Today I read the
next fifty pages of Hard-Boiled
Wonderland. The Professor’s granddaughter and the Calcutec, after another
long journey, make it back to the surface, where the Calcutec has to decide how
to spend his last hours of consciousness. Murakami mines this decision for its
bathetic humor, especially when the Calcutec has to spend some of this valuable
time in the Laundromat doing the granddaughter’s laundry! Apart from that, the
Calcutec’s choices are pedestrian: arranging to have dinner with the Librarian,
renting a fancy car, and doing some shopping. There’s none of the kind of
philosophical reflection or agonizing we might expect, partly because the
Calcutec seems to have come to terms with what’s going to happen. If anything,
the Dreamreader is in a greater state of turmoil than the Calcutec, partly
because his Shadow is apparently about to die, but mostly because the Shadow
insists that now is the time to escape from the Town. At this suggestion, the
full strength of the Dreamreader’s ambivalence about leaving comes to the fore,
and his Shadow is hard-pressed to persuade him to honor his agreement. Now that
we know that this struggle between the Shadow and the Dreamreader is taking
place within a part of the Calcutec’s consciousness, the stakes of whether or
not to leave the Town should be raised but for some reason I don’t feel that
way. Perhaps the Calcutec’s acquiescence to the end of consciousness influences
the feel of both parts of the novel as it draws to a close.
I also read the next
fifty pages of Paula Rabinowitz’s Black
& White & Noir: America’s Pulp Modernism. I’m reminded of
Rabinowitz’s comment at the start of this book about the seeming incoherence of
its contents because the chapters range so widely over subjects with little
connection to each other. What saves the work, though, is that her choice of
subject matter and the observations she makes about those subjects are so
consistently thought-provoking. In a chapter devoted primarily to the fiction
of social worker turned novelist Margaret Slade, for example, Rabinowitz argues
for the figure of the social worker as a female counterpart to the private eye,
although the social worker’s nominal allegiance to the state differentiates
this figure from the independence of a Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. And in a
fascinating chapter titled ‘Barbara Stanwyck’s Anklet,’ Rabinowitz discusses
the fetishistic power of household objects in noir, focusing in particular on
shoes as a sign of “women’s aggressive mobility in postwar urban spaces.” When
every page of these chapters shoots out ideas like sparks, one doesn’t mind a
slight lack of coherence!
I also watched John
Farrow’s 1948 film The Big Clock, an
adaptation of Kenneth Fearing’s 1946 novel with the same title. Ray Milland
stars as George Stroud, the editor of Crimeways Magazine and employee of the
megalomaniac publisher Earl Janoth (wonderfully played by Charles Laughton).
When Laughton murders his lover, he tries to frame the man who saw him on the
night of the murder, not realizing that man is none other than Milland.
Consequently, Milland finds himself having to run the search for himself using
the highly successful techniques he’s developed at Crimeways while also
conducting his own investigation to try and nail Laughton. It sounds very complicated,
but it’s all handled smoothly and with excellent pace by Farrow, and the
performances from the large cast are all consistently strong. The only thing I
didn’t care for was the film’s use of humor, which made it as much a screwball
comedy as a noir. The movie’s screenwriter, Jonathan Latimer, is known for this
combination of traits, but I thought it was overdone and spoiled the otherwise
suspenseful atmosphere of the film. Fearing’s novel is much darker and
communicates Stroud’s paranoia much more vividly. http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/classics/the-big-clock/
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