The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler

I read The Big Sleep a few years ago during a foray into genre fiction I was making at the time. I liked it fine, but I can't say it left much of an impression on me. Sometime later, someone I follow on Twitter recommended (generally, not to me personally, in the context of like, essential noir novels or somesuch) The Long Goodbye, so I added it to my PaperbackSwap wishlist and a couple weeks ago it showed up in my mailbox. The timing was perfect: June was a busy travel month for me and engrossing, plot-driven books are about the only books I can manage to read when I travel. (This was also the reason behind my selection of The Death of Roger Ackroyd immediately before The Long Goodbye. I finished both books on planes.)

For a long stretch as I was reading The Long Goodbye, things felt slightly familiar, but I wasn't certain that I had seen the movie. Then, when I was finally sure I had, I found that the book diverged quite a bit from what I remembered happening in the movie. I looked into this after the fact, and it turns out it's not so much that my memory is faulty but that the movie is quite different from the book. Several characters are missing from the movie and most notably, the ending - which I remembered and was expecting - is totally different. The mood of the movie is also different. As the Wikipedia page explains, the movie was updated to be set in the present day (1970s), when a character like Philip Marlowe was anachronistic. Anyway, the differences meant the book felt almost totally new to me.

So, about the book: I loved it. The writing was incredible. This is the language that is both imitated and spoofed in detective stories everywhere. Reading The Long Goodbye, I felt like I was experiencing the real thing for the first time. It was beautiful, and funny, and evocative, and stunning. I couldn't get over it. Everything else about the book felt sort of incidental. The story was good, but not nearly so good as the telling. Good or bad, I found I could read right past and forgive the flaws and bits that made me uncomfortable. It was just such a pleasure to read.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie

As I've discussed before, detective TV shows are like comfort food to me. However, as I've also discussed before (like one sentence later in the same post), I haven't read a lot of detective fiction. This was the third Agatha Christie novel I'd read and my first featuring Hercule Poirot.* It should come as no surprise that I have watched the full 70-episode run of the BBC Poirot series. Luckily for me, they all sort of muddle together so I can read the books without remembering whodunit. When I started The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, I immediately remembered which episode it was (the one where Poirot decides to retire to the country!), but I didn't remember the crime at all.

To read Poirot after watching hours upon hours of the TV show was a little surreal. I could see and hear David Suchet perform every affectation written on the page. I was almost surprised to find that I didn't feel this detracted from the book at all. What did surprise me was that the book was written in the first person by one of the other characters. It had never occurred to me that the Poirot books might be first person narratives. (While reading Roger Ackroyd, I inferred that many of the books are probably narrated by Captain Hastings.) Seeing this in action, it's clever and makes perfect sense. The narrator is in the same position as the reader: neither of you ever know quite what Poirot is up to until the big reveal. Anyway, it was fun to read this. Yay!

As an aside, I HIGHLY recommend this LA Review of Books article from a few years ago on the occasion of the end of the Poirot TV series, but about Poirot more broadly.


* I read And Then There Were None in middle school, adored it, and sought out another Agatha Christie novel at random. I don't remember which I ended up with, but it was a Poirot book and 13-year-old me just couldn't get into it. I don't think I quite got what Poirot was supposed to be. I never picked up a Christie book again until last year when I found a Miss Marple book at a thrift store, but I have watched every BBC adaptation of her books I can get my hands on.

Stoner, John Williams

When I was a kid, I thought the word melancholy sounded all wrong for what it meant. To me, melancholy sounded like a happy word and I thought it should represent a happy feeling. Many years later, by which time I had mostly reconciled myself to the definition of melancholy, I learned about literary traditions of melancholy, wherein it was seen as a mark of genius or a prerequisite to artistic production. This somehow jibed with my old childhood idea of melancholy, and so I've continued to think of melancholy as a sadness that is tinged with joy. The feeling of melancholy for me is similar to nostalgia, or the particular feeling of remembering past happiness in the face of loss, or simply the enjoyment that comes from wallowing in sad songs.

The overwhelming feeling I got while reading Stoner was melancholy. At times while reading it, I would think, "my god, how depressing," but I would read on and as I went I would find it not so depressing after all. What it really felt was normal and true. Stoner reads as the biography of a man who led a life that was more defined by frustration than fulfillment. He is constantly thwarted, but at the same time, you never feel he is all that disappointed in his lot. Which is not to say he's happy with it; it just is. In the end, I didn't even think the sadness quite outweighed the joy in this book, or maybe what joy there was seemed all the more joyful because of the pervasive sadness of the book. And that's what I liked best about the book; you could feel sorry for Stoner (and I definitely did - a lot!), but you could also read it and feel that this is what life is and that it's not so bad.