back to IVing IV: "What", Doc wondered aloud, "the fuck, is going on here?"

[alice wellintown]

Any novice reader of fiction or drama or narrative looks for flaws in
characters. Authors contruct characters with flaws so that readers
will look for them, find them, evaluate them. It's basic stuff. Larry
is a little man, a parody of the man Chandler desrcibes in his famous
essay, "The Simple Act of Murder." He's not as grown up as you
suggest. Bigfoot nails him pretty good; he is one of the juvenile
generation who appreciate the distinction between child-like and
childish. As far as Penny is concerned, she too is not as grown up as
you suggest but rather like Frenesi when she admonishes her crew that
they are not playing little kid games. She doesn't really have the
maturity to know what she's doing here. If she did, she would not
interest us. Characters need flaws and readers need to discover them
and, yes, get excited about those flaws and how they advance the plots
and themes.

On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 12:06 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> This seems a juvenile way to read the book , looking for character flaws
>  and  getting all overwrought about it. These are grown ups in a dangerous
> world, and characters in a murder mystery, and your interp is just silly.
> Every investigation into an organized criminal conspiracy is dangerous.  For
> years Hoover insisted there was no organized crime problem in the US. He
> must have been a very brave and thoughtful man to keep the FBI safe from Mob
> danger.
> On Dec 2, 2009, at 9:15 PM, alice wellintown wrote:
>
>>> Mark Kohut wrote:
>>> p. 283 Doc's  'first thought' was for Penny's safety after looking at
>>> this
>>> folder. Doc is presented as a tender-hearted type---outside of a
>>> one-on-one with some Badasses--once again. P shows us steady thoughts of
>>> others, especially his women "friends".
>>
>> Again, I'm reading a very different Larry. The text doesn't say his
>> first thought was FOR her safety. He understands that she might have
>> put herself in grave danger by treating the file as any other sealed
>> ancient history file when it is in fact a very special file; it's a
>> file that people she works with and people she works for, as well as
>> other dangerous people, don't want her reading or slipping to people
>> like Larry. Now, Larry only realizes the super grave nature of this
>> file after he starts reading it, but he knew that it was no typical
>> sealed ancient history file. He knew she was putting herself at risk.
>> He only now realizes how much risk. Penny, it seems has no clue. Not a
>> fair trade. He traded a wall paper penny stock for a bundle of blue
>> chips. As they say, it's another day and every dog will have one. This
>> one belongs to Larry. But let's not confuse one good trade with a
>> positive year. Penny is not his friend. No definition of friendship
>> allows that one can shop one's friends or put them in serious harm to
>> satisfy one's curiosity or get a job done or keep one. No, put it in
>> quotes, but it ain't even close to a friend. An enemy is more like it.
>> And Larry is a coward. What Penny did is fairly low on the courage
>> scale because she didn't know the danger she was in. If she knew how
>> dangerous that file was when she took it and gave it to Larry, we
>> might call her fairly courageous, but not a hero because she didn't
>> take that risk for her friends or brothers and sisters, but in
>> exchange for information.  What Larry did is cowardice. He downplayed
>> the risk and sent her in harms way to satisfy his own needs and
>> desires.
>
>