The Long Goodbye

I'm rereading The Long Goodbye. This is the fourth time, or maybe the fifth. I lost count somewhere in college, when I read it in a week I was supposed to be reading something else for a seminar and wrote the seminar paper on it instead. I got a B. The professor said I seemed more interested in the detective than in the argument, which was true, and which I still don't think was a flaw.

I first read Chandler from my mother's shelves. She was a school librarian, and the house I grew up in has more books than walls to put them on. The mysteries lived in the den, alphabetical by author, and somewhere around fourteen I worked my way from Allingham to Chandler and stopped there for most of a year. The copy I read had a cracked spine and her name inside the cover in pencil. I asked her once if I could keep it. She said I could borrow it as long as I liked, which is a librarian's way of saying no.

What I loved then was the voice. Nobody in my life talked like Philip Marlowe, and nobody I've met since does either, which is probably for the best. Chandler wrote similes the way other people breathe. The famous one is from Farewell, My Lovely, about a blonde who could make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window, and every reader of his has a favorite of their own. At fourteen I copied them into a notebook. I tried to use one in an English essay and was asked to see the teacher afterward.

What I love now is something else. Marlowe is decent. That sounds like faint praise, and it isn't. In The Long Goodbye he takes a liking to a charming drunk named Terry Lennox, for no reason he can fully explain, and he stays loyal to him when it costs him everything a man like that has to lose: money, sleep, a few days in a cell rather than tell the police what he knows. He isn't a good man in any way the people around him would recognize. He drinks too much and talks back to everyone. But he can't be bought, he doesn't lie to the people who trust him, and when the job is over he goes home alone and plays chess against a book of famous games. Chandler wrote in an essay that down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean. I didn't understand that at fourteen. I think I do now.

There's a loneliness to him that I missed the first time, too. The book is long and slow in places, and Chandler knew it. He was writing it while his wife was dying, and you can feel it in the long middle, in the way Marlowe keeps returning to people who have already let him down. It's a book about friendship, and about what you owe a friend who turns out not to deserve it.

I write for a living now, and I've noticed that I reread differently. I see the scaffolding. I see where he needed to get a character from one room to another and didn't care how. I see a scene that goes on three pages too long because he was enjoying himself. And then a line comes along that's so exactly right that I put the book down on my chest and look at the ceiling for a while, and I forget about the scaffolding entirely.

Is there a book you go back to that reads differently each time?