Book Review: I Should Have Stayed Home
I love noir for many reasons. One: I’m fascinated by the genre’s bleak outlook and low opinion of human behavior. I don’t always share this view, but I respect its attachment to reality (and, let’s face it, real life sometimes unfolds exactly how noir predicts it will). Two: the cover art. Oh the beautiful, beautiful cover art. I could fill a blog on Robert McGinnis alone (see why here, courtesy of Leif Peng and his fabulous blog Today’s Inspiration). So when I heard word you could download pulp novels for free at Munseys, I lost no time in scooting over there for Kindle material.
There’s a surplus of titles available that I’ll hopefully get around to reading. For no particular reason whatsoever, I started with I Should Have Stayed Home by Horace McCoy, which you can download it for free here. (For citation purists, yes I know you underline book titles but on teh intertubes it makes it look like a link so I’m making a stylistic choice of using italics instead).
The book follows Ralph Carston, a handsome young man from Georgia who’s gone to Hollywood to make it big in movies. He and roommate Mona Matthews work as extras, barely scraping by, when a courtroom fracas by Mona gives them a flash of notoriety. This leads to a swank Hollywood party and an introduction to Ethel Smithers, a rich older woman with a less than pure interest in Carston.
We’ll go ahead and stick a big ol’ SPOILER WARNING on the discussion from here on in case we have some readers hesitant about learning too much.
The primary thread, of course, follows Carston’s descent into depravity. Or it should, but I can’t get myself too worked up over the author’s definition of what depravity is. True Carston loses his virginity to the elderly Smithers as part of an unspoken trade for her influence, but his commitment to sacrifice his soul for his desires, the hallmark of a noir book, is, at best, wishy-washy. He comes and goes from the Smithers house indecisively, hardly the passionate commitment to destruction a noir lead normally displays. Instead, he ends up a struggling actor who gets to meet lots of powers-that-be, come and go as he pleases, and has to endure some unpleasant company. That sounds like a better than average Hollywood job. Sure he has a bad first sexual experience but that was probably the case for all his friends back home too.
The hard-edged writing style gives the book a noir feel but I don’t find the characters as broken at the end as the genre usually leaves matters. While they undergo the losing of morals, idealism, and integrity, the ending situation is a mixed bag, with Mona pulling out of the tailspin to presumably live a decent (if somewhat defeated) married life. Carston appears set to continue his try for stardom, albeit with a more cynical (some would say realist) view. There’s an inevitability of failure in the air but the consequences are not damning – the worst we think that can happen is Carston goes back home to Georgia.
More telling is how success is portrayed. The successful characters are so because they prey on others perceptions. There’s the hack writer who acts outlandishly, making others conclude he must be a genius and therefore a fabulous writer. There’s the actress skinny dipping at a Hollywood party, who admits to Carston she doesn’t like doing these things but it’s how she stays successful. Ethel Smithers achieves her success with young men by giving the image she can help them achieve stardom, although Carston’s experience with her “contacts” proves continually unsuccessful. In other words, it’s all a game, and the characters who can best deny who they are in truth are the ones that win.
There are some digs at the manufactured Hollywood image of “anybody can make it!” that still read fresh today, but a lot of Cranston’s loss of idealism is similar to what any college student entering the working world finds. Hollywood may have been a precursor to the view that “your employer’s interest in you extends only so far as you remain profitable to them,” but that attitude has seeped so fully into all areas of industry today that the reader tends to side with the machine over Cranston because he’s so, in our modern view, naive and simple headed. This reality is perhaps more noir than the author truly expected us to turn out, but you adapt to the world you’re given or you end up like Cranston, playing by the rules of the dream rather than the rules of the actual game.
