THE LITTLE SISTER

It was a blast. Not quite as good as The Lady in the Lake; Chandler’s wife was dying of cancer while he wrote it, and also, he was working on screenplays in Hollywood at the time, which definitely seems to have embittered him. Every character in the book is unlikeable (at least The Lady in the Lake had decent-hearted, homespun Sheriff Patton to take the edge off everyone else), some parts are repetitive (all three female characters seem irresistably attracted to Marlowe as soon as they meet him, and I can’t believe I'm saying this, but the sexy banter eventually wears thin), and Marlowe himself seems extra-despairing, possibly in danger of going off the rails. Still, Chandler’s writing continues to prompt a lot of page-dogearing from me—so many good parts! Here are the high points:

• Cat-related metaphors pop up in Chandler with unusual frequency, and I’m glad he seems to find the word “kitten” as endlessly amusing as I do. This one is the best, though: “She probed the inside of her tool kit again and dragged out a red change purse and from that she took a number of bills, all neatly folded and separate. Three fives and five ones. There didn’t seem to be much left. She kind of held the purse so I could see how empty it was. Then she straightened the bills out on the desk and put one on top of the other and pushed them across. Very slowly, very sadly, as if she was drowning a favorite kitten.”

• People are constantly drinking and smoking in Chandler books, providing him with some running action to describe during the dialogue scenes. At least Marlowe calls himself on it occasionally: “I killed my cigarette and got another one out and went through all the slow futile face-saving motions of lighting it, getting rid of the match, blowing smoke off to one side, inhaling deeply as through that scrubby little office was a hilltop overlooking the bouncing ocean—all the tired clichéd mannerisms of my trade.”

• I love it when Marlowe gets all jaded and world-weary: “We went on staring at each other. It didn’t get either of us anywhere. We both had done too much of it in our lives to expect miracles.”

• Chandler’s character descriptions are always priceless: “A fat man in sky-blue pants was closing the door with that beautiful leisure only fat men ever achieve… Above the sky-blue gabardine slacks he wore a two-tone leisure jacket which would have been revolting on a zebra. The neck of his canary-yellow shirt was open wide, which it had to be if his neck was going to get out. He was hatless and his large head was decorated with a reasonable amount of pale salmon-colored hair. His nose had been broken but well set and it hadn’t been a collector’s item in the first place.”

• Good scenery descriptions, too: “The Chateau Bercy was old but made over. It had the sort of lobby that asks for plush and india-rubber plants, but gets glass brick, cornice lighting, three-cornered glass tables, and a general air of having been redecorated by a parolee from a nut hatch. Its color scheme was bile green, linseed-poultice brown, sidewalk gray and monkey-bottom blue. It was as restful as a split lip.”

• Four great sound-related similes:
  1. “Her voice was as cool as boarding-house soup.”
  2. “The room was suddenly full of heavy silence, like a fallen cake.”
  3. “Her voice faded off into a sort of sad whisper, like a mortician asking for a down payment.”
  4. “She had a low lingering voice with a sort of moist caress in it like a damp bath towel.”
  

• Poor Marlowe. Always too smart for the room:
  “‘Out. I don’t know you. I don’t want to know you. And if I did, this wouldn’t be either the day or the hour.’
  ‘Never the time and place and the loved one all together,’ I said.
  ‘What’s that?’ She tried to throw me out with the point of her chin, but even she wasn’t that good.
  ‘Browning. The poet, not the automatic. I feel sure you’d prefer the automatic.’”

THE LADY IN THE LAKE

As much as I loved my two months with Dickens, it’s a joy and a relief to move on to Raymond Chandler. While his voice may be just as distinctive as Dickens’, his descriptions as vivid, and his characters as colorful, it’s such a relief to read his clear, direct, unabashedly twentieth-century prose. While Dickens did encompass violence, corruption, sex, and moral depravity, you had to wait around for it, or dig through several layers of propriety to figure it out, but here it’s out in the open and it’s awesome. I adore Chandler’s writing: muscular, action-packed, hard-boiled but often beautiful, bittersweetly funny, occasionally just bitter, and drowning in alcohol. Not to mention that (a) he writes so intimately about Los Angeles, now that I live here it just adds to the fun (see the joke about Pasadena’s legendary heat in the quotes below); and (b) I’ve got a crush on Philip Marlowe about a mile long (tough, lonely, sad, morally compromised, a standup guy trying to survive a crushingly dirty world…swoon!). I’ve read the early Chandler already—The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, The High Window, and his short stories—so this month I’m tackling the later four books. (How I love authors with manageable oeuvres! Austen, Forster, Fitzgerald—just a handful of novels to read before you become a completist.)

Forget the plots—no, seriously, I’ve already forgotten the plots of all the Chandler books I’ve read. The plots aren’t the point. Famously, when the screenwriters of The Big Sleep called on Chandler to unravel a tangled plot detail for them, even he wasn’t able to do it. The point is the atmosphere, particularly that hard-boiled, wisecracking, simile-ridden private-detective narration that has been so frequently imitated and parodied in a million noirish books and movies since. Here are a few gems from The Lady in the Lake, which I finished yesterday. For maximum effect, imagine all of them being read to you in the voice of Humphrey Bogart:

• “She looked playful and eager, but not quite sure of herself, like a new kitten in a house where they don’t much care about kittens.”

• “His head with the hat off had the indecent look of heads that are seldom without hats.”

• “I got home about two-forty-five and Hollywood was an icebox. Even Pasadena had felt cool.”

• “Grayson was a long stooped yellow-faced man with high shoulders, bristly eyebrows and almost no chin. The upper part of his face meant business. The lower part was just saying goodbye.”

• “I smelled of gin. Not just casually, as if I had taken four or five drinks of a winter morning to get out of bed on, but as if the Pacific Ocean was pure gin and I had nose-dived off the boat deck. The gin was in my hair and eyebrows, on my chin and under my chin. It was on my shirt. I smelled like dead toads.”

• “The clerk snapped at Degarmo’s back like a terrier.
  ‘One moment, please. Whom did you wish to see?’
  Degarmo spun on his heel and looked at me wonderingly. ‘Did he say “whom”?’
  ‘Yeah, but don’t hit him,’ I said. ‘There is such a word.’
  Degarmo licked his lips. ‘I knew there was,’ he said. ‘I often wondered where they kept it.’”
  

• “Degarmo swung his head hard at him. ‘What about this scarf, fatty? Isn’t that evidence?’
  ‘You didn’t fit it in to anything—not that I heard,’ Patton said peacefully. ‘And I ain’t fat either, just well covered.’”

• “‘However hard I try to be nice I always end up with my nose in the dirt and my thumb feeling for somebody’s eye.’”

DAVID COPPERFIELD

I spent all of March working through David Copperfield (including some marathon reading sessions on the plane back and forth to Minnesota), and am ashamed that I didn’t manage to post about it at all. In short, it was really good, even better (literature-wise) than Nicholas Nickleby, but not quite so enjoyable to me personally. NN was formulaic but just more good old-time Victorian-melodrama fun; DC, written in the first person and occasionally in the present tense, with its focus on dreams and memory and shaping one’s own identity, felt shockingly modern, though still definitely chock-full of Dickensy flavor. (And inscrutable Victorian mores—even with all I knew of the period, it was hard for me to swallow it when after Little Em’ly ran off with Steerforth, her friends and family kept suggesting that she was obviously about to become a prostitute at any moment, and it would have been better if she had died than be seduced by him, even though after she leaves Steerforth she reunites with her family and ends up living a long and happy [if never-married] life in Australia.) I was maybe getting a bit overloaded on Dickens by the end of my two-month stint with him—so much so that when my company switched over to Microsoft Office 2007 recently, during a training session I found myself momentarily unable to interpret the phrase “widow and orphan control” in its correct typographical context, my mind clouded by diabolical Dickensian implications of oppression and villainy. Still, I know my thirst for Dickens will return after a short break—in fact, I’d like to try to read all of his novels eventually.