![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
missroseroseNot so long ago, when I was telling a friend why I wasn't interested in reading the Ringworld series, I described my response to Heinlen's Stranger In A Strange Land. "I enjoyed a lot of the philosophy and the premise, but about every ten pages I wanted to either sock Heinlein in the jaw or throw the book against the wall, or both." Knowing my particular sensitivity to gender issues, my friend suggested that perhaps we should create a metric for measuring sexism in literature: "How many pages did Rose make it through before she threw the book against the wall?"
Had my copy been a paper book and not on my Kindle, this would have set a new record: three.
It's not so much that Philip Marlowe, our intrepid detective, holds women in contempt. (He holds everyone in contempt; being an equal-opportunity asshole is more or less his stock in trade, and has inspired a whole genre of similarly misanthropic hardboiled antiheroes). It's that Raymond Chandler, the author, so clearly does so as well. This being a book from 1939, I wasn't precisely expecting any female characters to be paragons of intelligence or agency, but every single woman of note in this story (and there are several) is portrayed as both extremely sexually desirable and equally sexually manipulative, and exist for precisely two reasons: (1) to advance the plot and (2) to come on to Marlowe so he can prove his manliness by rejecting them in the most humiliating way possible. They have no consistency in characterization or apparent desires/fears/personalities of their own, and act in ways that make no sense aside from fulfilling those two dictates. It's pretty clear that Chandler thinks of women as fickle, alien creatures impossible to understand and of little import; were he around today, I strongly suspect he would be a proud and outspoken member of both the Men's Rights and Pickup Artist communities.
The book isn't precisely short on racism or homophobia, either - the latter to the point, combined with the recurring theme of turning down feminine advances, where I found myself wondering if Marlowe (or possibly Chandler) wasn't an angry closeted gay man himself. To me, those felt more in line with what you'd expect from the times, and less of a personal vendetta than the pervasive misogyny. However, I'm notably sensitive to gender issues, so others may feel differently.
Still, even without these problems, the prose has not aged well - or to put it bluntly, is downright awful. The awkward use of adverbs can at least be attributed to changes in fashion, but the combination of Hemingway-simplistic vocabulary with convoluted sentence structure makes it hard to take seriously, even before the ridiculously hypermasculine tone fully materializes. And while I realize that the tortured metaphor is a time-honored trope of noir fiction, some of these are at the Sharknado level of so-awful-it's-hilariousness.
I can't in good conscience quite give it one star; for all of its problems, it does a good job portraying the darker side of a bygone era, and has a lot of interesting day-to-day details of life in Los Angeles at this time in history, and how police and detectives functioned in the era before Google and FBI databases. And from a literary standpoint, its influence has been huge, on everything from Casablanca to Laura to Mulholland Dr. to Night Film. But man, I wish someone had warned me about the sexism before I nearly threw my Kindle against the wall. D
Had my copy been a paper book and not on my Kindle, this would have set a new record: three.
It's not so much that Philip Marlowe, our intrepid detective, holds women in contempt. (He holds everyone in contempt; being an equal-opportunity asshole is more or less his stock in trade, and has inspired a whole genre of similarly misanthropic hardboiled antiheroes). It's that Raymond Chandler, the author, so clearly does so as well. This being a book from 1939, I wasn't precisely expecting any female characters to be paragons of intelligence or agency, but every single woman of note in this story (and there are several) is portrayed as both extremely sexually desirable and equally sexually manipulative, and exist for precisely two reasons: (1) to advance the plot and (2) to come on to Marlowe so he can prove his manliness by rejecting them in the most humiliating way possible. They have no consistency in characterization or apparent desires/fears/personalities of their own, and act in ways that make no sense aside from fulfilling those two dictates. It's pretty clear that Chandler thinks of women as fickle, alien creatures impossible to understand and of little import; were he around today, I strongly suspect he would be a proud and outspoken member of both the Men's Rights and Pickup Artist communities.
The book isn't precisely short on racism or homophobia, either - the latter to the point, combined with the recurring theme of turning down feminine advances, where I found myself wondering if Marlowe (or possibly Chandler) wasn't an angry closeted gay man himself. To me, those felt more in line with what you'd expect from the times, and less of a personal vendetta than the pervasive misogyny. However, I'm notably sensitive to gender issues, so others may feel differently.
Still, even without these problems, the prose has not aged well - or to put it bluntly, is downright awful. The awkward use of adverbs can at least be attributed to changes in fashion, but the combination of Hemingway-simplistic vocabulary with convoluted sentence structure makes it hard to take seriously, even before the ridiculously hypermasculine tone fully materializes. And while I realize that the tortured metaphor is a time-honored trope of noir fiction, some of these are at the Sharknado level of so-awful-it's-hilariousness.
I can't in good conscience quite give it one star; for all of its problems, it does a good job portraying the darker side of a bygone era, and has a lot of interesting day-to-day details of life in Los Angeles at this time in history, and how police and detectives functioned in the era before Google and FBI databases. And from a literary standpoint, its influence has been huge, on everything from Casablanca to Laura to Mulholland Dr. to Night Film. But man, I wish someone had warned me about the sexism before I nearly threw my Kindle against the wall. D
