Thousand-Yard Stare

The Goodbye Look - Ross Macdonald

The title refers to the thousand-yard stare that soldiers, too long in combat, have when they have a bad feeling about the next fight. Lew Archer, private investigator, recalls the goodbye look among he and other Marines when they fought on Okinawa in April of 1945, 23 years before the events in this novel take place.

The plot is the most complex Macdonald ever wrote, an even tighter knot than The Chill. Just a few of the skeins in the tangle: a troubled college boy, a mixed-up teenaged girl, hundreds of letters written from the forward areas of the Pacific War, and the killing of supposed child molester in a railroad yard in the early Fifties. I think reading attentively shows respect to a writer with high standards of craft, but I never detected goofs of time or slips of logic.

Besides returning to the theme of the traumatizing effects of war even years after hostilities end, Macdonald was never hesitant about making family dysfunctions the pivot of his plot. Family connections are intricate and surprises about who is related to whom are gradually revealed as the novel moves at a steady pace. Archer investigates the theft of a gold box. Showing his classical education at the University of Michigan, Macdonald twice compares Pandora’s Box  to the stolen box, from which spring three murders, an attempted suicide and a successful suicide, to mention only a couple of unfortunate behaviors in this novel.

Macdonald’s prose, as usual, is a mixed bag. We get the strained: “Pacific Street rose like a slope in purgatory from the poor lower town to a hilltop section of fine old homes.” We get the showy: “His eyes were black and glistening like asphalt squeezed from a crevice.” But we also get just the right note: “The girl was wan with jealousy.”

Soon after this novel was released in 1969, high powered critic of the New York Times John Leonard and popular novelists like William Goldman praised it. It became a best-seller. Macdonald regarded this one, his fifteenth Archer novel, as his jump from genre fiction to mainstream fiction. His implied claim that this novel is more high art than mystery is fair, considering that Archer does little interviewing and less detecting in this one.

Reading it in 2021, we can’t help feeling the novel is an artifact, a piece of evidence in the social history of the end of World War II to the oil shocks in the United States. For hard-boiled writing, Macdonald always gets compared to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, but I think he was more interesting than both in terms of psychological, moral and social insight.