Fredric Brown and The Meaning of Life

The Fabulous Clipjoint by Fredric Brown
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

WOW. I LOVED this book.

It has much of the usual tough guy detective or noir story feel but it is a different kind of mystery. In some ways it is a slow burn even though things do happen and you want to find out what it coming. BUT the resolution at the end is a bit of an “anti-resolution”, at least in a mystery story sense. It is hard to explain, just read the book and get to the end.

The kicker is toward the end where finally there is a reference to what the title is all about. After all their adventures, our young protagonist and his wise but tough uncle have a drink from high above Chicago and Brown lays out the whole point if it all. And it goes in a direction I wasn’t expecting.

We took a table by a window on the south side, looking out toward the Loop. It was beautiful in the bright sunshine. The tall, narrow buildings were like fingers reaching toward the sky. It was like something out of a science-fiction story. You couldn’t quite believe it, even looking at it. “Ain’t it something, kid?”

“Beautiful as hell,” I said. “But it’s a clipjoint.” He grinned. The little laughing wrinkles were back in corners of his eyes. He said, “It’s a fabulous clipjoint, kid. The craziest things can happen in it, and not all of them are bad.”| Page 128

So basically, everything going on around us is a con, or a bait and switch, where we are lured into life but false advertising. I might be overreaching here but we are lured to buy, eat, do, some many things and most of them are really not good for us. The majority of stuff in a coffee shop you should not get (pastries, sugar packed coffee, and more). And just look down a cereal aisle in a grocery store, millions spent to lure us to buy sugar coated crap.

Well, you get the idea. But to make a big ol’ comments about the absurdity of modern life at the end of a mystery novel. THAT is something special.

I must confess I don’t think I would have appreciated it as much when I was younger. I guess I am an older more cynical reader now and ripe for Fredric Brown mysteries.

Now some quotes:

She came back looking like a million bucks in crisp new currency. | Page 111

I said, “You talk like a poet, not a carney.” He chuckled. “I read a book once,” he said. “Look, kid, don’t try to label things. Words fool you. You call a guy a printer or a lush or a pansy or a truck driver and you think you’ve pasted a label on him. People are complicated; you can’t label ’em with a word.” | Page 49

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One Life

I let the last birthday go by without comment. Less to say, or birthdays mean less each year.

On the drive home from work I listened to Lisa Ekdahl’s “One Life”. Where for all the different personalities and all the conflict, there is just one life we are all living. And that reminded me of some psychologists saying there is no “self”, no individual, and our individuality is a fiction brought about by all the different parts of our brain interacting.

And this interaction is not a collection of discrete parts pretending to be a whole, but what there is of a self is the relations between all the brain activity. So too society is not a collection of individuals, but the relationship between all the brain relationships going on. And it is all happening NOW, every moment, and we let it flow by without comment, like ignoring a birthday .

BUT this universe of connections is the very essence of existence and it binds us together even while we ignore it.

To quote from the movie “Brazil”..”We are all in this together”.