Desperation in the Suburbs
WOODFIN, HENRY A.
Desperation in the Suburbs BLACK MONEY By Ross Macdonald Knopf. 238 pp. $3.95 Reviewed by HENRY A. WOODFIN Free-lance writer; contributor, "Saturday Review" Ross Macdonald writes...
...he has found his particular subject and his personal way of handling it...
...The interconnections in American life between the Las Vegas casinos, the new underworld of quasi-respectability, and the middle classes are conveyed in human terms, with all parties damaged by the reticulated corruptions...
...But, since his protagonist is a California private detective, Macdonald is usually spoken of as a follower of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler-to the disadvantage of all three...
...He is a skillful and intelligent novelist, albeit a minor one, who provides those essential insights into character and milieu which are the major functions of his craft...
...His portrait of life in a state college and the desperate striving for accomplishment is consistently pointed and concise...
...Though the violence of the third-rate private detective thriller is conspicuously absent, Macdonald's universe is replete with malevolent activities and psychological violence-more convincingly frightening as the reader realizes the veracity of the account...
...The usual Macdonald themes are present, but they are treated with even greater lucidity and sharpness than before...
...He is a man of realistic compassion and understanding, called upon to look into the details of the private and non-villainous lives of individuals living in more or less quiet desperation in the anomic world of Los Angeles and its environs...
...Macdonald combines the elegaic theme of The Great Gatsby with scrupulous observation of the minute details of modern life-all rendered in neatly balanced prose that make his characters both individuals and types...
...His investigator, Lew Archer, is an ex-Los Angeles police detective who has weathered the aftermath of a disastrous marriage and, for undisclosed reasons, gone into private practice...
...In these days of dreary fiction, Ross Macdonald is a boon...
...Black Money is, I think, his best book yet...
...contributor, "Saturday Review" Ross Macdonald writes detective novels, so he is seldom dealt with in serious literary quarters...
...Archer's efforts to make sense of their shattered lives, in this microcosmic climate of physical comfort and moral collapse, can provide no relief other than knowledge, and knowledge uninformed by an organizing principle to make the miniscule tragedies and crimes either bearable or expiable...
...Macdonald depicts the members of the Southern Californian middle classes, the real subjects of his novels, as rootless, usually without real connections where they have chosen to live...
...Archer, while in the employ of his clients is disinterested, and without the quixoticism often characteristic of this sort of hero...
...While he is not without some indebtedness to Chandler, the body of his work is very much his own...
...Thus, bourgeois America is described quietly and mercilessly as a place in which human aspirations are lost in a shuffling movement toward surfing, gambling, senseless academic or business achievements, and suburban status...
...This is everyone's loss...
Vol. 49 • April 1966 • No. 8
