Life imitates McGee « STEVENHARTSITE

Life imitates McGee

March 14, 2008

Nancy Nall looks in the pages of a John D. MacDonald novel and finds there a lesson for Eliot Spitzer.

This entry was posted on March 14, 2008 at 3:13 pm and is filed under The Reading Life.

4 Responses to “Life imitates McGee”

J.D. Rhoades Says:

March 14, 2008 at 9:33 pm
I bow to none in my respect for John D. Macdonald. The Travis Mcgee books were some of the first crime fiction I truly loved, and at an early age.

But in the light of age and experience, I have to say that Macdonald had some truly ridiculous views on women, very much in line, as it turns out, with Hugh Hefner’s.

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Steven Hart Says:

March 15, 2008 at 8:01 am
No doubt about it. Travis McGee’s whole lifestyle could have been taken from the Playboy playbook.

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Lance Mannion Says:

March 15, 2008 at 10:24 am
McGee lived a 1960s bachelor’s idyll, no question, and I still envy him, dammit. But MacDonald’s portrayal of female character often had more in common with Updike than with Hefner. You can unpack the backstories of a lot of his murderesses and repack them and come up with an Updike story. MacDonald was also very good at portraying weak and morally lazy men, another Updike speciality.

But the really interesting part of the passage Nance quotes is how closely the way the ficitonal call girl ring of 40 years ago does business matches up with the way the Emperor’s Club apparently operates today.

“Kristen” probably hasn’t had time to develop the “whore’s look.” My guess is that she hasn’t even figured out yet that she is a prostitute. I’d bet if you caught her unawares you wouldn’t see the whore’s look in her eyes, but you’d see a different kind of emptiness, the same one that appears in the eyes of many dreamers of fame and fortune, the empty eyes of someone who is only alive when they’re being lavished with lots of attention and applause. And I’ll bet you that somewhere in McGee’s past there is a woman with just that kind of emptiness.

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Sunday Bookchat « The Opinion Mill Says:

March 15, 2008 at 10:35 pm
[...] shopping mall for a 14th century Islamic scholar. A thought experiment for Chinua Achebe. A Travis McGee novel for Eliot Spitzer. A heavily updated paperback edition for The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia. And more [...]

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