Customer Reviews

The Underground Man

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The Underground Man was the first Lew Archer novel I had ever read. I was 12 or 13 and was looking for something other than the Stephen King and Michael Crichton potboilers that were so popular at the time . Reading this book was an epiphany. Now, nearly 15 years later, and hundreds of PI novels later, I have discovered nothing that surpasses this series.

The thing I liked about what MacDonald did is he took all the traditional Hammett/Chandler plot points and character traits (later to become tired cliches when grabbed on by dozens of lesser writers) and made them fresh and relevant. All the authors that came after him, from Parker's Spenser to Grafton's Kinsey Millhone (who sometimes resembles a female Lew Archer) owe their livelihoods to MacDonald.

The Underground Man is particularly interesting. In it, the author combined a natural disaster ( a devastating wildfire in the Southern California hills) with the turmoil that has enveloped the family whose members he is investigating. Like most of the later Archer stories, he serves not so much as the investigator of wrongs than an emissary to untangle the complex and poisonous relationships of the characters and try to avert impending tragedy. He is not so much interested in "who did it" as much as finding out what circumstances caused the situation he is now mixed up in.

Please disregard the previous negative reviews of this book. It doesn't sound to me like they even read the bookvery carefully. They totally misinterpreted the character. Lew Archer is not the stereotypical hardened tough guy of zillions of pulp paperbacks. He is actually a sensitive softie, perhaps too soft for his own good on occasion ("down these mean streets this weeping man must go" as one wag put it).

The other characters, the female ones included, are neither overly virtuous nor utterly weak as the negative reviewers seem to believe. They are simply ordinary people caught up in a bad situation. Politically Correct (even though the term didn't even exist when the book was written) platitudes give way to a realism never seen before in a detective story. MacDonald transcended genre.

Lew Archer is above all a flawed romantic who tries to make sense of a senseless world. I think the world could use a few more Lew Archers. Both this character and his creator have been inspirational to me in more ways than I can count.

Highly recommended.

Though he's generally listed third in the triumvirate--Dashiell Hammett (The Father); Raymond Chandler (The Son); and Ross MacDonald (The Holy Ghost)--Mr. MacDonald is more properly recognized as the greatest of the private eye authors. Hammett's one great novel, The Maltese Falcon, and the equally great film version, along with his precedence in time (1939), are undeniable, and Chandler was likewise fortunate enough to have Humphrey Bogart put his imprint on Phillip Marlowe, but neither sustained a series of novels at the steady high quality of the Lew Archer books. In fact, Hammett and Chandler tailed off rather badly at the end of their careers, whereas the final few Archer mysteries scaled heights that not only transcended the genre but make them necessary reading for anyone hoping to understand the "malaise" that afflicted America in the 1970s. The Underground Man, published in 1971, may well be the best of MacDonald's oeuvre, which would make it pretty much the best p.i. book ever written. Hard to argue it isn't at least one of the pinnacles.

The story opens with Archer feeding peanuts to some blue jays outside his apartment--the sort of balance of nature to which MacDonald seemingly wanted him to restore the world by solving crimes. But when a little boy emerges from another apartment, followed by his mother and then by her estranged husband, Archer is plunged into their domestic quarrel and then into a series of adulteries, broken marriages, petty crimes, frauds, and murders stretching back across three generations. And, as if to demonstrate that such disordered lives must have cosmic consequences, the backdrop for the tale is a raging brushfire, fed by the Santa Ana winds, that sweeps across the scenes of the crimes and threatens to consume the whole cast. And just as mortal crime triggers natural disaster, so too does a character suggest to Archer that he serves as a similar spark to human tinder:

"You smell like trouble to me," he said.

That stopped me for a minute. He had a salesman's insight into human weakness, and he'd touched on a fact which I didn't always admit to myself--that I sometimes served as a catalyst for trouble, not unwillingly.

Of course, a forest fire burns away dead wood and allows for new growth, but Mr. MacDonald provides us little reason to believe that Archer's cases have much salutary effect.

To the extent there is some hope, Mr. MacDonald would appear to be suggesting that the confused young people of the era were not so much to blame for their problems as their parents -- that Greatest Generation that he indicts in a way that will shock readers of Tom Brokaw. Typically drawing a parallel to the environmental degradation that was imagined to be a sign of the times, he refers at one point to "a generation whose elders had been poisoned ... with a kind of moral DDT that damaged the lives of their young." that image of moral DDT is quite powerful and positions his fiction quite comfortably in the American Puritan tradition of Original Sin and Fallen Man. But his vision of American life is so pitch black by this point that it places him squarely in the 1970s. History students trying to imagine how that decade could have ended in Jimmy Carter's hand-wringing could hardly do better than read Ross MacDonald to get a sense of how bleak the mood was at the time.

At any rate, Lew Archer is a first-rate guide through this darkness, lonely and vulnerable in ways that most modern private eye novelists have abandoned. This forces him to be more passive than his super-heroic successors, but also means that he's affected by the tragedies he plums in ways that they never are. And so, when the novel ends with the rains finally having come and a human touch as moving as Bill Murray taking Scarlett Johansson's foot in Lost in Translation, we may not get closure, but we do feel that some semblance of order has been restored. In 1971 that may have been as much as most folks hoped for.

I just happened upon this book, and I'm now a confirmed Ross Macdonald fan!

I am amazed by reviewers that revile a book written over 20 years ago because it does not match the mores and attitudes of today.

One of the charms of this book is that it beautifully captures Southern California in the 60s. I was there, guys, and women did not act or dress the way they do now. Don't judge this book out of the context of its era. Instead of being irritated because the book does not portray today's world, enjoy the ride into the past!

As for Macdonald's writing, it was masterful! With a few well chosen phrases, he sets the stage and immerses you in his world. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, and look forward to reading more.

In the winter of 1972, the New York Review of Books featured this novel on its cover and proclaimed the it had won the editors over: From then on, detective mysteries would be considered literature - not just pulp fiction for the lowly masses. They had good reason. The way MacDonal writes, the story reeks of southern California in the 60's, capturing the feel of a Sunday drive through Santa Barbara and along its beaches. It also recognizes that all powerful families have dark histories that sadly repeat themselves over and over. This is the central theme; a constant in Ross MacDonald stories, but best expressed in this one. This mystery novel will not soon leave your memory bank; you will recall it fondly over and over for many years.

All you need to know about this fine Ross Macdonald novel is that

John Leonard put the review of The Underground Man on the front

page of The New York Times Book Review in 1971.

That was unheard of for a mystery.

Suddenly, everyone discovered Ross Macdonald. He truly is the successor

to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. And much more psychologically

sophisticated. Besides this book, his best may be The Chill and The Zebra Striped Hearse.

Macdonald tends to get short shrift next to some of the bigger names in hardboiled detective fiction. This is really too bad. He's a brilliant writer. His detective stories are well-plotted, and find their home in the shattered lives of the characters who inhabit them. Although I love reading his work, there is a palpable air of depression that hangs over the most restorative of his happy endings. Eudora Welty once said that his books were about "the absence of love". I couldn't begin to summarize in a better way. If love is gone or no longer possible, what kinds of connections can people still find?

The Underground Man is generally considered one of the best of the Macdonald novels. Often criticized for an unrealistic plot (perhaps fairly), it is subtle and complex in the way that it introduces and uses characters. The land itself becomes a character, with its wildfires and poisoned ocean casting a shadow over any hope that the people may have for resolution. In this book (the original act is the kidnapping of a young neighbor), he explores the subject of misplaced romance-- women directing and misdirecting their hopes and desires on the men around them. Really wonderful.

If you don't know Macdonald, and you like writers like Chandler or Hammett, you should really pick up one of his novels.

The book's narrator, private detective Lew Archer, is hired to find young Ronald Broadhurst, who has been kidnapped by his father and a younger woman. Of course the plot soon thickens, and Archer finds himself investigating murder, theft and conspiracies galore. A devastating forest fire rages throughout the book, just outside the margin of the action, but near enough to the story to create a consistent backdrop of urgency and fear.

A hurried reader of Ross Macdonald's novel might mistake it for a relatively straightforward detective story, albeit a well-written one. However, this book is strikingly different from many others of the genre. Rather than highlighting action or intrigue, the book chooses to focus on human relationships and the ravages caused by divorce and greed.

Though the plot moves slowly in parts, Macdonald's surprisingly trenchant commentary on devastated relationships and societal decay is as vibrant and relevant today as it was 30 years ago.

You could scour shelf after shelf of mysteries and not find Underground Man's equal. Macdonald's prose is unmatched and his past-engulfed characters stumble through a charred southern California landscape unable to escape their history. This book will, however, spoil you for other mystery writers who cannot match the master.

The Lew Archer series is a must for any fans of detective fiction, even the slow parts (when the detective is asking questions) are written in such elegant prose you read every word from the master craftsman, Ross MacDonald.
THE UNDERGROUND MAN is a tour of family and connections with many twists and paths. The answers do not come easy as each person doesn't want "to talk about that."
Find a comfortable place to curl up with one of the best.
Nash Black, author. HAINTS and WRITING AS A SMALL BUSINESS are now available as Kindle editions.

I'm a big fan of Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer novels, and this one's my favorite. Perhaps it's something about the way he perfectly captures Southern California during a brush-fire at the beginning of this novel, or maybe Archer's struggle to understand the generation behind his. Anyway, it's my favorite novel by one of my favorite authors.