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She Was In College I finished Groucho Marx, Master Detective. I'm tired, time to take a break. Let Fred the writer's block monkey have this evening, kick back, read the book and don't fret it. Most of the time it's not for lack of ideas, but lack of energy and too many hours making faces in front of a computer screen (an unusual concept). I take the position there are no new ideas, any old idea in a storm, as long as it resonates, has a bit of whatever you're calling the truth at the moment and you can wrap it up in clever little halfway comprehensible sentences. I mentioned my thoughts about Groucho when I'd read half of it. Goulart creates a Groucho character that is the Groucho character of his movies, every other line a one liner. People recognize him on the street and he goes into a routine and that's always been Goulart's strength, he's a master of the off the wall twist somewhere in between the subject and the predicate. If you told me that Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was one of Goulart's pseudonyms, I'd say right, Adams always sounded like a British Goulart to me, only not as funny. I don't know, this stuff is always so subjective. The Groucho character seems both real and totally artificial. There are a couple of noir like scenes with a kind of loose canon somebody's going to crush your head with a hammer reality to them, interspersed with the barrage of one liners, downshifting more quickly than I'm accustomed to shifting through the literary esses. After a while you adopt the writer's reality and all this bouncing back and forth seems less jarring. I think. I've started the second book, Groucho Marx, Private Eye (page 3) and I'll see what I think when I'm finished. I'll bring one to my mother (Who reads mysteries morning, noon and evening.) next month in Seattle to get her reaction. I'm not sure what she thinks about the Marx Brothers, but they were making movies when she was in college. |
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