Book Review: Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely.Book Note: The Best American Crime Reporting 2007.Book Review: David Goodis, The Moon in the Gutter.Book Review: Raymond Chandler, The High Window (1941).Book Review: Charles Williams, Big City Girl (1951).To Goodis' credit, he does take a valiant stab at noir profundity in the novel's last chapter, but the rest of the book is not there to back it up. The greater problem is that his characters seem to behave as they do because they are in a noir novel and not for other discernible reasons. The lesser problem is that Goodis' prose is often painful to read-he strings together limp, cliché-ridden sentences as if he does not remember what his previous sentence was or have any idea what his next sentence will be. Sentenced to life in San Quentin for the alleged murder of his wife, Vince Parry escapes in a desperate attempt to prove his innocence. The main thing I see in The Moon in the Gutter is bad writing. One recent example: in The Rough Guide to Crime Fiction (2007), Barry Forshaw cites The Moon in the Gutter as his representative Goodis text in arguing that, of all the noir novelists, "Goodis comes the closest to the existential angst of Camus and Sartre." I wish I could see it, but I can't. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.David Goodis is commonly ranked in the top tier of noir novelists, and The Moon in the Gutter is commonly ranked among his best work. On Thursday, January 7th, 2021 at 4:50 pm and is filed under Books, Cinema, Culture, World. His characters are broken down shadows of their former selves, worried more about damaging those they love then worrying about damage to themselves as full of weaknesses, contradictions, and surprising resistances as Goodis himself.
Ed Gorman once said that “David Goodis didn’t write novels, he wrote suicide notes,” and if we think of the literature of the suicide note, filled with equal parts anguish, guilt, love, and attempts to understand, then David Goodis’ work would easily fit within these bounds. It’s difficult to find quotes from David Goodis about his own approach to writing, but the accolades and insights of others help fill the gap. ĭavid Goodis Bleak Beautiful Vision of humanity.(Truffaut, Charles Aznavour and Marie Dubois)
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