Surely I am not the only one who
hungers to get away from the interminable chain of dispute
respecting _Moby Dick_ and _Huckleberry Finn_. Worthy books,
but yeesh.
On a lower class note, I would like
to sing the praises of John D. McDonald. As a youth, I sort
of fit all of his stuff into the catagory of Travis McGee,
which is not bad but which suffers from the vices that
afflict series fiction in general.
However, I just finished _Barrier
Island_ (was this his last?) and am in the middle of an
earlier book about Vegas at the moment. While MacDonald is
too crass and uncool for anyone to compare him to Melville or
Twain, or even Chandler or Hammett, he is also so good that
it almost amazes me that we can find time to talk about
anyone else. His antagonists, in the non-McGee stories, are
so rounded and so sympathetically drawn that it is simply
shocking. His bitter psychological insight makes Ross
McDonald seem like a guest on the Oprah show. His acute eye
for social class outstrips Chandler, no small feat, and
reminds one of the best of John O'Hara. At his own best, he
strikes me as vastly better than an over-rated literateuer
like Simenon.
I really mean all this crap, and I don't
think I am just puffing the guy. Don't we have any stone-cold
MacDonald fans on the list? And does anyone know how a
Harvard grad came to crank out cheap paperback
originals?
James
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