Nation Topics - Raymond Chandler | The Nation

A long-lost memoir of the Spanish Civil War moves jaggedly between boredom, fleeting triumphs and terror.

Margaret Thatcher is never named in Derek Raymond's Factory novels, but her shadow falls over them.

The collected nonfiction of Roberto Bolaño is a treasure trove filled with straw and dust, jewels and gold.

Two new novels, by Michael Chabon and Nathan Englander, recharge the modern Jewish experience with a sense of the exotic.

Walter Mosley's Fortunate Son is a serious novel about
intimately connected yet diametrically opposed black and white
stepbrothers.

Daniel Fuchs's The Golden West is best read as an
author's requiem for the Hollywood he loved.

Despite their indifference to genre fiction, American publishers of literary novels have consistently made exceptions for homegrown crime writers.

Somewhere, and it's not in this new Everyman's Library edition, James M.
Cain betrayed a state secret when he said that "a writer can only write
two hours a day." The truth in this observation

Much as I hate to, I'm going to start by talking about the damn money.
I'm only doing it because almost everyone else is.

It's not just the author profiles and publishing-trade columns, but
seemingly every other review of The Emperor of Ocean Park that
mentions, way before stuff like plot or characters, the $4.2 million
Knopf paid Yale Law professor Stephen L. Carter for this first novel and
another to come. Most, if not all, of these pieces seem incredulous that
an academic-of-color could reap the kind of dough-re-mi for thriller
writing that the John Grishams and Tom Clancys could command. Pundits of
both colors--or of what Carter's novel continually refers to as "the
darker nation" and "the paler nation"--sound pleasantly surprised that
an African-American male could earn some pop-cultural buzz by being paid
millions of dollars for doing something that doesn't require a ball or a
microphone.

I'm guessing Carter has the grace to be appreciative about all this. But
I'm also guessing that the author of Reflections of an Affirmative
Action Baby is equipped with inner radar delicate enough to pick up
faint signals of condescension (or worse) beneath all this hype. Sifting
through the reviews so far, especially those taking Carter to the
woodshed, one detects glimmers of doubt as to whether the book or the
author deserves all that money and attention. No matter that Carter,
Yale Law's first tenured African-American professor, has established his
credentials as a legal scholar and public intellectual, having published
seven nonfiction books whose subjects include values (Integrity,
Civility), faith in public life (The Culture of Disbelief, God's Name in Vain) and, of course, race
(Reflections...). Black people have been through enough job
interviews to recognize the skeptically arched eyebrows in key precincts
of Book-Chat Nation over Carter's big score. The eyebrows ask: Is the
book worth all this fuss--and all that damn money?

The short answer is yes, though we'll get to the longer, more
complicated answer in a few clicks. First I want to address the other
recurring motif in the reviews so far: a belief that the novel's primary
value--if not the only legitimate reason for all that money--comes in
the way it foregrounds privileged reaches of African-American society.
As if Dorothy West, John A. Williams, Nella Larsen, George S. Schuyler,
John Oliver Killens, Charles W. Chesnutt, Lawrence Otis Graham and E.
Franklin Frazier, the Veblen-esque sociologist-satirist who wrote
Black Bourgeoisie, had never been born, much less ever bothered
writing books. To these weary eyes, such incredulity over class issues
reflects nothing more than the same-as-it-ever-was manner in which
novels by African-Americans are waved toward the sociocultural
checkpoint before they can compete for artistic consideration. And since
it's being marketed as a legal thriller/whodunit, The Emperor of
Ocean Park has the added burden of being stigmatized as a genre
piece. Hence the carping in some reviews over Emperor, whose
closing kickers spring merrily like tripwires.

Hello. It's melodrama. There are a lot of smart people who agree
with Raymond Chandler, who confessed to a friend in 1945 that he chose
to write melodrama "because when I looked around me it was the only kind
of writing that was relatively honest." Also as Chandler and other smart
people drawn to genre have repeatedly proved, it's possible to hang
lyricism, social observation, even political ideas on melodrama's broad
shoulders so long as you don't forget to play by the rules of the genre.
One more thing: Melodrama, when played at top speed, often can be
transformed into something very close to satire or, at least,
sophisticated farce.

The Emperor of Ocean Park doesn't move quite fast enough for
that, which may be its biggest problem. Still, it is sophisticated
entertainment; witty, elegantly written (way better than Grisham or
Clancy, OK?), conceptually outrageous in a genteel way and flush with
conflicting ideas unleashed in the stick-and-move fashion of a
freewheeling sparring match. The surprise isn't that Carter can write
fiction. It's his showmanship in mixing up the car chases, chess
strategies, red herrings and gun battles with such dark, rueful
observations as this:

I suddenly understand the passion of the many black nationalists of the
sixties who opposed affirmative action, warning that it would strip the
community of the best among its potential leaders, sending them off to
the most prestigious colleges, and turning them into... well, into young
corporate apparatchiks in Brooks Brothers suits, desperate for the favor
of powerful white capitalists.... And the nationalists were right. I am
the few. My wife is the few. My sister is the few. My students are the
few. These kids pressing business cards on my brother-in-law are the
few. And the world is such a bright, angry red.... I stand very still,
letting the redness wash over me, wallowing in it the way a man who has
nearly died of thirst might wallow in the shower, absorbing it through
every pore, feeling the very cells of my body swell with it, and sensing
a near-electric charge in the air, a portent, a symbol of a coming
storm, and reliving and reviling in this frozen, furious instant every
apple I have ever polished for everybody white who could help me get
ahead.

This passionately skeptical, somewhat self-loathing voice belongs to
Talcott Garland, who also answers to the names "Tal" and "Misha." (This
multiplicity of names is one of the little jokes that Carter threatens
to run into the ground.) A law professor at an unnamed Ivy League
university, Talcott is one of four children of Oliver Garland, a
conservative judge appointed by Nixon to the US Court of Appeals, who
might have served on the Supreme Court if his nomination hadn't been
derailed because he was seen hanging around the federal courthouse with
a college roommate named Jack Ziegler, a former CIA agent and a sinister
presence skulking in the dark alleys of American power.

As the novel begins, Tal's father, whom Time once dubbed the
"emperor of Ocean Park" because of his family's impressive digs in the
Oak Bluffs section of Martha's Vineyard, has been found dead in his
study. Tal is, at best, indulgent to older sister Mariah's suspicions
that their father met with foul play. Still, Tal suspects something's
afoot when, at the judge's funeral, Ziegler pulls him aside to ask the
whereabouts of some "arrangements" that the judge stashed away
somewhere. Knowing "Uncle Jack" all too well, Tal suspects that these
"arrangements" don't exactly fall into customary categories of
post-mortem details. By the time bogus FBI agents try to scare him into
telling what little he knows and the Episcopal priest who conducts the
funeral is tortured and murdered, Tal's paranoia has kicked into third
gear.

All of which Tal needs like root canal. Things are rough at the law
school with various and sundry colleagues intruding their personal
dramas onto his own. One of them, it turns out, is in competition with
Tal's stunning wife, Kimmer, short for "Kimberly," for potential
appointment to a federal judgeship. Kimmer frets and fusses about the
appointment, oblivious to her husband's concerns for their safety from
whatever or whoever is stalking them. She barely notices the shadow
stalkers, traveling long distances from home to make rain for her
high-toned law firm. Tal suspects Kimmer is having an affair, but can
barely keep her close by long enough to probe for concrete evidence. He
concedes being flummoxed in general by the nature of women, seeking
respite from such mysteries in "the simple rejuvenating pleasure of
chess." Indeed, the conundrums of chess, a game where, as in life, white
always gets the first move over black, play a metaphoric role in the
mystery, complete with missing pawns from the judge's own set and a
strategic gambit labeled "Excelsior."

A few words about Tal: He's the hero of the story, but he's not an easy
man to admire. Readers so far think he's at best an unjustly beleaguered
nerd or at worst an embittered brat, as self-absorbed as the mercenary
students, career women and secular humanists he slaps with his words. He
behaves badly at times, never more so than in a memorably chilling set
piece in which he bullies and humiliates one of his students, "an
unfortunate young man whose sin is to inform us all that the cases I
expect my students to master are irrelevant, because the rich guys
always win.... His elbow is on the chair, his other fist is tucked under
his chin, and I read in his posture insolence, challenge, perhaps even
the unsubtle racism of the supposedly liberal white student who cannot
quite bring himself to believe that his black professor could know more
than he.... I catch myself thinking, I could break him." And he
does, adding to the rapidly expanding ledger tabulating his
self-disgust.

On the other hand, he loves his young son Bentley in a way that
frightens him, especially when he visualizes a future in which Kimmer
drifts out of his life with son in tow. He volunteers in a soup kitchen,
partly as penance for his transgressions, partly to turn down the noises
his own inner radar makes and submit to Christian values. He also yearns
for a grounded sense of family, though relations with his aforementioned
sister are strained and his brother Addison--the one Tal believes Dad
liked best--is a commitment-phobic radio personality who keeps slipping
from sight to avoid close scrutiny. (He has his reasons.) And there was
a younger sister, Abby, something of a family renegade, who died in a
car accident. "When Abby died," Tal recalls, "my father went a little
nuts, and then he got better." It's the book's most pithy line. Don't,
for a minute, forget it.

Carter is very good at evoking the wonderlands of American life, whether
the Vineyard, Aspen or Washington's "Gold Coast" enclave of wealthy,
powerful African-Americans. He's even better at describing the
machinations and intrigue in law school faculty offices--which shouldn't
be a surprise, though Carter's extended disclaimer (pages 655-57) begs
readers not to confuse Tal's spiky, tempestuous professional life with
his own. Still, from what readers know of Carter's ideas about religion,
ethics, politics and manners, it's not too much of a stretch to see Tal
asserting his creator's right to probe, confound and, whenever possible,
shatter conventional ideological boundaries.

At one point, Tal has a reverie about one of his father's standard
speeches to white conservatives, pointing to the overlap of their
opinions on such issues as school vouchers, abortion and gay rights with
those of the African-American mainstream. "Conservatives are the last
people who can afford to be racist. Because the future of conservatism
is black America!" Quickly, Tal's mind makes a countermove. "Because
there were a few little details the Judge always left out. Like the fact
that it was conservatives who fought against just about every civil
rights law ever proposed. Like the fact that many of the wealthy men who
paid for his expensive speeches would not have him in their clubs....
The Judge was surely right to insist that the time has come for black
Americans to stop trusting white liberals, who are far more comfortable
telling us what we need than asking us what we want, but he never did
come up with a particularly persuasive reason for us to start trusting
white conservatives instead."

For fans of the well-made thriller, these and other digressions may seem
like patches of glue. But for those who think the plot is, as with the
rest of the book, somewhat overstuffed with data, false leads, sudden
frowns and black-and-blue contrivances, Tal's asides come across like
flares of random, cheeky insight. As the quote above suggests, neither
left nor right is spared Tal's withering assessment, though if I were
keeping score, the liberal humanists get it in the teeth far more than
those with more spirit-based devotions explaining their identities.

Readers have become accustomed to books written by African-Americans to
come down hard on a sociopolitical point. Mystery lovers want airtight
solutions. The Emperor of Ocean Park fulfills neither
expectation. And that, as much as anything, earns both its money and its
respect. Novels of ideas, in whose company Emperor surely belongs
if I read my Mary McCarthy right, are supposed to be exactly that: About
many ideas and not just one. Someone, maybe the author of Anna
Karenina, once suggested that fiction should rouse questions, not
answer them. Once again, the defense calls Raymond Chandler to the
stand: "It is no easy trick to keep your characters and your story
operating on a level which is understandable to the semi-literate public
and at the same time give them some intellectual and artistic overtones,
which the public does not seek or demand or in effect recognize, but
which somehow subconsciously it accepts and likes."

The Emperor of Ocean Park is no Farewell, My Lovely. But
Carter is on to something. And he may someday deliver what Chandler
does, along with a hearty serving of something non-Chandler-esque. What
that something may be is hinted in a few lines close to the novel's very
end:

"That truth, even moral truth, exists I have no doubt, for I am no
relativist; but we weak, fallen humans will never perceive it except
imperfectly, a faintly glowing presence toward which we creep through
the mists of reason, tradition, and faith."

Your move, Tom Clancy.

"Funny and scary," quoth Quentin Tarantino, "two great tastes that taste great together!" He was referring to his own Pulp Fiction, but the quip could be applied equally to the dark-horse art-house hit of the moment, the refreshingly Tarantino-free With a Friend Like Harry. Everybody's buzzing it as France's answer to Strangers on a Train. No wonder: It's about a stranger (Harry, played to giddy perfection by Sergi Lopez) who, bumping into a man on a road trip, offers unrequested help in bumping off pesky relatives, as in Hitchcock's film. The "fat bastard" (as Strangers on a Train co-writer Raymond Chandler called Hitch to his face) is director Dominik Moll's favorite director, and he admits he named his hero Harry to evoke The Trouble With Harry (as well as Harry Lime and Woody Allen's Harry Block). This Harry's surname is Balestrero--Henry Fonda's character in The Wrong Man.

But just put Hitchcock out of your mind, OK? Because With a Friend Like Harry is no movie brat's bloodless Hitch homage. Moll went straight to the source to make this picture: He steeped himself in Patricia Highsmith, author of the original Strangers on a Train and the novels about Tom Ripley, a killer who steals his best friend's identity and traffics in other people's fraudulent art (a role played with stony gravitas by Dennis Hopper in The American Friend, slickly by Alain Delon in Purple Noon, in gay earnest by Matt Damon in The Talented Mr. Ripley and no doubt innovatively by John Malkovich in the forthcoming Ripley's Game). Moll's character Harry is like Highsmith's pragmatic psychos, and he's got a ripe, Ripleyesquely eccentric obsession with the high school buddy he accidentally reunites with, Michel (Laurent Lucas, a pouty mouth drooping beneath a pudding-bowl haircut and dead eyes). With a Friend Like Harry scores by echoing Highsmith's tone (muted horror, deadpan glee), her agnosticism about human motives and her style, as implacable as a sleepwalker in a meticulously real world.

When Highsmith first wrote a Ripley novel, she recalled, "I felt that Ripley was writing it--it just came out." That's just how With a Friend Like Harry unspools--as if Harry directed it, leaving us as passively fascinated as his ambiguous victim, Michel. There's a hint of what's up in the credit sequence, an aerial shot of the beat-up car of Michel and his wife, Claire (Mathilde Seigner), rolling down the hot highway with no air conditioning on an anhedonic holiday with their three authentically squalling toddlers. The highway railings look like film sprockets--Michel and Claire don't know it, but their vacation is trapped inside somebody else's movie! The titles cast shadows on the car and road. The whole film is a contest between the quotidian life of harried parenthood and Harry's cold shadowland of the instant fulfillment of every writer's secret wish.

Michel is a thwarted writer, you see. He precariously supports his burdensome clan by teaching French to the Japanese in Paris, but in school he wrote the ambitious, passionately numbskulled poem "The Dagger in the Skin of Night" and the abortive sci-fi novella The Flying Monkeys, about gibbons with propellers on their heads who "did chores and spied on people." He hasn't thought about his diaper-dampened literary dreams in years, but when Michel stops at a gas station and Harry recognizes him, Harry forcibly reminds him of literature's loss.

It's an uncomfortable scene: The men's room walls seem to close in, Harry's urgency is odd, he seems alien--a Spanish actor in a French flick, though his performance won him a Cesar, the French Oscar, for Best Actor. Michel has no memory of his alleged classmate. As Harry itemizes their shared past, you feel sweaty and mesmerized, like Michel. Harry has puckish little parentheses tugging at the corners of his mouth; his smile is like a sunlamp. The windshield wipers on his spotless Mercedes no doubt go, "NICE-guy-NICE-guy." Yet his affability bear-hugs you. Harry makes like a good cop with a bad cop's will to power. Yet what writer can resist someone who quotes you from the school lit mag verbatim, urges you to be true to your gift, hands out cash like a one-man MacArthur Foundation (Harry's rich) and offers your testy wife and keening kids a ride in a car renowned for silence and climate control?

The scene walks the scary-funny razor with weightless aplomb. Pretty soon Harry and his young squeeze, Plum (Sophie Guillemin), a ruby-lipped, passive pinup, get themselves invited to the picturesquely decrepit country manse Michel is refurbishing on a shoestring. Moll, an inexperienced director trying out the enchanting toy of Cinemascope, gets the goods: That mansion looks sensational against the looming woods and Magritte sky, a dark stone god brooding with one window ablaze like an angry eye. These shots, plus aerial shots of sinuous roads engulfed by greenery and driver's-eye views of the car approaching the mansion by night, are as resonant as the more pompous tableaux that introduce each chapter of Breaking the Waves.

Inside, the manse is as psychically cramped as the men's room where Harry met Michel. It's an obscurely threatening place and also a place of silliness, like the absurdly low-ceilinged office in Being John Malkovich; when Michel finds Harry raiding the fridge late at night--Harry boasts that he always eats an egg after each orgasm--we might as well be in Fawlty Towers. Many shots skillfully exploit the anxiety potential of narrow hallways without looking like self-conscious lifts straight from the Fat Bastard.

The whole house is drab, barren, ramshackle--except the bathroom, which Michel's parents redecorated in blinding fuchsia, to surprise him. And control him. Moll shows us Michel on the phone, ineffectually protesting the imposition of Dad's bad taste. Not that Michel lacks bad taste of his own; he just needs somebody to push him around. Dad (Dominique Rozan) is an amusing patriarchal caricature, an impenitent groper of dames, even his daughter-in-law, and he's a mad dentist as well. When Michel visits their apartment, Dad insists on drilling his teeth in the den. Apparently, Michel won't be jawboning his father into any power reapportionment anytime soon. Back in his own home, when Michel decides to resuscitate his neglected novella, he curls up in that fuchsia bathroom like a fetus and writes all night. Michel is a slave to his ambition and dream of freedom.

Life in the mansion with Harry as Boswell in residence has a dreamy quality--when Michel has a narcissistic dream about the flying monkey from his novella, it's no less creepy-comic than his waking hours. To keep it all from lapsing into abstract satirical fantasy, Moll buttresses the dreamlike scenes with rigorously realistic snippets of domestic life. Claire evinces a new interest in Michel--she'd never suspected him of poetry--and even bonds with Plum. The girls are crazy for Plum, who yearns for kids of her own. "I wish I were a normal person," mourns Plum. This is affecting, because up to now Plum has registered so strongly as a walking symbol, an inflatable ecstasy receptacle, a lurid David Lynch critter. To find out she was human all along is appalling. Suddenly, Harry and his damn eggs don't seem so funny. At dinner, when Harry viciously puts down Plum and she leaves the table, we wince for real. Pain hurts, even if you're just a dimwitted symbol. It has dawned on Claire that Harry's influence is not wholly benign.

As Harry gets scarier, clearing out the human deadwood obstructing Michel's literary vocation, the movie starts to part company with its illustrious forebears. It gets more trivial as Harry's mental problems get more serious. Harry snickering and feinting and being unpredictable is unnerving; Harry howling mad isn't worth listening to. You want to throw a shoe at him. The sad fact is, every psycho is a sphinx without a secret, and only the greatest storytellers can concoct a narrative illusion that satisfies our craving for meaning where life provides none. Even if it's only to rub our noses, as haughty Highsmith does, in the meaninglessness of life and death, and the likelihood that God, if He's up there, evidently resembles Ripley.

Moll's implicit commentary on the nature of fiction and the ruthlessness of art is not a patch on Highsmith's. The movie ends like a firecracker that emits a respectable spurt of sparks instead of exploding. Maybe Moll just isn't interested in climaxes featuring what French critic Claude Chabrol called the "world of vertigo and paroxysm" that Hitchcock (and most Highsmith adapters) favor. Call me Anglo, but I could use more paroxysm here. Still, if With a Friend Like Harry is no match for Strangers on a Train cinematically, the Fat Bastard himself would admit it's better written and acted. The David Sinclair Whitaker score is solid (they say he composed for the Hammer horror movies), the use of Dolores Del Rio's 1928 song "Ramona" as Harry's leitmotif works, the editing rhythms are impeccable and the movie somehow manages to raise hopes sky-high, faintly disappoint and then linger in the back of your mind for days, an unremovable burr. It's a giggle and a brrrrr. By modern standards, it's a masterpiece.