More Than 10 Billion Sold

By John Skow

SLEEPING BEAUTY by ROSS MACDONALD 271 pages. Knopf. $5.95.

Sneaky question for a book reviewer who complains that Ross Macdonald has written the same Lew Archer detective story 19 times in a row: "How do you know, O sage?"

Answer: I know because I read them.

Sneaky Question: You read them, I take it, in the line of professional duty?

A.: Well, I have to keep up . . .

S.Q.: That's very conscientious.

A.: All right, all right. I read Macdonald because I like him.

S.Q.: No more questions.

A.: Oh yes, there are . . .

For instance, is Archer entirely stable? We have only his word, after all, for the outlandish things that happen during his investigations. Is it really likely that practically every case a detective works on could hinge on a hideous crime committed a generation before, in the presence of a tiny child, who blocks the memory from his consciousness and thus, grown to adulthood, is a psychological time bomb? Wouldn't it be a good idea for Archer to see a shrink?

Another thing, isn't it about time for Macdonald to give Archer another raise? When he began gumshoeing, back in 1949, he made $50 a day, and now he charges $100. It's just not enough. Even if he cracks one case a week, he has to solve 40 cases a year just to make $20,000.

Figure that Archer gets hit on the head once every case. Sometimes it's more, sometimes less, but it must average out to at least that. Now that's not only a lot of punishment--Archer must be, what, 50-some?--it's a lot of hospital bills. No wonder he's broke all the time. In Sleeping Beauty he complains about money. He has just about enough to make the rent on his $200-a-month apartment, he says, and pay the office bills, and that's it. What's he going to live on when he retires?

Decay. All in character, of course. Archer is as much loser as winner. In his wash-and-wear slacks and sports jacket he shoulders resentfully among the heedless rich and the heedless young who are the villains of Macdonald's recurrent daydream, and ours. Roughly at first, then with a rough man's compassion, he rubs their noses in mortality, the loser's truth. See the proud millionaire grovel, as Archer spades up the moldering past! See the sneering teenager whine, as Archer lays bare the certain decay that lies ahead!

Add to these satisfactions an occasional confirmation of the law's venality, a whiff of burning plastic as Southern California chars at the edges, and Archer's own pleasurable disillusions, and--for the reader who is unyoung, unrich and undelighted--you have a fantasy very nearly worth 19 reruns. Archer's middle-aged tiredness is the necessary anchor in reality; the reader is not Billy Batson any more, and he will not believe Captain Marvel.

Still, there are signs that Ross Macdonald's durable whimsy is fading. Sleeping Beauty is a blurry effort, far less vivid than The Underground Man, the Archer thriller whose appearance two years ago caused the world of belles-lettres to proclaim the discovery of a new Dostoevsky. It is hard, a day after finishing the book, to remember its furniture: an oil spill off the California coast; the disappearance of a beautiful young woman; a narrow, evil, oil-rich family; a confused and possibly psychotic young man, and, yes, a murder seen by a child 25 years ago, who then spends several days alone with his mother's body.

At best, the writing is rechewed Macdonald. At worst, the words might have been bought by the carload from the Erie Stanley Gardner estate. The world of belles-lettres is subject to cyclical hysteria, some of it fairly predictable, and it seems likely that Ross Macdonald (whose new novel carries a wistfully belletristic dedication to Eudora Welty) will be sent back to the cellar, where nature has ordained that detective-story writers should work. Very well; Macdonald is not Dostoevsky. For some tastes he may not even be the best crime novelist named Macdonald now at work. (All those lowbrow fans of John D. Macdonald, please step forward.) He is an honest, talented craftsman, however, and his touch at its best is pleasantly wry. Heaven forfend that he should stop writing, down there in the cellar. But as for Archer, never mind that raise. It's time for him to marry a rich, pretty widow and retire.

John Skow

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