I'm beginning my summer vacation by finally reading Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely. (I've seen the RKO film adaptation Murder, My Sweet several times, which most likely influenced the way I read the novel. Que sera, sera.)
I'm not gonna bother with a plot summary. Philip Marlowe sticks his nose into other people's business and gets concussed quite a bit.
Since I'm writing this quickly, let's just get my thoughts down through numbers.
1. Exposing/perpetuating racism
So, this book is kinda racist. Thankfully, the worst offender is the first scene, set in a black bar. After that, there is only the occasional off-hand derogatory reference to blacks or Asians. If the entire novel had been like the first scene I would have probably stopped reading.
When racism appears in fiction, I always try to judge it on a exposing/perpetuating scale. In other words, does the racism of this novel expose racist attitudes or does it merely perpetuate them? (As always, this is a very subjective scale. For example, when I used to watch Stephen Colbert's talk show The Colbert Report, in which he would adopt the persona of a right-wing blowhard commentator, I thought he did a masterful job of exposing the stupidity of such worldviews. But apparently many right-wingers watched the show unironically as a validation of their beliefs. One man's exposure is another man's perpetuation.)
For me, the novel falls on the side of perpetuation. While there are moments of exposure, such as when Marlowe and a police detective discuss how no one but them (not the media, not the cops) care about the murder of the black bar owner, for the most part Marlowe is a willing participant in the casual racism of the era. While he is ironic about everything else, the one thing he can't distance himself from is the racial attitude of the time.
And speaking of . . .
2. Marlowe's ironic voice
The novel is famously first-person, and one reads Chandler for the fantastic character descriptions and hyperbolic similes, not for the convoluted plots. Interestingly, Marlowe speaks the same way he narrates, making sarcastic quips about everything. (Though there is of course always a moment where Marlowe lets us peek through his hard-boiled shell to his gooey center. In this book, it's a completely superfluous scene late in the novel where Marlowe is sneaking onto an offshore gambling boat and has a breakdown, sobbing to the just-met perfect manly man Red about his fears.)
But why does Marlowe speak this way? No other characters in the novels ever appreciate it. It annoys the cops, his lady friends--everyone. The only people who enjoy it are the readers. Marlowe is very meta in this way; a so-called realistic character who walks around speaking to an imaginary audience. Marlowe is like the worst improv actor ever. Instead of "yes, and . . . " he says "but, no . . . " to everyone. He undercuts any reality another character is attempting to establish, whether it's the serious gravity of a police investigation or the provocative flirtations of a seduction scene. And in so doing, his "but, no" helps invent the mid-century concept of "cool."
3. Realism
Fiction always establishes its own reality by contrasting itself with other examples of its genre. It's a shell game that cons us every time.
There is a great example of this move made explicit in the final chapter of Farewell, My Lovely. Marlowe's lady friend comments that he should have solved the case by throwing a big dinner party and inviting all the suspects over, a la Philo Vance. Marlowe replies, "It's not that kind of story [. . . ] it's just dark and full of blood." (In fact, Chandler's writing style sets out to break most of S. S. Vine's famous "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories.") This move, establishing his fictional detective as more real than other popular fictional detectives, allows Chandler to write a pretty unrealistic novel, full of dialogue that no one would ever say.
4. Three Short Stories in One
Chandler (again, famously) stitched this novel together from three already written short stories, and the stitching shows.
Yet strangely, aside from a few places (most notably the previously mentioned scene with Red), I prefer the redundancies of the novel to the more streamlined film adaptation. I like that Marlowe is working two separate cases that eventually turn out to be connected, rather than in the film, where it's just one case all along. I like that the "good girl" love interest has nothing to do with any of the cases. In the film, she's the step-daughter of the femme fatale, and so you know she's good. In the novel, I kept wondering if there was gonna be a plot twist revealing her as dirty, and that tension is missing in the film. I like that there are two separate cops, one for each case, and that Chandler contrasts the two. The first, Nulty, is pretty useless--he keeps trying to get Marlowe to do his job for him, and we never see him out of his office chair. The second cop earns Marlowe's respect, though. And there is a "David Simon in The Wire"esque undercurrent of how the corruption of law enforcement is due not just to individual bad actors, but to a system that actively discourages what it ostensibly promotes.
However, the movie is very pretty, and helped define the look of film noir, so there's that.
