Like a Figure of Speech : A Simile Can Sing in the Deft Hands of a Ross MacDonald or Raymond Chandler

A SIMILE IS A USEFUL literary device. It can adorn a sentence like a jewel adorns a woman’s throat.

It is defined in the dictionary as “a figure of speech in which one thing is likened to another, dissimilar thing by the use of like , as , etc . (“Her tears flowed like wine.”)

Actually, “Her tears flowed like wine” is not a very good simile. One can not really imagine tears either looking like or tasting like wine.

A simile ought to be apt, vivid and felicitous. And it ought to be used sparingly.

What provokes these thoughts is a novel I have just finished that is strewn with similes like land mines. They are not only too many, they are not very good.

In the first brief chapter alone there are at least 15 similes. I might have missed one or two.

First, the author describes a Cadillac limousine as looking “like a sleek and intrepid whale.” Whale is OK, but do we need sleek and intrepid ?

Two paragraphs later he writes that hydrocarbons hang there (over Los Angeles) “like an off-color movie.” Does that mean a movie with bad color or an X-rated movie?

He notes next that the deserted bleachers at Hilltop High School were “brittle and gray, like the parched bones of a skeleton.”

Hilltop High School is evidently Belmont High School, my alma mater, and I never thought of the bleachers, even when empty, as looking like the parched bones of a skeleton.

The next paragraph contains three similes. “When the back door (of the Cadillac) finally opened, it ricocheted like the ball in one of those ball-to-wall sports.” I would have thought the door of a Cadillac limousine would open gently.

In the same paragraph a man uncoils from the car “like a relaxing snake,” and his suit hangs on him “like the loose flesh of the damned.”

To work, a simile must compare its subject with something familiar. “He was as big as an ox.” I can not picture the loose flesh of the damned.

There are four more on that same page, including “The air was as dense as chicken gravy and almost the same color.” Los Angeles smog might be compared with many things, but hardly chicken gravy.

Worse, the author alternately uses as where like is correct: “She felt as an idle spear carrier on the stage of life.”

It is probably the influence of Raymond Chandler that causes so many contemporary novelists to scatter similes through their prose. Chandler might also employ the simile several times in one chapter, but usually they were inventive and graphic, and often funny.

On the first page of “The Big Sleep” Chandler writes: “Beyond the garage were some decorative trees trimmed as carefully as poodle dogs.” An almost perfect simile for topiary trees.

On the next page he writes, “She walked as if she were floating.” Simple and visual. On the same page, “She lowered her lashes . . . and slowly raised them again, like a theater curtain.”

On page four we find these: “They (orchid plants) smelled as powerful as boiling alcohol under a blanket . . . . A few locks of dry white hair clung to his scalp, like wildflowers fighting for life on a bare rock . . . “using his strength as carefully as an out-of-work showgirl uses her last good pair of stockings . . . “he sniffed at it (a puff of cigarette smoke) like a terrier at a rat hole.”

I think Chandler was stretching himself on that page. Few of us have ever smelled alcohol boiling under a blanket. The thing held up for comparison must be something we recognize instantly. An out-of-work showgirl protecting her last pair of stockings, yes. We can’t see it, maybe, but we get the picture.

One of the best writers in the Chandler genre was Ross MacDonald, author of the Lew Archer detective novels. MacDonald himself was a master of the simile, but he, too, could overdo it. I cannot forget one in which he said that the setting sun looked like a Frisbie. The setting sun does not look like a Frisbie. The setting sun looks like nothing else in the world. To compare a setting sun with a Frisbie is to diminish it, and I don’t think that’s what MacDonald intended.

If there is any purpose in this trivial essay, it must be that it gives me a chance to sneak in a simile of my own. It appears in “God and Mr. Gomez,” my book about our house in Baja. In describing Santo Tomas Bay, which our house overlooked, I wrote that a little green fishing boat “lay on the water like a Van Gogh brush stroke.”

Now I like that one, but you will never find it in any compendium of familiar quotations. Which is why I quote it here.

Who is going to give me immortality if not I?