Bovary. (Romantic figures are very needy.) I fell for him like a ton of bricks. I could see in him what Daisy couldn’t. I could feel his constant yearning. When he was murdered so unjustly and mistakenly, I died too. I fell in love with my first fictional character and learned about the art of the first person narrator at the same time.
I read Leaving Cheyenne only once and I don’t have a copy of it. I think the book is out of print now. To be honest, I have a hard time remembering details of the story. So why is it on my list? The book hit me in the gut. Two men in love with the same woman. One woman in love with the two men. What I remember is the passion and compassion that is shared among these three people and their inevitable loss. I still feel for these characters.
The Long Goodbye is like the Bible to me. I have read it many times. And it always feels new from the opening, where Marlowe sees Terry Lennox drunk and takes pity on him, to the end, when Marlowe sits at his desk as Lennox leaves his office:
I listened to his steps going away down the imitation marble corridor. After a while they got faint, then they got silent. I kept on listening anyway. What for? Did I want him to stop suddenly and turn around and come back and talk me out of the way I felt? Well, he didn’t. That was the last I saw of him.
I never saw any of them again—except the cops.
No way has yet been invented to say good-bye to them.
This book is about two men and loss. Most crime novels are riddled with betrayal but this has a depth that goes beyond the usual. Chandler’s prose is dazzling and he captured my hometown like I had never seen it.
No Country for Old Men is the most recently written book on my list. The reason I picked it is because I hadn’t been struck or gobsmacked by a book in a long time until I read this one. Sherriff Bell is one of the great characters and has a villain to match him. The themes of love, duty, good and evil are brilliantly interwoven into a very bloody brutal story. If a book can have a soul this book has it.
All these books have the similar theme of struggle and loss. And they all have great narratives and characters. Except for one, I read them when I was young. I wonder how good a writer I would be without having read them.
Believe it or not, I have never read anything by Raymond Chandler—yet. I think I might as well start with The Long Goodbye (since both you and JLW listed it as one of your six all-time favorites). I never understood what’s so great about Gatsby, though. And I have this sneaking suspicion that I probably never will. . . .
By the way, loved No Country for Old Men the movie. Javier Bardem (almost) gave me nightmares!
I just remembered: the closest I came to reading Raymond Chandler was when I read Stephen King’s “Umney’s Last Case,” which is a Chandler pastiche. Very good short story. I’m sure John F. knows it too!
Yep, I liked Umney. And Josh, you’d like Chandler as well.
Josh, please do not start with The Long Goodbye—it is the last and most complex of all of Chandler’s major works. (He wrote one Marlowe novel after it, Playback, which he based on his own non-Marlowe screenplay, but by then Cissy had died and he had crawled into a bottle to escape—it is patently inferior to his other work.)
Start with The Big Sleep. After that, Farewell, My Lovely. The next three novels, The Lady in the Lake, The High Window, and The Little Sister, may be read in any order. They are not quite up to the standard set by the first two, but they are still very much worth your time, especially The Little Sister. Then, and only then, after having gained a solid appreciation for what Chandler could do and the essence of the Marlowe character, should you tackle The Long Goodbye.
Critical opinion varies regarding it. Some, like Melodie and me, regard it as his crowning achievement. Others find it bloated and tediously slow. But one thing’s for sure: the Marlowe at its beginning isn’t the same Marlowe as at its end. That’s not really the case with the rest of them.
Somewhere in there, you should also look at his short stories, especially “Red Wind”.
Raymond Chandler, although a very strange duck personally, set the standard by which all subsequent hard-boiled stories are measured. His only real peer was the great Dashiell Hammett, whose clean and sparse style is almost antipodal to Chandler’s rich and evocative one. But it isn’t a stretch to say that almost every classic hard-boiled mystery written after Chandler has his fingerprints on it, especially the best of them.
Josh,
James is right. Don’t start with The Long Goodbye. I’d follow his reading plan or even start with Red Wind and Chandler’s other short stories.
There are some clunkers in The Long Goodbye. If remember Marlowe equates himself to s stallion sexually. Toe curling.
So you may ask why do james and I like this book.
I love it because it is multi layered with various relationships echoing the theme of love and betrayal. And it’s filled with characters from the creative to the criminal. All of them representing a cross section of Los Angeles. I like that it takes it’s time because I love being in Marlowe’s world and reading Chandler’s prose. And most of all becasue Chandler dared with this one
I am all in favor of reading Chandler in order, but I am the minority report in favor of Farewell My Lovely as the best of ’em.
Okay, thanks guys! I guess I’ll just start with his first book The Big Sleep, and then work my way through the rest chronologically. What I discovered just now and what I find very surprising is the fact that he wrote only . . . what? Half a dozen (complete) novels? Raymond Chandler is such a well-known and highly regarded name, you’d think he has many, many more books to his credit. But I guess that’s one proof of his genius; he only needed six books—and a bunch of short stories—to earn himself a firm place in literature. Really amazing!
Thanks for the reccomendations!