Customer Rating: 
Summary: More research and less imagination
Comment: Judith Freeman relies heavily on inspiration and imagination to flesh out Raymond Chandler's very
full but incomplete life in her book "The Long Embrace." But more thorough research might have
gotten better answers to all the questions she raised about Raymond Chandler, creator of the Philip
Marlowe stories in novels, short stories and film. For example, during Chandler's "Hollywood" period
he worked with Billy Wilder on the film "Double Indemnity". The relationship was somewhat strained
but what we learned helped us understand a bit more about the man. Perhaps an even more popular film
of the era was "Strangers On A Train" by Alfred Hitchcock who also employed Chandler to work on his
film. Hitchcock even drove all the way down to La Jolla to confer with Chandler even though Chandler
hated him. But there is no mention of the Hitchcock conflict in the book (or even Hitchcock's name)
Chandler would keep him waiting on purpose before admitting him to his home. Why did Chandler hate
Hitchcock? Delving into this mystery by Ms. Freeman might tell us more about Chandler than depending
upon sudden inspiration while sitting in her car getting "vibes" about the place and what happened.
As a result one feels that she is skipping part of the story or is not completely honest about
aspects of his life. But it just may be sloppy research. And the passages she writes! She tries to
out-Chandler Chandler with Marlowe type phrases. Is she auditioning for a mystery writing job or
what? I learned a great deal more about Chandler than I knew but I kept feeling that something was
left out or missing; kind of like the student who undertakes a term paper too great in scope to
possibly finish by the deadline so time becomes a problem and the project is turned in with details
missing and overlooked. That's how I felt after reading this book. For example she told us that
Chandler wrote on half-sheets of paper but never explained why. She even told us whose job it was to
cut the paper up into half sheets but not why. (It was a writing discipline he practiced to relay
all the details of a scene as quickly as possible in the shortest amount of time and space.) Oh,
also there are a lot of photographs but no captions under the photographs to identify them. There is
a photograph index in the back of the book so you have to constantly flip back and forth to make any
sense out of them. Also there are glaring errors such as identifying Terry Lennox as a character
from "The Big Sleep." He was a character from "The Long Goodbye" and Ms. Freeman should have known
that. Maybe it was just an editor's error. I'll give her that but the chapters seem to meander on
and on and I kept waiting for a point to be made. Chandler broke his stories up into short and
understandable chapters. Ms. Freeman would have done us a favor if she did likewise. I enjoyed the
book but would give this term paper a B- for lack of comprehensive research.
Customer Rating: Summary: If you love Raymond Chandler ...
Comment: Reading these seven prior reviews, it stands out that all of them are pretty much right. The
strengths of this book are its strengths and the weaknesses are its weaknesses. But that isn't the
whole story.
The Long Embrace is a subjective account of a subjective experience that
in turn requires a particular frame for the subjective experience of the reader in relationship to
Raymond Chandler. If you love Raymond Chandler and his work as much as Freeman, you will love this
book. It you don't like Chandler or are neutral to his work, you might not like it. It's a homage,
and a reverie, and a critical work, and above all, the projection of an author in search of both
objective and subjective correlatives for her vision and life experience. Objectively she is
struggling to map her own biography and history with the history and the landscape of Los Angeles,
but not just any Los Angeles - it's the Los Angeles of Raymond Chandler's fiction that constitutes
her quest, an imaginary landscape more real to her than the smoggy basin she inhabits. That makes
the search doubly difficult. So she spends energy and time driving the city streets in search of
markers for the many way-stations with which Chandler and his wife Cissy mapped their own erratic
trajectory through life, his career, and a city that devours itself daily. Because Chandler's vision
seized Freeman's heart and soul as well as her agile and creative mind, she needed to build a
three-dimensional tic-tac-toe-like representation of all this, and as I say, if you too have loved
Chandler and his special gift to us, you will appreciate, savor and understand the compelling
necessity of her quest.
Young people who have not experienced the constant destruction
of the markers of our histories as American cities bulldoze the external signs of our past may not
appreciate the emotional impact of Freeman's journey, her attempt to overlay transparencies of the
current physical city in which she lives on the even deeper emotional landscape of Chandler's
fiction. Maybe only middle-aged people and older ones can really appreciate why this book exists.
And people who do not intuitively understand why noir is the appropriate lens for
those of us who grew to maturity in post World War 2 America may not resonate with this quest. When
Freeman cites the film Chinatown as the "most brilliant movie of them all," either you know exactly
what she means, or not. You sit up and quack like a duck, or you don't. Since I cite in my own work
- my speeches and my non-fiction collection, Islands in the Clickstream, in particular - Chinatown
and Blade Runner, another LA-noir classic, more frequently than any other two films, I think I do
understand. If you know what I mean when I say that, if you smile with recognition, you will love
reading this book.
Yes, there are passages you might scan, when Freeman indulges
herself in her own experiences and observations on site, but that might also be because her
existential journey which this book represents is not your primary interest. That's fair enough. But
if you can see yourself vicariously tracing the footsteps of this enigmatic couple in order to under
their relationship, so constitutive of the identity and energies of this uniquely American writer,
then you will linger over those passages too. It is precisely the ephemeral nature of her
observations - who she sees, the time of day, the smell and look and feel of places present to her
and to us through her writing and only through her writing through which she attempts to divine the
former essence of what was there, once, and is gone forever - that call attention to the ephemeral
nature of our own memories, linked to the books or films that meant so much and which have become
even more real to us than the places they depict.
What is needed now, of course, is
someone who explores Judith Freeman's life to understand her compelling need to understand the
dynamics of this relationship, her obsessive pursuit of "Ray," as she calls him; what is needed is
someone who visits all the places Freeman lived, explores her relationship to friends, husbands,
lovers, and her childhood history. That subjective biographical quest would in turn be imposed on
hers, inviting alas another quest, one in search of Freeman's biographer, and on and on, turtles all
the way down, as they say, and perhaps that is the crux of this lovely, insightful, well-written
book: primary materials, no matter how abundant, never fully explain the mystery of the Other, and
when that Other has affected us deeply, we always write as much about ourselves as the one we
describe. Memories link, blur, and recede in infinite regress, pointing toward poetic or spiritual
writing as the ultimate frame of the illusion of objectivity, an illusion we inherit from the
twentieth century, too, and which in fact is the foundation of the detective story in the first
place. We solve mysteries vicariously through these books, pretending that a scientific method is
all we need, because we know deep in our hearts that we can never solve the real mysteries of life.
We are all searching for coherence and meaning and harmony in a symphony hall full of dead spaces,
filling in the blanks with the contents of our lives.
(..)
