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Acne: A Memoir by Laura Chinn

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/04/books/review/acne-laura-chinn-walking-gentry-home-alora-young-fruit-punch-kendra-allen.html

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The Measure by Nikki Erlick: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/28/books/review/the-measure-nikki-erlick.html

Robert B. Parker & Raymond Chandler

Ever since I tried reading Kim Newman's Something More Than Night back in March, I've been thinking about Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, so I picked it up over the weekend at Barnes & Noble. Then I figured I might as well get Robert B. Parker's Poodle Springs (Chandler wrote the first four chapters). Wish I hadn't given it away. Oh, well. Was only about $10.

By the way, because of a Parker blurb on The Big Sleep, I tracked down the review it's from: https://www.nytimes.com/1995/10/08/books/crimemysterythe-big-text.html — pasted below is the first half where Parker shows what a great writer he was and how well he understood Chandler:

RAYMOND CHANDLER'S literary career began late and inauspiciously. Forty-five years old, out of work and drinking too much, he set out in 1933 to make a living writing stories for Dime Detective and Black Mask. He wrote too slowly to make much money. And most of his short stories are, at best, of their time and place, more interesting for what they led to than for what they are. Reading them, we can watch Chandler experiment with voice and point of view, trying out protagonists. We get our first glimpses of the rich, dark Southern California world that Marlowe would inhabit, a world that would be as completely rendered, and as fictive, as Yoknapatawpha County. Chandler did not, as is often alleged, capture Los Angeles. He invented it.

While Chandler appears to have written some poetry and done some literary journalism in his youth, his professional writing life began when he got $180 from Black Mask magazine for "Blackmailers Don't Shoot." He published his first novel, "The Big Sleep," in 1939 and his last, "Playback," in 1958. He was neither prolific nor inventive. His seven novels all rework previous inventions. But what emerged from the process is a whole much larger than the sum of its parts.

Chandler's baroque Los Angeles, with its juxtaposition of jacaranda trees and call houses specializing in 16-year-old virgins, is as tangible a location as we have in our literature. No place is boring in Philip Marlowe's world. Nothing is unimportant. Each place energizes the work, and Chandler's novels would be diminished if anything were removed. The people who live in Marlowe's world are equally inextricable. There is no elevator operator who merely runs the car and no thug who provides only menace. All the characters imply a life beyond the novel. In short, Chandler wasted nothing: no character, no scene, no word. For all its romantic luster, his prose is without ornament. It is as functional as a Shaker table.

It is, of course, Marlowe who makes this so. In his narration the American vernacular proves once again capable of telling any story without violating its own authenticity. But Chandler's power doesn't come simply from voice. There is vision. And with his wonderful negative capability, Marlowe sees both the jacaranda trees and the call houses. The trees don't redeem the call houses; the call houses don't blight the trees. Marlowe is indeed, in D. H. Lawrence's phrase, "hard, isolate, stoic and a killer." It is perhaps the price of living on the fault line where the American dream grinds against the American reality.

Marlowe is also compassionate, and funny, and we like him very much (which is perhaps his reward for recognizing that reality is the sweetest dream of all). In Philip Marlowe, Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious -- an innocent who knows better, a Romantic who is tough enough to sustain Romanticism in a world that has seen the eternal footman hold its coat and snicker. Living at the end of the Far West, where the American dream ran out of room, no hero has ever been more congruent with his landscape. Chandler had the right hero in the right place, and engaged him in the consideration of good and evil at precisely the time when our central certainty of good no longer held.

Bad writing is easy to spot, and easy to explain, perhaps because there is so much of it. But what makes great writing better than good writing remains unclear. I have gleaned where Chandler reaped, and I have spent much of my adult life thinking about it, but I have never been able fully to explain how Chandler can do what he does.

CANDY HOUSE by Jennifer Egan

I give this novel 3 out of 5 stars. I listened to Egan's Goon Squad back in ’11, and while I don't remember much about it, I recall enjoying it.

Candy House was OK. Too many characters, IMO — glad I have a text-file app on my phone to type in the page number of a character's first appearance.

I almost didn't finish the book with the chapter about the tech head using data when trying to figure out if the girl he works with will date him. I'm not a fan of technology or its evangelical-like adherents.

My favorite chapter was the one that was mostly emails and texts. It showed how Machiavellian the entertainment business can be.

Glad I finished Candy House, though I don't think I'll be reading anything else by Egan.