America Is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer CultureErikDussere. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Abstract

Is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture Erik Dussere. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.Erik Dussere's Is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture, winner of the 2014 Edgar Award for Best Critical/Biographical Work, examines literary and cinematic noir from the 1940s to the present in terms of the confrontation it stages between two versions of America (4), one defined by consumer culture and the other in opposition to it. According to Dussere, it is this animating ideological core (185), rather than specific set of visual and narrative conventions, that gives the category of noir coherence.The study opens with an analysis of postwar hardboiled fiction and film noir that sets up this tension between consumer culture and authenticity. A section on Raymond Chandler examines how the hardboiled detective hero comes to embody an ideal of American authenticity: classless, solitary, and autonomous. This figure stands outside of mainstream consumer society, sardonically observing its degradations.The book's examination of cinematic postwar noir focuses especially on visual representations of confrontation between commerce and authenticity. For example, in his analysis of the iconic Jerry's Market scenes in Double Indemnity, the supermarket functions as synecdoche for American consumer culture, its blandness serving as counterpoint to the deviant, exciting lives of the story's criminal protagonists.Dussere continues to track this opposition between mainstream consumerism and marginalized authenticity through conspiracy texts of the Sixties and Seventies, where the investigator protagonists of thrillers such as The Parallax View are rendered ineffectual witnesses to pervasive corruption. He distinguishes these conspiracy narratives from those of Pynchon's California trilogy, beginning with The Crying of Lot 49, which retains the idea of an authentic American elsewhere-one that lurks just beneath society's surfaces, that is populated by those who define themselves in opposition to mainstream America, and that Pynchon aligns with a homegrown Left tradition (133).The book continues its exploration of this Two Americas model (161) with comparison of Sam Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat by the Door and Chester Himes's Plan B, in which the black ghetto, existing apart from the suburban mainstream, is figured as an alternative space that concentrates black frustration (174). …