Dogs, psychologists, fear, and Ross Macdonald

"She walked away from me and her fear." 

— Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case (1959)

"I could smell the fear on Donny: there's an unexplained trace of canine in my chromosomes." 

—  Ross Macdonald, "The Imaginary Blonde" (1953) 

I like Macdonald better as a dog than as a psych major.

"The Imaginary Blonde," which appeared first in Manhunt, was also known as "Gone Girl," the same title Gillian Flynn used for her 2012 novel. Do any Flynnheads out there know if the title is a nod to Macdonald?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

The way some writers date

(Ross Macdonald wearing a fedora)

I spent my previous post excoriating the obtrusively amateurish Freudianism in Ross Macdonald's The Galton Case. Another aspect of that novel has dated almost as poorly, and that got me thinking about why some themes date better than others.

That second aspect is the depravity of the dog-eat-dog American suburbs. Here are four extracts from The Galton Case:

"Flowers bloomed competitively in the yards."

"Arroyo Park was an economic battleground where managers and professional people matched wits and incomes."

"The commuters in their uniforms, hat on head, briefcase in hand ... It was a junior-executive residential section."

"You wouldn't want to to get around that I didn't do my share ... You don't want to shame me in front of my friends. [this from a housewife trying to talk into her husband into buying cake for a church supper. And where does she want him to buy the cake? "You know the bakery at the shopping center."]

The first image is striking even if the sentiment is dated. The next two extracts can have little impact on later generations whose views of the suburbs were shaped by "Pleasant Valley Sunday." The fourth is just wince-makingly bathetic today, however it may have seemed to readers when The Galton Case was published in 1959.

Once upon a time in America, starting sometime after World War II and fizzling out in the mid-1960s, suburbs and their new accessibility to middle-class homebuyers were objects of fascination, horror, and fevered imaginings. The Galton Case appeared three years after the novel Peyton Place. I'm just old enough to remember Dave Berg poking amused fun at the suburbs in Mad magazine.

But the novelty wore off, generations grew up in the burbs, and their depravities and social pathologies were absorbed into popular culture and forgotten.

I reflected several times while reading The Galton Case how odd it was that the trappings of a story published in 1959 should feel stale, while those of Dashiell Hammett's stories, from thirty and more years before, should feel fresh. Why is this? It's not enough to suggest that Hammett was a better writer than Macdonald, because chip away the social trappings, and The Galton Case is a thrilling family drama with a virtuoso twist.

I'm just old enough to remember the tail end of the world for which Ross Macdonald wrote The Galton Case. Hammett's world, on the other hand is remote and hence new. Is that why it seems fresher to me than Macdonald's? Why do some old stories date poorly? Why do others seem thrillingly fresh?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Ross Macdonald, amateur psychologist

I really did want to get back to more exotic climes for this post, but I got sidetracked by a sort-of Canadian.

An article called "The Second Generation of Hard-Boiled Writers" tells us that "Ross Macdonald brought Freudian analysis from the university, where millions of students were learning it, to explain to a mass public why good people do bad things."

In The Galton Case (1959) , some of the analysis is right out of a freshman class:

"But she held herself with adolescent awkwardness, immobilized by feelings she couldn't express."

or:

"She walked away from me and her fear."

How does the protagonist/narrator, Lew Archer, know this on first meetings with people he has never seen before?

Elsewhere, Macdonald, the eager amateur psychologist, shows, tells, and interprets what Macdonald the author would have been better off just showing:

"She tried to go on, but the words stuck in her throat. She plucked at the skin of her throat as if to dislodge them."

A laconic author in the Hammett mode would have let the reader guess the reason for the throat-plucking. So, I suspect, would a Macdonald more comfortable with psychoanalysis and more confident that his readers would be, as well.  Freudian psychology must have seemed more novel, more darkly exciting, in 1959 than it does today.

And how about "I had a delayed gestalt after I'd given up on the subject"? I think that's Macdonald's attempt to update the old something-bothered-me-but-I-couldn't-put-my-finger-on-it.-It-didn't-hit-me-till-later trope.  But delayed gestalt? Delayed-effing-gestalt?    

It may be significant that two of the wittier, less forced bits of psychological analysis in the book's first half come from characters other than Archer. Old Mrs. Galton "likes to dramatize herself. It's the only excitement she has left," the family lawyer says."She lives on emergencies," remarks a family servant.

But it's a hell of a story so far, and I can see why later crime writers worship Macdonald. Previous authors had made the long-buried family secret a motif. Macdonald made it the substance of this story, and he unfolds the suspense slowly and relentlessly.

This is my first real crack at a Macdonald novel, so my guesses could be dead wrong. But I suspect that his books got even better once he, er, internalized his psychological interests, got more comfortable with them, and learned how to have Archer express them more naturally and less like an enthusiastic recent convert.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011