The Occasional Rewards of Reading Escapist Trash — Long Deceased John D. MacDonald’s Interjections of Condensed Rumination — into His Macho Man Dialogs

© 2015 Peter Free

 

19 March 2015

 

 

Just because it looks like literary trash does not mean that it is

 

Thoughtful writers of escapist fiction will sometimes serendipitously sprinkle very short traipses of philosophical seriousness into their books.

 

Occasionally, these make an otherwise forgettable story worthwhile.

 

 

Disclaimer

 

I generally avoid serious literature. My existence has been saddeningly reality-drowned enough to do without it. Thus, my opinion on the following may not be worthwhile.

 

 

When I was young, I was addicted to action and private eye novels

 

Perhaps as an escape via the protagonist’s ability to do something about concretized wrongs. Then for 37 years, I gave even this up because my occupations themselves trended toward action.

 

 

Going back with old eyes

 

Recently, out of elderly curiosity, I picked up some of the action/PI books that I had read as a young man. Among these were some of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series.

 

His bed-hopping, insufferably macho (“salvage consultant”) McGee character was ridiculous, even in my youth. But MacDonald’s stories were generally well plotted. And McGee’s intellectually and psychologically insightful colleague, the economist Meyer, made up for some of McGee’s rankling emotional absurdities.

 

(Meyer was probably a partial stand-in for MacDonald, who had a Harvard MBA degree.)

 

Meyer’s often concisely expressed wisdom

 

This one from the novel, The Green Ripper — a word play on a child’s misunderstanding of “grim reaper”:

 

 

Not one of us ever grows up to be what he intended to be. Not one of us fulfills his own expectations, Travis.

 

We are all our own children, in that sense. At some point, somewhere, we have to stop making demands.

 

© 1978 John D. MacDonald, The Green Ripper (1979) (at page 548 in John D. MacDonald: Five Complete Travis McGee Novels, Wings Books, 1985) (in the standalone novel, this quotation will appear 2 to 3 pages from the end of the story) (paragraph split)

 

 

The Meyer thought will not mean much to the young, but  . . .

 

Rereading it in my late sixties, I smiled at the sad familiarity of the observation. Perhaps more true for some than others.

 

A link between minds is what occasionally elevates authorial experience, masquerading as trash, into companionable solace.

 

 

Characteristically, MacDonald prefaced The Dreadful Lemon Sky (1975) with a perceptive thought provoker

 

George Santayana’s (1863-1952) familiar one:

 

 

Life is not a spectacle or a feast: it is a predicament.

 

Which works on spiritual planes spanning the comparatively trivial to the profound.

 

 

The moral? — Good writers — even when appealing to our escapist impulses — occasionally remind us that . . .

 

There is no escape, even when we are determined to find one. It is that rueful realization that binds us to the predicament and each other.