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    The Long Goodbye
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    The Long Goodbye
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    The Long Goodbye
    Audiobook5 hours

    The Long Goodbye

    Written by Patti Davis

    Narrated by Staci Snell

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Ronald Reagan's daughter writes with a moving openness about losing her father to Alzheimer's disease. The simplicity with which she reveals the intensity, the rush, the flow of her feelings encompasses all the surprises and complexities that ambush us when death gradually, unstoppably invades life.

    In The Long Goodbye, Patti Davis describes losing her father to Alzheimer's disease, saying goodbye in stages, helpless against the onslaught of a disease that steals what is most precious-a person's memory. "Alzheimer's," she writes, "snips away at the threads, a slow unraveling, a steady retreat; as a witness all you can do is watch, cry, and whisper a soft stream of goodbyes."

    She writes of needing to be reunited at forty-two with her mother ("she had wept as much as I over our long, embittered war"), of regaining what they had spent decades demolishing; a truce was necessary to bring together a splintered family, a few weeks before her father released his letter telling the country and the world of his illness . . .

    The author delves into her memories to touch her father again, to hear his voice, to keep alive the years she had with him.

    She writes as if past and present were coming together, of her memories as a child, holding her father's hand, and as a young woman whose hand is being given away in marriage by her father . . . of her father teaching her to ride a bicycle, of the moment when he let her go and she went off on her own . . . of his teaching her the difference between a hawk and a buzzard . . . of the family summer vacations at a rented beach house-each of them tan, her father looking like the athlete he was, with a swimmer's broad shoulders and lean torso. . . . She writes of how her father never resisted solitude, in fact was born for it, of that strange reserve that made people reach for him. . . . She recalls him sitting at his desk, writing, staring out the window . . . and she writes about the toll of the disease itself, the look in her father's eyes, and her efforts to reel him back to her.

    Moving . . . honest . . . an illuminating portrait of grief, of a man, a disease, and a woman and her father.


    From the Hardcover edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateAug 2, 2004
    ISBN9781415920251
    Unavailable
    The Long Goodbye

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    Reviews for The Long Goodbye

    4/5

    44 ratings31 reviews

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    • 5/5
      ...And now I'm fresh out of Chandler.

      Everyone's been telling me that The Long Goodbye is the best. I think they're right. Several people told me I should read it first. I think they're wrong. I think it's best when you know and love Philip Marlowe, and you know and love Chandler's writing, and he can come along and punch you in the gut and bowl you over all over again. Or shoot you in the head.

      I loved this one the best. I loved Terry Lennox and I loved Marlowe for helping him and I kind of followed the whole plot and thought it was clever and probably the best. I love the last two chapters and wanted to punch Chandler for them at the same time. I love the way it finishes up, and I hate the way that Marlowe is just as alone, just as bitter, just as poor, at the end. Except, I hate it in a good way.

      Probably the best plotted and the most emotional of the lot. If you're only going to read one, read this.
    • 4/5
      a vintage crime story with lots of twists and turns that kept me guessing and surprised. fast paced. well-written. enjoyable.
    • 3/5
      I generally don't care for the hardboiled private eye genre, although Chandler's writing and wry asides made this book readable for me. It was the second winner of the Edgar for Best Novel and follows Philip Marlowe through a tangled plot involving deceit upon deceit.
    • 4/5
      It's everything you want from Chandler – femmes fatales and bent cops and hoodlums with guns and '50s slang, and dialogue that only sounds clichéd because so many people since have tried to copy it.‘Alcohol is like love,’ he said. ‘The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you just take the girl's clothes off.’Or again:Cops never say goodbye. They're always hoping to see you again in the line-up.I don't know if I agree with those who say this is his masterpiece – maybe I preferred Farewell My Lovely. But it's definitely up there. As always, the plot is impossible to follow and the murder mystery is less important than painting a mood-picture of Los Angeles at a particular time. It probably never existed exactly like this, but reading him makes me nostalgic for it all the same.This one wrapped up very satisfyingly at the end, with a series of encounters and dialogues that felt like the title being played out, and made it seem like the last book of a series (although it isn't, quite): I particularly loved the gruff, manly conversation with Bernie Ohls at the finish. His relationship with Marlowe – the back-and-forth of two men who respect each other but aren't sure if they like each other – reminded me of the dialogue between Bogart and Rains at the end of Casablanca.Chandler got more autobiographical here than he usually does, and there is a hint of introspection behind some of the snappy similes – one character (like Chandler) grew up in England before going off to fight in a world war; and another, even closer to the bone, is a tired, aging genre novelist who (like Chandler) types on yellow paper and drinks too much, and worries that he's been wasting his literary gifts on pulp fiction.If Chandler worried about that himself, he shouldn't have. I don't even really like crime fiction much, but his stuff, as the Sunday supplements like to put it, ‘transcends genre’. In other words the sentences sing, and you're reading for a lot more than just plot resolution. This was pure pleasure from start to finish.
    • 5/5
      My first Raymond Chandler; it will not be my last.I was snagged with the first few paragraphs. “ …because Terry Lenox’s left foot was still dangling outside, as if he had forgotten he had one. “ “…and over her shoulders she had a blue mink that almost made the Rolls-Royce look like just another automobile. It didn’t quite. Nothing can.” The writing is eloquent and concise. Descriptions that take you into the location without tearing you away from the story. Writing that makes the story better. And what a story. There is a lot of twisting and turning squeezed in this book. And the ending is perfect. Yes, you may get an inkling where it will wind up, but still a nice little jolt.My first sentence says it all
    • 5/5
      Arguably Chandler's masterpiece. Tough, witty, poignant and smart. Okay, maybe his female characters could use just a soupcon of shading, but it's Chandler's world and he's the boss. Marlowe is a classic character, with enough complexity to spill over onto all the others. There just ain't no book like this book.
    • 5/5
      The ultimate noir novel? It's long, it's bleak, it's about power, and love, and lust, and booze, and getting beat up by cops and doing the right thing. The plot's foundations seem a little shaky: Marlowe goes on a crusade to protect a 'friend' he barely knows, but then again that's the kinda straight-up guy he is, right? Superb.
    • 5/5
      I've never seen the movie, but I doubt that it can measure up the scope of this novel. This is the one where Marlowe really becomes emotionally involved in a case. He is out to help a friend and finds alcoholism, romance, corruption, and terror among the upper class. The quality of language is very high. Points of entertainment and social commentary are vivid and perfectly placed, ordered, and quantified. This book is not without healthy doses of humor, social criticism, metaphor, or action. Read it!
    • 3/5
      Got this at a book exchange party. I meant to read it last year when it was the book for One Chicago, One Book, but didn't, so now was my chance. It was so hard-boiled and tough, great stuff. Iconic.
    • 3/5
      Got this at a book exchange party. I meant to read it last year when it was the book for One Chicago, One Book, but didn't, so now was my chance. It was so hard-boiled and tough, great stuff. Iconic.
    • 2/5
      First foray into Raymond Chandler wasn't very desirable. It took a very long time to read such a short novel. The main character wasn't very desirable and I certainly didn't root for him to close the case. The plot was interesting enough but the characters distracted from it so much, I didn't enjoy it. I read this book for a reading group and couldn't even finish on time to participate in the discussion. I am doubtful there will be any other Chandler novels for me.
    • 5/5
      Raymond Chandler is the grandpappy of hardboiled detective novels, and The Long Goodbye is a good example of just how good Detective genre stories can be.This is my favorite of Chandler's stories, because it contains a heartfelt core that isn't necessarily present in all of the Philip Marlowe stories, as well as a good mystery and alluring writing.For young adults, this could serve as a wonderful introduction to noir fiction and mystery as a whole.Note: some adult content - drunkenness and seduction and the like.
    • 3/5
      This 1953 novel has detective Philip Marlowe helping a guy flee after his wife is killed. It reads OK, but I did not like Marlowe--I seldom like supposed heroes who are adulterers--and the surprise ending did not surprise me, since I suspected it all along. No character in the book was overly admirable, and the book wins no prize from me. It is the fourth Chandler book I have read and I presume I will not read another.
    • 5/5
      My favorite Chandler novel so far, also the first I had ever read at that point. Somewhere someone told me to buy this, I'm glad they did.
    • 5/5
      Though Chandler is one of my favorite authors and "The Long Goodbye" is one of my favorite books I have to admit that I have never understood Marlowe and what makes him tick. He almost always does the thing I would avoid and his lack of greed and egotism makes me always feel miserable. I certainly would have taken all the money he was offered, and I certainly would have let me been seduced by the "Golden Angel" (Eileen). But how can you not adore an author who writes a c.v. like that: "The homicide skipper this year was a Captain Gregorious, a type of copper that is getting rarer but by no means extinct, that kind that solves crimes with the bright light, the soft sap, the kick to the kidneys, the knee to the groin, the fist to the solar plexus, the night stick to the base of the spine. Six months later he was indicted for perjury before a grand jury, booted without trial, and later stamped to death by a big stallion on his ranch in Wyoming." (p. 44)
    • 4/5
      I've never read chandler before, and picked this up without any real expectations of finding a book I would really enjoy, and I was totally blown away by the first 3rd of the book. I love the prose, the characters, the dialogue, the way it talks about corruption, ethics and honour - really interesting, with a page turning plot which kept me reading. The plot does get very convoluted as it continues and the female charcaters seem somewhat one dimensional, but i'll definitely be going back for more.
    • 4/5
      My first Marlowe and a pretty good start. The dialogue was crisp and Marlowe was an interesting guy, although there were probably a few too many twists and turns.
    • 2/5
      For quite some time now, my husband had been urging me to read "hard-boiled" detective fiction. And I chose this particular book because it won an Edgar Award, and is on the list of "1001 Books you Must Read Before you Die." Well, I have to say the only reason I made it all the way to the end was because I love my husband, and wanted to give this book a fair shake. But it really wasn't my cup of tea.Philip Marlowe is a private eye in 1940s Hollywood, California. The Long Goodbye opens with Marlowe encountering a couple outside a bar. The man is quite drunk; the woman drives off in their car, leaving the man in a pretty sad state. Marlowe takes him home, gets him sober, and is drawn into friendship with this mysterious man, Terry Lennox. They meet for drinks several times. Then one night, Lennox visits Marlowe and asks to be taken to Tijuana. His wife has just been killed and although Terry didn't commit the murder, he knows he will be implicated. Marlowe helps him get away, but Terry's story is far from over. Meanwhile, Marlowe takes up another case involving an alcoholic writer. The two cases turn out to have a connection, which is gradually revealed.But I didn't really care, and that was my problem with this book. If there's one thing I've learned about my reading, it's that I enjoy character-driven novels. In The Long Goodbye, every single character was a stereotype. The central characters were fabulously wealthy (except for Marlowe, who still managed to move within their society with relative ease). There were a few seedy characters who acted suspiciously, just to keep the reader interested. The local police were violent, ineffetive, or both. Most characters had some level of dependency on alcohol or drugs, and associated behavioral issues. There were few women in this book, but all of them were blonde bombshells with only one real function in life. It's a shame -- Raymond Chandler is quite famous for this type of novel, and some of the film adaptations make for interesting viewing. But I think I'll take a pass on his other books.
    • 4/5
      Pretty near perfect. Certainly worthy of being reprinted so many times, in so many languages, with so many interesting covers. And as far as the murderer of Terry Lennox ... he had me until the end.Of course, there's the dialogue, especially Marlowe with these ice cool blondes. I could only imagine Bogart in the role (Elliot Gould? God help us). And I'm not sure that in a blind reading test I could pick Hammett from Chandler. But maybe: despite the ping pong dialogue, Chandler does have a habit of throwing in superfluous adverbs. How else can someone read a newspaper alone in a restaurant booth but "quietly." And these women speaking "gravely" and so on. My biggest reservation, though, concerns the initial meeting with Lennox and why Marlowe carted the guy home. I mean, why? It may well work in the movie, but Lennox isn't particularly charming. Well, Lennox must remind Marlowe of something or someone from his past. I kept thinking we were going to get a few more hints of that, but it never came. The 1950s. Or 1950s LA noir: so much drinking! And the discreet sex scene.
    • 4/5
      I can't say anything about that hasn't already been said better by someone else. His style is brilliant, his plots are tight, and he's a joy to read.That being said, I can't help but think he's got some serious pent-up hostility toward blondes.
    • 3/5
      This was my first Chandler book. I was often tempted to put it aside and read something else, but I stayed with it to the end. I am left with mixed feelings. The Philip Marlowe character somehow eludes me. I can't understand the guy. His standards for accepting fees for the work her performs are so high that he always refuses payment. How does the guy survive? There is only one client in the book who is acceptably ethical to Marlowe, and he charges this client $20 and leaves it as a tip to a bartender. Any client who has the slightest character flaw encounters Marlowe's disdain, and has his money returned.There was dialogue I truly enjoyed, the plot was interesting, and there are many good things to be said of the book. I guess I have to read more Chandler; but I won't right away.The paperback I read was published by Pocket Books in 1964. The cover artwork is better than any of the covers shown here, in my opinion, but no credit is given in the book to the artist.
    • 5/5
      How is it that Chandler manges to write so simply and yet produce natural and vivid prose? He does it with solid plotting too and a glut of memorable characters.
    • 3/5
      I couldn't put it down. Even better than The Big Sleep, I thought.
    • 3/5
      I followed up "The Talented Mr. Ripley" with this novel, hoping to go on a '50s noir binge. Unfortunately Raymond Chandler was less to my taste.Though it's extremely well-constructed, I didn't like the plot that much until the twist at the very end. I guess I just wasn't connecting the pieces most of the way through, but I didn't really appreciate what was going on until the very end.My biggest problem was probably how aggressive the characters were, though. Phillip Marlowe picked fights with everyone he ran across, and most everyone obliged him by fighting back, either verbally or physically. I just didn't understand why this was an acceptable way of getting information, or why it was necessary to fight with absolutely everyone, including a man he brushed past in a bar.I don't know. That kind of soured it for me, I guess.
    • 5/5
      You don't read Raymond Chandler for the plots--you read him for the magnificent "hard boiled" prose. The Long Goodbye is probably his most complex work, full of world weary insights and a somewhat more "tender" Marlowe. The great pleasure of The Long Goodbye is seeing how the main character, Philip Marlowe, reconciles his cynical view of humanity with a genuine desire to help a few unfortunates in life. The best Marlowe...classic...
    • 5/5
      (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)So are you familiar already with the "One Book One Chicago" (OBOC) program? We're not the first city to do it (in fact, we stole the idea from Seattle), but are definitely now the largest city in America to do so; basically, roughly three or four times a year the Mayor's Office and the public library system choose an important and popular book (usually a 20th-century novel), stock the various libraries around the city with thousands of extra copies, host a whole series of events around the city tied to the book itself (often co-sponsored by various creative and corporate organizations), and otherwise do as much as possible to convince the entire city of Chicago to read the book all at once, all in the same thirty-day period. And when it works, it really is quite the great little experience; imagine walking around a city of four million people and constantly running across others reading the same exact book you're reading, in cafes and on the train and at discussion clubs and while waiting in line at the supermarket, and all the fun little intelligent conversations such a thing inspires among complete strangers.And the latest OBOC choice (their fourteenth) is a real doozy, too; it's The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler, the last great novel by one of the most truly American writers our country has ever seen, a book both popular with the mainstream and historically important to the world of arts and letters. And indeed, Chandler is so distinctly an American artist precisely because he both helped invent and perfect a truly American form of the arts, so-called "detective" or "crime" or "pulp" fiction, a genre which first gained popularity in the rough-and-tumble first half of the 20th century and is by now an international phenomenon and multi-billion-dollar industry. It's the perfect genre for Americans to have latched onto, fans say, because crime fiction examines the exact dark side of the coin which pays for the American Dream as well; this idea of a truly market-driven, truly free society, whereby busting your hump and believing in yourself can legitimately get you ahead of all the other schmucks of the world, whether that's through noble activities or criminal ones. No one is better suited than an American, the theory goes, to see the complex symbiotic nature of both these options -- the hidden dangers of capitalism, the dark seductions of crime -- and thus it is that this style of fiction is one that Americans are distinctly known for.Now, that said, The Long Goodbye is also atypical of the usual type of work Chandler first got famous for; another detective tale to be sure, starring his usual standby antihero Philip Marlowe, but this time a wearier and more socially-conscious man than before, in a tale written late in Chandler's life (in fact, just six years before his premature death). Because that's an important thing to know about Chandler, especially to understand the mystique surrounding his work and enduring popularity, is that he was a bit of a rough-and-tumble fellow himself, although unusually so; a pipe-smoking, chess-studying, erudite nerd who was nonetheless a heavy boozer and womanizer, someone who not only managed to snag a lucrative corporate executive job in the middle of the Great Depression but also lose it because of showing up to work drunk too many times in a row. Chandler had never meant to be a full-time writer, sorta stumbled into it ass-backwards because of his vices, and was always very critical of the other things going on in his industry and the other people being published; it's because of all these things, fans claim, that Chandler writes in such a unique and distinctive style, and the fact that such stories got published at the exact moment in history they did that ended up making him so popular.Because that's the other thing to understand about Chandler if you don't already, that along with a handful of other authors, he helped define the "smart pulp fiction" genre of the 1930s, '40s and '50s, the same genre that spawned gangster movies, film noirs and more; so in other words, not just spectacular stories of derring-do among criminal elements, tales of which had already been getting published regularly for the lower classes since Victorian times, but also bringing a slick, Modernist style to the stories, a clean minimalism to the prose inspired by such contemporary "authentic" peers as William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway and more. Reading The Long Goodbye for the first time this week, in fact my first Chandler book ever, I can easily see why people have been going so nuts for his writing style for 75 years now and counting; because Chandler had a natural ability to get it exactly exactly right, to not underwrite his stories even a tiny bit and not overwrite them either, to bump up nearly to the edge of cheesiness at all times but to rarely ever step over. That after all is why literally thousands of pulp-fiction projects have rightly faded into obscurity now over the last half-century, but with writers like Chandler still being chosen for programs like OBOC; because Chandler had a born mastery over the subtleties of it all that most other writers before and after him have lacked.For those who don't know, as mentioned The Long Goodbye concerns a recurring character of Chandler's named Philip Marlowe, a private investigator from whom we now derive many of our stereotypes concerning the subject -- the shabby urban office with the frosted-glass window, the sudden appearance of dangerous dames with gams that just won't quit, the tough-as-nails sad-sack private dick who don't take no guff from nobody no how. Ugh, see how easy it is to fall into cheesy Chandleresque mannerisms? And this is the flipside of reading Chandler anymore, of course, something you need to actively work against while reading his books if you want any chance of deeply enjoying them; it's imperative that you forget all the cultural stereotypes and cliches that have come from the world of pulp fiction, that you not immediately think of a tough-talking Humphrey Bogart while reading this but rather approach it as a contemporary reader in the 1950s would, one who has no preconceptions about what they're getting into. Because in many ways, a trench-coated tough-talking Bogart type is bad casting when it came to the Marlowe that Chandler originally presented to the public; his Marlowe is a lot more like the author himself, a quiet intellectual who mostly enjoyed staying at home, who talked in the clipped and gruff way he did merely because he was a borderline sociopath and nihilist, who wanted as little to do with the rest of humanity as possible.Because man, the world that Chandler paints in The Long Goodbye is certainly not the most pleasant or optimistic one you'll ever come across; a world full of spoiled, weak little hairless apes, running around flinging their own excrement at each other and succumbing to their basest vices at the slightest provocation. And indeed, this is one of the other things this particular novel is known for, much more so than any of the other novels of Chandler's career, as being one of the first truly complex and brutally honest looks at the entire subject of alcoholism, a tortured look at the subject from an active addict who bitterly blames the moral weakness of the alcoholics as much as the disease itself. In Chandler's world, the majority of bad things that happen to people happen because of those people's own actions and attitudes; because they are petty, because they are weak, because they are greedy, because they are spineless. Sure, occasionally a person might get framed for a murder they didn't actually commit, or other such unfair crime; but ultimately that person has been guilty of countless other sins in the past for which they were never caught, making it impossible to exactly feel bad for them when it comes to the one particular trumped-up charge.It's a delicious milieu that Chandler creates, but for sure a bleak one, a remorseless universe that like I said is punctuated by this sparkling dialogue that at all times shines; it's very easy to see after reading this why his work caught on so dramatically in the first place, and why organizations like the Chicago Public Library are still finding it so important to bring him to people's attention. And unlike a lot of other so-called "Important Historical Work," actually reading through The Long Goodbye never feels like some dated chore; I mean, yes, as mentioned, the dialogue has a tendency to border on cheesy, but usually stays on the good side of that line as long as you're not reading along out loud in a wiseguy New York accent. (And by the way, to see an excellent example of how to present Chandleresque dialogue in a non-cheesy way, please see my review of the truly brilliant 2005 Rian Johnson contemporary high-school noir Brick.) It's a book that not only delivers a simple lurid entertainment, but also gets you thinking about a whole variety of deeper topics for days and weeks afterwards; I'm glad the OBOC people picked it for the program, and I'm looking forward to attending the various Chandler-related events going on around the city throughout the rest of April. I encourage you to pick up a copy as well, if you haven't already.
    • 2/5
      Raymond Chandler books were highly recommended via many sources, but I have read several and never liked any; I don't like the characters and the stories are not that intriguing.
    • 5/5
      THE Great American Novel, hands down. Poetry as fiction. Wow!
    • 5/5
      Someone tucked a copy of this in the school library. It was a paperback, which was odd, because the library had nothing but hardbacks. I checked it out and was told it was not a school book and that someone must have placed it on the shelf mistakenly. You should not read this sort of book, said the teacher on library watch. Which was, of course, the most incentivising tag you can give a teenager. I read it and then consumed every book Chandler wrote.
    • 5/5
      Sheer narrative genius (wrapped around a misogynist plot that doesn't always make a whole lot of sense as usual) from the daddy of crime fiction.