Books to the Ceiling

I’ve already written fairly extensively about Ross MacDonald. (See The Way Some People Die.) And I just posted a quote from The Doomsters this past Sunday. But can I read a MacDonald novel and not write about it? Never!

So I thought I’d concentrate on the language of the novel. As I was reading, I placed post-it notes at particularly memorable passages. So of course, by the time I finished the book, it resembled the literary version of a porcupine, fairly bristling with little yellow scraps of paper. (How, one wonders, did we ever manage before the invention of post-it notes?)

The Doomsters (195 has a strange opening: “I was dreaming about a hairless ape who lived in a cage by himself. His trouble was that people were always trying to get in.” Lew Archer is awakened from this hallucinatory vision by someone knocking at the side door. It’s a young man, wild-eyed, dishevelled, agitated. His name is Carl Hallman and he has just escaped from a nearby mental hospital. Archer lets him in. And of course, into the private detective’s life Hallman brings the inevitable world of trouble. Welcome to Archer/MacDonald country, where love shades into hate in an instant; motives are nothing if not suspect; women are either saints, lushes, whores, or some combination thereof; corruption, especially among public officials, is rampant; and family members desperate for money and power seem hellbent on destroying one another.

Sounds like rough terrain, doesn’t it? It is. It can be violent, depressing, hopeless. Why do I keep returning to it? I don’t know.

Well, I do know, sort of. There is something grimly compelling about watching these families implode like something out of a Greek tragedy. The glimpse of a used-to-be southern California, with its vast orange groves and its oil wells, certainly fascinates. And finally, there’s the mordant wit, the economy of expression, the figurative language and the rapier-sharp dialog that make Ross MacDonald’s prose so compelling:

“I went in through the curtains, and found myself in a twilit sitting room with a lighted television screen. At first the people on the screen were unreal shadows. After I sat and watched them for a few minutes, they became realer than the room. The screen became a window into a brightly lighted place where life was being lived, where a beautiful actress couldn’t decide between career and children and had to settle for both.

“Veins squirmed like broken purple worms under the skin of his nose. His eyes held the confident vacancy that comes from the exercise of other people’s power.

“She had the false assurance, or abandon, of a woman who has made a sexual commitment and swung her whole life from it like a trapeze.

“The dining-room had a curious atmosphere, unlived in and unlivable, like one of those three-walled rooms laid out in a museum behind a silk rope: Provincial California Spanish, Pre-Atomic Era.

“Headlights went by in the road like brilliant forlorn hopes rushing out of darkness into darkness.

“‘He oughtn’t to have ran,’ [Sheriff] Ostervelt said. ‘I’m a sharpshooter. I still don’t like to kill a man. It’s too damn easy to wipe one out and too damn hard to grow one.’

The Doomsters is the seventh of the eighteen Lew Archer novels. While it has many of the signature qualities that make this series so memorable, it is not without flaws, the chief of which is a verbose, almost hurried explanation of what has actually occurred in the course of a very complicated investigation. This lengthy exposition is delivered by a single character and is crowded into the novel’s concluding chapters. It was the only time the plot lost momentum. And I have to say that if anything, it left me even more confused about just who did what and why.

But up until that point, I was, as usual, enthralled. The Doomsters marks the end of MacDonald’s apprenticeship, as it were. It was followed by the terrific Galton Case, The Wycherly Woman, and my all time favorite, The Zebra-Striped Hearse.

I thought the title of this book was some kind of made-up word. Turns out it was made-up all right, but not by Ross MacDonald. On p.226, he quotes these lines:

‘Sleep the long sleep; / The Doomsters heap / Travails and teens around us here…’

I googled them and found that they were from a poem by Thomas Hardy: “To an Unborn Pauper Child.” Well, that’s what you get when you have a writer of hardboiled fiction who also happens to have a Ph.D. in English (awarded by the University of Michigan in 1951).

Ross MacDonald 1915-1983

I have, from to time to time, heard California referred to as Lotusland. This morning, with California on my mind, as it is for most Americans right now, I decided to track down the reference. Turns out, it is from The Odyssey, a copy of which has been on my coffee table for the last week. (The Teaching Company lectures on CD are responsible for my renewed interest in classical literature.) In Book Nine, in Samuel Butler’s translation, the passage reads thus:

“I was driven thence by foul winds for a space of nine days upon the
sea, but on the tenth day we reached the land of the Lotus-eater, who
live on a food that comes from a kind of flower. Here we landed to take
in fresh water, and our crews got their mid-day meal on the shore near
the ships. When they had eaten and drunk I sent two of my company to see
what manner of men the people of the place might be, and they had a
third man under them. They started at once, and went about among the
Lotus-eaters, who did them no hurt, but gave them to eat of the lotus,
which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about
home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to
them, but were for staying and munching lotus with the Lotus-eater
without thinking further of their return; nevertheless, though they wept
bitterly I forced them back to the ships and made them fast under the
benches. Then I told the rest to go on board at once, lest any of them
should taste of the lotus and leave off wanting to get home, so they
took their places and smote the grey sea with their oars.

Alas, Southern California resembles anything but Lotusland right now. Rather, the news footage makes it look downright apocalyptic. Thank goodness that as of this writing, the worst appears to be over! We have family in northern San Diego County, so it’s been a nervous time for us. At this writing, they and their house are no longer threatened, but they have harrowing stories to tell concerning friends who have not been as fortunate.

I’d like to recommend a powerful you-are-there piece of reporting by Amy Wilentz in yesterday’s (10/25/07) Washington Post: “When the Hills Are Burning.”

Apparently, the latest trend in development in Southern California is to build further inland, coastal property having become prohibitively expensive for too many potential buyers. The problem is that this move into the hills of California’s interior is creating a whole new sphere of vulnerability. In an article in Wednesday’s Washington Post , Mike Davis, a historian at the University of California at Irvine, suggested that in order to fully comprehend the nature of this newest danger, “‘…you simply drive out to the San Gorgonio Pass, where the winds blow over 50 mph over a hundred days a year and you have new houses standing next to 50-year-old chaparral.’” (Chaparral is a highly flammable, drought-resistant scrub oak which almost invariably provides tinder for California wildfires, although its exact role in these fires is the occasion of some controversy.) Davis then adds, “You might as well be building next to leaking gasoline cans.”

Nine years ago Mike Davis published The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. His chief concern in this book is what ecologists term the “urban/wildland interface” and how this phenomenon specifically affects Los Angeles and the surrounding area. Here is a sample of chapter titles: “How Eden Lost Its Garden,” “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” “Maneaters of the Sierra Madre.” Floods, drought, and, of course, earthquakes are likewise covered. I read this book when it came out, so I don’t remember the specifics, but I do remember the mounting sense of dread as I read on. And yet…

Who would be crazy enough to live there? My family, composed of basically sensible people. and, given half a chance, my husband and myself. For California has had that Lotusland affect on us when we have visited the San Diego area and the desert towns of the Coachella Valley, where my parents used to spend their winters. On the approach to the Palm Springs Airport, you descend to what seems like the bottom of a bowl ringed around with mountains. The airport itself is open to the air, with citrus trees in abundance. The air is scented with them; the sky is blue; the mountains are everywhere. My father loved this place, and he bequeathed his love of it to me.

Another memory: I am standing on a corner in the quaint little downtown of Carlsbad. Soft breezes are caressing my bare arms. I close my eyes and simply stand still. This is a time of trouble for our family; these gentle zephyrs seem to impart a kind of consolation. Every time I have traveled to Southern California, I have been reluctant to leave. I have desired, like the lotus-eaters, to stay where I was forever.

I have no desire to post photos of these terrible fires; we have seen plenty already in the mass media. Rather, I would like to post just a few beautiful shots of San Diego: this is why people love it there!

From left to right: the San Diego Skyline at night, San Diego Bay from Harbor Drive, Point Loma Lighthouse, Two Towers in Balboa Park, and View of San Diego from Seaport Village

[The Los Angeles Times has a list of agencies accepting donations for victims of the California wildfires.]