The Goodby People, Gavin Lambert
The Goodby People, Gavin Lambert
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

The Goodby People

Author: Gavin Lambert

Narrator: Philip Battley

Unabridged: 6 hr 49 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 01/28/2025


Synopsis

First published in 1971, The Goodby People is perhaps the greatest novel ever written about post-Manson, pre-Disney Los Angeles.

"The bisexual draft dodger living on the skids, the glamorous young widow in search of enlightenment, the skinny gamine from out of town who wants to make it in the movies . . ."* These are the people who inhabit Gavin Lambert's mordant portrait of Southern California at the end of the 1960s: forever swapping addresses, lovers, and dreams. They live in extraordinary, suffocating wealth; or else flirting with a Mansonesque cult; or else in a fantasy where golden-age actresses make ghostly visitations to comment on their daily life. All that binds them together is their common sense of aimlessness—and the clear, judgment-free eye of a British author trying his best to be a friend to each.

Cool, incisive, yet essentially kind, and very much ahead of its time, The Goodby People unfolds "in the yawning chasm between real life in Los Angeles and the fantasies manufactured by its dominant business" (*Gary Indiana), and stands as Gavin Lambert's masterpiece.

Contains mature themes.

About Gavin Lambert

Gavin Lambert was
born and educated in England. He is the author of both biographies and novels,
including Inside Daisy Clover and The Goodbye People. His screenplays
include The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
starring Warren Beatty and Vivien Leigh, Inside
Daisy Clover starring Robert Redford and Natalie Wood, the Oscar-nominated Sons and Lovers, and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.
Lambert lived in Tangier from 1974 to 1988 and presently lives in Los Angeles.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Tosh on August 22, 2022

Not a perfect novel by any means, but when it's good, it's really good. Basically, three sections/chapters and the middle section (Chapter 2) are the best. What is interesting is that the book was written during the heights (or lows) of the Manson world, and it captures that creepy vibe of its times......more

Goodreads review by CJ on November 29, 2022

really loved this melancholy LA exploration......more

Goodreads review by Vansa on November 12, 2022

LA in the 60s was peopled by the ghosts of Hollywood past trying to come to terms with changing tastes and mores-large derelict soundstages, elaborate sets recreating everything, from Eden to Babylon and large mansions in the hills, many of them unoccupied and forgotten, a fate shared by their owner......more

Goodreads review by Andy on February 25, 2023

This was easily my least favorite of Gavin Lambert's Hollywood novels. The Goodbye People is a triad of stories profiling three lost souls. The first, a very indulgent and selfish rich woman who chronically disappears in the hope her friends keep trying to find her, a sort of adult Hide and Seek gam......more

Goodreads review by Jesse on October 28, 2024

A vibe. Or, rather, a quite excellent encapsulation of the vibes of a particular place (Los Angeles) during a specific moment in time (early 1970s). Lambert's polished, carefully detached narrational style, smooth as the ice that sparkles & clinks quietly in a gin & tonic, conjures the brittle surfa......more