fajrdrako | Melancholy Baby...

I finished reading the new Robert B Parker novel, Melancholy Baby. It isn't a Spenser story, it's about his female private eye, Sunny Randall. I tend to think that Sunny is simply a female version of Spenser - they're very alike, except that Sunny's love is for art not poetry, and her dog is a pit bull named Rosie. In this story, Sunny is hired by a young woman who believes her parents are not really her parents, and she wants to find out how this could be.

I've heard Parker fans say they don't like the Sunny Randall books nearly as much as the Spenser novels, and though I don't like Sunny quite as much as I like Spenser because she isn't as witty and doesn't quote poetry. I like the books just fine.

But I noticed two things this time.

The first is about mothers and motherhood. I thought this book might better be entitled "Mommie Dearest" because the phrase is used in the book, and basically it is about several appalling mothers. There's the woman who pretended to be young Sarah's mother, who is a self-serving bitch. There is the woman who is really Sarah's mother who is not just a self-servig bitch but a murderer several times over. And there is Sunny's own mother, insensitive and stupid, whom we don't actually see, but a subplot involves Sunny's sessions with her therapist (Susan Silverman) as she tries to resolve her relationships with her parents and her ex-husband.

Now, this book, like all the Parker books, is a crime thriller, and you don't expect crime thrillers to be full of thoroughly nice people. Certainly a lot of men in Parker's books are just as nasty as any of the women could be. But it seems to me also that we have quite a few good fathers - in this book, certainly, there are several - and I can't think offhand of any really nice or admirable mothers in Parker's books. Of course he's written a lot, I can barely remember a fraction of his characters, there's bound to have been a good mother in there somewhere... isn't there?

But thinking on this theme further: of his two female protagonists, neither Sunny Randall nor Susan Silverman have children or want them. Both have dogs whom they love and pamper excessively - doesn't Susan call Pearl "the baby"?

Seems to me that a lot of Parker's writing is autobiographical and even if it isn't, he has some serious motherhood issues he's working out.

The second thing I noticed bothered me somewhat more. Parker makes a point of championing feminist issues, and usually I can't fault him for it - even if I have never liked Susan Silverman much. Strangely enough, I found Susan more palatable here, in the role of rather remote but effective psychotherapist, and there's a cute moment where Sunny speculates on what Susan's boyfriends must be like. She figures he must be a geek. (If anyone is reading this who doesn't read the Spenser books, Susan Silverman's boyfriend is the very-macho, very literate thug, Spenser, about as ungeeklike a figure as anyone could imagine.) The reason I like her better here is that I get to see her through Sunny's more objective eyes, not from Spenser's adoringly worshipful viewpoint.

But a good part of the story here was about Sunny's inability to let go of her lex-husband, whom she left, and whom she divorced, because she couldn't manage to live with him. She loves him, she sleeps with him, she likes him, but she can't or won't live with him. Well, in this book, he marries someone else, and Sunny is devastated. She goes for pyschotherapy to work this out - and good for her - but at the same time she keeps calling him, seeing him, asking him to reassure her that he loves her more than his new wife - she just can't make the adjustment. And he, rotten slob, says he does love her more, which struck me as colossally unfair to the new wife even if it were true. It seems he has no problem forgiving Sunny for her treatment of him. I just wanted to give her a shake and scream, "Stop messing with his head. You don't want him - let him go."

In the pursuit of the case, after resfusing the crude advances of an ugly fat slob, she goes to interview a handsome, successful lawyer, and goes to bed with him. Briefly. Staying all night is too much commitment for her. She feels like bit of a floozy (her word) but this didn't bother me in the least. What bothered me was a few chapters later, when the cute lawyer is murdered. Sunny has no reaction at all. No sorrow, no real surprise, no acknowledgement of any personal connection at all. She doesn't even think of going to his funeral. Now... I have no problem with casual sex, or recreational sex, or two consenting adults who do whatever they want to together on whatever terms they want, but to have no reaction at all when someone you had sex with is murdered only a day or two later - that strikes me as horribly callous. Inhumanly so.

Add to this that it seems crucially important to Sunny that her father should love her more than her mother and her sister - I was beginning to think maybe I didn't like Sunny so much after all.

Another more trivial point: Sunny notices how good Susan Silverman's make-up looks on her, and thinks that she doesn't trust women who don't wear make-up. This thought is so foreign to me that I can't even get my mind around it to assess it. It did raise the thought that while I don't necessarily judge a woman's looks on whether or not she wears make-up, I do think attractive men look really hot in make-up. So why is that? Is it the hint of an androgynous quality, or the fact that it's more unusual? Or something else?