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the complete review - fiction

The Underground Man

by
Ross Macdonald

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : great tone and atmosphere

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "(I)t seems to me altogether typical of Macdonald’s pleasant, entertaining average." - Richard Schickel, Commentary
  
  
• "The plot is intricate, involuted, and complicated to the hilt; and this, as I see it, is the novel's point. The danger derives from the fairy tales into which people make their lives. In lonely, fearful, or confused minds, real-life facts can be come rarefied into private fantasies. And when intensity is accepted -- welcomed -- as the measure of truth, how can the real and the fabricated be told apart ? (...) What gives me special satisfaction about this novel is that no one but a good writer -- this good writer -- could have possibly brought It off. The Underground Man is Mr. Macdonald's best book yet, I think. It is not only exhilaratingly well done; it is also very moving." - Eudora Welty, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "Good characterization and mise-en-scène, slightly marred, however (pace Aristotle) by too frequent indulgence in metaphor." - Edmund Crispin, Sunday Times
  
  
• "Californian opulence once again eviscerated in all its dark extravagance of emotion, all its wriggly hidden horrors." - H.R.F.Keating, The Times
  
  
• "The Underground Man has a slower pace and fewer witty one-liners than The Moving Target, but one warms to Lew for his insights into the problems of others and his awareness of his own demons." - Sarah Curtis, Times Literary Supplement

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       For much of The Underground Man fires blaze in and around Santa Teresa -- Macdonald's fictionalized version of Santa Barbara --, a threat that laps at property and characters and unpredictably spares and consumes. It is a difficult threat to control and grasp -- much like those faced by the characters in the complicated case that Lew Archer has to deal with in this story.
       The case begins relatively straightforwardly: Jean Broadhurst spent the night with her six-year-old son Ronny at a friend's place, one of Archer's neighbors. Archer meets the boy when his father, Stanley, comes to pick him up, to go take him to visit Stanley's mother -- and he sees that Broadhurst is also traveling with a young blond. Jean comes to Archer for help the next day, when she hears about the fires in Santa Teresa -- the place where her mother-in-law lives, and where Stanley was taking the boy.
       Archer agrees to try to help, and soon finds more than he bargained for: Stanley, dead and buried, the teenage blond and Ronny gone. It looks like a sort of kidnapping, with the girl -- Susan Crandall -- a good girl who suddenly seems to have gone over some edge, likely drug-fueled, but it's not your traditional sort of kidnapping, with ransom demands or the like. Indeed, the girl seems to be protective of the kid -- but she and the young man she goes on the run with do make it difficult for Archer to reunite mother and child.
       Another dead body -- whom Archer also encountered while he was still alive, and who was demanding some money -- complicates the puzzle.
       Stanley had been looking for his own lost father for a long time -- the man abandoning his family was: "the main event of his childhood" -- and, as Jean explains to Archer:

     "My husband has been looking for his father for some time," she said, "and gradually breaking up. Or maybe I've gotten it turned around. He's been looking for his father in the hope it would put him back together."

I began to think I had a glimmering of the problem. It was often the same problem -- an unreality so bland and smothering that the children tore loose and impaled themselves on the spikes of any reality that offered.

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.

- M.A.Orthofer, 4 December 2017

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Links:

• Vintage publicity page
• Library of America publicity page
• Penguin Classics publicity page
• Diogenes publicity page

• brothersjudd.com
• Commentary
• Harry Connolly
• Desperate Reader
• Detnovel.com
• Kirkus Reviews
• Las Lecturas de Mr. Davidmore (Spanish)
• Mamoulians Geschichten (German)
• The New York Times Book Review
• The Read Pack (German)

• Ross Macdonald at books and writers

• Black Money
• The Galton Case
• The Goodbye Look
• The Instant Enemy

• See Index of Mysteries and Thrillers
• See Index of Contemporary American fiction
• See Index of Canadian literature
• See Index of Series and Sequels under review

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About the Author:

       Canadian-American author Ross Macdonald (actually: Kenneth Millar) lived 1915 to 1983.

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© 2017-2022 the complete review

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