Kirk's Reviews > The Big Fix

UPDATE: Reading a passage in Nolan's bio about Roger Simon's friendship with Ross Macdonald made me think I ought to review Simon's The Big Fix. Lo and behold I already had two and a half years ago. Whoops---but hey, at least I remember what happens in the book. And it's a nice opportunity to repost in case anybody's looking for a quick, fun throwback. Honestly, this is sorta proto-Inherent Vice.

Original Rev:

Just by a fluke I happened to remember that I'd seen the movie adaptation of The Big Fix about 30 years ago (when I was but a peewee) and liking its take on the 60s, especially the seen in which Moses Vine gets emotional over film of anti-war protestors singing "Give Peace a Chance." Strikingly, the movie is not available on DVD, so I decided on a whim to track down the original novel. My 1973 first edition has a different cover than the reprint here---much more period, with a Jewfro'd Moses taking a hit off a doobie (remember that archaism?) and a femme fatale lurking in the background. I plowed through the book in a single night of insomnia. It's a fun, fast read, though, inevitably, a bit dated: the major plot circles around the search for an Abbie Hoffman-like radical who's gone underground. (Murray F. Abraham played him in the flick, while Richard Dreyfuss---in his pre-asshole phase---made for a great Moses Vine). The book is pretty harsh on Hoffman-style leftists, lampooning their pretentions, so in retrospect the book can seem a tad ungenerous considering the good Hoffman did in the years between he turned himself in in '81 and his suicide seven or eight years later. (I heard him lecture at Mizzou in 83 when I was a freshman and thought he was cool). That said, Roger Simon manages to blend Raymond Chandler and 70s ennui in a thoroughly enjoyable way in this story of political intrigue---if you ever wondered what it'd be like if Philip Marlowe solved crimes with the help of a hash-pipe, this period piece will show you.