From: Jezzaroona
Category: Amis's Contemporaries
Date: 6/24/99
Time: 3:25:45 AM
Remote Name: 195.44.202.91
"He had a face like a collapsed lung."
This is interesting because over the last few weeks the above figure really stood out as RC metaphorising at his best (sometimes his don't work). Yet in the context of the MAD, the language seems really Amisian, one of the characters down The Black Cross perhaps. Jules & Gary, I agree with the both of you, figuring it all out and Good vs/and Evil - but also the same unshakeable romanticism, the highbrow (and high minded) alone on the mean streets (though the highbrow is less pronounced in RC and the meaness of the streets is as much a product of the interior states of Amis' characters who walk them than the fact that many of them are criminals and lowlife of some description. *The Long Good-Bye* as RC's most intriguing? The *romantic* figure of Terry Lennox commiting suicide and not commiting suicide...of claiming he murdered someone when he didn't...the alcoholic and blocked writer, Wade who can't remember if he's killed someone but feels the guilt in some kind of Freudian sense...the fact that no-one hires Marlowe really, or at least he accepts no case...
If we like RC because he played (literary) games with Pulp Fiction, then may be The L G-B is where RC played games with his own game-playing formula?