Machan's Musings - Parker’s Stumble into Stereotyping
by Tibor R. Machan
Over the years I have read nearly every novel written by Robert B. Parker, famous, mainly, for his Spenser PI books. And I have liked them. His writing, first of all, is neat, sharp—no nonsense. His character, Spenser, is tough and teaming with integrity. Spenser’s a great cook, drinks properly, and has an ideal love life with Susan, a Harvard educated shrink who claims Spenser’s a great lover. His close buddy Hawk is a friend in the Aristotelian tradition of friendship, nothing less.
One great ingredient of these books for me is, oddly, the absence of something so often found in such works, namely, stereotyping. I am thinking of, for instance, John Grisham, who deploys types a lot. As do many others. Parker has eschewed them, in the main, until Bad Business, his penultimate Spenser book.
I confess I was saddened by the fact that Parker allowed himself a conventional vice I most despise, business-bashing. Bad Business revolves around an Enron-type story and it is pretty good, incidentally, at making that company’s shenanigans clear and plain to the reader. Of course, there is the violent crime angle and that’s good—you expect this from Parker’s Spenser novels (although he is quite capable of writing good fiction that has none of it at all). But he also permits himself this time to give some of his favorite characters some stupid remarks, like when Susan asserts, with no rhyme or reason supporting it, that all of "corporate America" is like the Enron-like company in the novel. Indeed, suits are all treated as shallow, greedy, obsessive robots, without a soul.
My son tells me I am too sensitive and allow this little thing to ruin movies, TV shows, and books for me. But someone has to take note: Dissing business is no less prejudiced than dissing farming or the sciences or art. People in all these can go bad but it should not color one’s view of others in the field.
This is especially irksome to me because I am sharply aware of how closely tied Parker is to big business—indeed, his several series have themselves spawned what could be considered big businesses. Certainly his publishers are big business. (And he even has his own film corporation, I learned, named after his dog.) So his caving into this politically correct business-bashing is disappointing.
I routinely try hard to disabuse my own students of the habit of stereotyping. Sure some—even many—priests have turned out to be pedophiles; doesn’t mean they all are. Many professors abuse their teaching profession by becoming advocates, even indoctrinators, in their class rooms. But certainly this doesn’t suffice to make university teaching a crooked profession and everyone in it—in "higher education America"—a quack.
But business isn’t given a fair shake. Sure, it has its villains, just as medicine or education or science. But there is a serious, deep-seated prejudice many folks in the humanities—remember Parker is a Boston University PhD in English literature—have against this profession. Why?
Well, business is certainly explicitly concerned with wealth—I call it the wealth care profession. And wealth has been under assault from many sides. Religions have tended to demean wealth making a lot, what with the idea, for example, that seeking profit and saving one’s soul are not quite compatible. (Jesus never got violent other than when the money lenders abused the Temple, though one may be sure other misdeed were aplenty on those grounds as well.) The intellectuals, starting at least with Socrates and Plato, felt people focusing on wealth creation didn’t have their priorities straight—indeed, were morally shallow (even though the two sages never said the same thing about soldiers or carpenters). Somehow, because people in business do not flaunt their mindfulness, the spiritedness of their tasks, they get a bad reputation. It is clear from how they are depicted by playwrights, such as the recently deceased Arthur Miller.
But in the case of Parker it may have been just a tiny stumble. His next book, Cold Service, is back on track, dealing mainly with unique individual characters. Even some of those from an Eastern European ethnic group are not made to stand in for all members, which is exactly as it should be.
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