The Goodby People

by Gavin Lambert

First published in 1971, The Goodby People is perhaps the greatest novel ever written about post-Manson, pre-Disney Los Angeles. "His elegant, stripped-down prose caught the last gasp of Old Hollywood in a way that has yet to be rivalled." (Armistead Maupin)

"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 1960 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.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Literary Fiction, Queer, Noir, Adult, LGBT

217 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Gavin Lambert was a British-born screenwriter, novelist and biographer who lived for part of his life in Hollywood. His writing was mainly fiction and nonfiction about the film industry.

Reviews

[Tosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

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. To me, it's a very class-orientated view of Los Angeles - people who were in the film world, or writing. If you're a fan of Eve Babitz or Joan Didion, for sure you need to pick up this book.

[CJ Alberts · Rating 4 out of 5]

really loved this melancholy LA exploration

[Vansa · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 owners. These houses ended up being a magnet for drifters from all over the country, coming to California, to dodge the draft, for the music, or in the hopes of finding themselves. This haunting book captures the zeitgeist of the place evocatively, and manages to avoid all the clichés associated with the Summer of Love. The narrator, like Lambert himself, is a screenplay writer living in LA, and he writes from the perspective of a neutral observer, detached, but not unsympathetic. Lambert achieves this tone perfectly and while he’s completely non-judgmental, he also doesn’t romanticize either Old Hollywood, or flower power. Neither does he take a censorious tone about drug abuse or free love and its attendant complications (mostly for the women). There’s an excellent description of a huge music festival and Lambert doesn’t resort to the usual clichés of peace and love or misbehaving rockstars, he devotes as many pages to the huge traffic snarls to reach the place ( a more innocent time, when nobody realized what vehicular emissions were doing to the environment)! This was a period just before widespread civil rights agitations and anti-war protests, and Lambert’s writing concerns itself with the kids who wanted to leave their small towns and experience a more liberal milieu, but were hampered by real world considerations of basic food and shelter. The idea of communes where everything was shared and people were looked after, didn’t work at all in reality, with more than a few devolving into small cults, with the self-proclaimed leaders justifying theft and sexual predation as emblematic of the times. In one particularly memorable line, Lambert writes, “surely there has to be a halfway house between high school and Haight-Ashbury”.
You tend to think of Golden Age Hollywood as so distant in time, and the Summer of Love as completely modern, but of course there was a period of time when the participants of both were in California! While the book has 3 sections, and 3 main characters Lambert’s narrator interacts with, the protagonist of the book really is LA, and the uneasy mélange it is of desert, wildlife, hills, mountains and stardom. All resting along a faultline and restless tectonic plates. The title captures it perfectly-it’s a place you find yourself in when you’re looking for something, but you do eventually bid it goodbye.

[Gohnar23 · Rating 4 out of 5]

#️⃣5️⃣2️⃣8️⃣ Read & Reviewed in 2025 🍩🧁
Date : 🗓️ Wednesday, October 1, 2025 🎁💐🍝
Word Count📃: 63k Words 🎉🍬✨

— !! 𖦹「 ✦ 🍪 Happy Birthday🎂 ✦ 」✮ ⋆ ˚｡𖦹 ⋆｡°✩

My 3rd read in "IT'S MY BIRTHDAY MONTH!!! :DDDD 👏🍭🍨" October.

4️⃣🌟, it's not very unique but it's still fun to read
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I don't know what this is called what this is definitely not a memoir but it's kinda like it. It's a fictionalized real person, like we are in the lens of a narrator that is like the author themselves, idk. But one thing for sure this book is gooddddddd. It is essentially just someone going through the streets of LA, meeting three different people and looking past their lives and all of their stories. So basically this is kinda like a short story collection? But its more connected to each other since this is a story about this narrator wh gets to meet these three people. I would say that the stories of them even though it's kinda typical are great. A wife losing her husband, bisexuality and and comparing yourself to someone famous. But the best out of all of the three stories is the story of Gary because it's the one that is most personal to the narrator and the one where the character gets to connect to the narrator the most. They almost got into a relationship because of it. So this whole three in one has many things to offer and likewise, many messaging and discussion to emotional support to personal subjects.

[Andrei Alupului · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was en route to California when I got sidelined by New York. I was off to make it in the movie "biz." Something came my way in my supposedly favorite place on Earth and I snapped it up.

Thing is, I've been feeling lately, even before I moved to this city, that maybe I'm more of a California guy at heart. There's something cold about this city and it feels like when you're sad here, when anyone's sad here, it's steeped in coldness and solitude. California sadness is always a sort of bittersweet feeling.

It's tough to reconcile that sadness with the sunshine and the palms. It can be lonely, it can even be nihilistic, but there's always a tinge of uplift and hope to it - even when you're resigned, you're resigned to the most beautiful landscapes we've got.

I'm probably simplifying things a bit. It's easy to shoehorn one place in order to shoehorn another, but it's meaningless. I've felt pretty warm in this place, before, too. Either way, if you know what I'm talking about when I talk about that California melancholy, here's a book that lives perfectly within that feeling and that does a pretty good job of articulating why I feel occasional pangs of regret for having gotten sidelined.

[Andy · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 game, Malibu-style. Lambert goes for pathos but this woman is an asshole.

The next profile's similar, only it's about a quasi-Jim Morrison hustler who's so stuck on himself and his propensity for using people. Lambert again makes the hustler's voice crack sadly on the beach while he confesses he lives for the high of making people want him.

The next profile is about a stupid hippie girl who imagines she has visitations by a shallow, vapid reclusive actress. The story aims for mystery but everybody is so idiotic you wonder why anybody would care.

Lambert did this kind of story much better in The Slide Area. Creepy Hollywood types can be compelling if they're fascinating - here they're just boring. They're the most unsavory people I've read in a book in a long time. And doesn't it suck that he dedicated his worst book to Natalie Wood. Ouch.

[Jerry · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel felt like three linked novellas; each of the three sections was of varying quality and appeal. I found the middle section, about a bisexual hippie named Gary Carson, to be the most interesting (in part due to the instability of his life and the fluctuations of his fortunes). But the first section, about a self-absorbed widow named Susan Ross, was so aggravating that I came close to a bonding the entire book. The last section was something of a denouement in that it combined some of the grit of the second section with some of the glamour of the first section (mixed with a tad of magic realism).

The book is likely semi-autographical; the nameless narrator shares some of the traits of the author. But the narrator rarely comes into focus, and passes through the novel like an observer of the highest and lowest rungs of Los Angeles society circa 1970. Oddly, the narrator- and the novel overall- faintly reminded me of Joan Didion’s Play it as it Lays; both books feature hippie-era Southern California as a kind of character in itself, full of vapidity and utterly lacking in meaningful human connections.

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 surface glamour that makes SoCa so endlessly beguiling, while also inferring the emotional quicksand pits suspended just beneath. Not long after I happened to revisit Chinatown, made several years later, & was struck in how in sync the two felt.

Now must read more by Lambert.

"For a while Susan and I stayed out of touch with each other. This meant nothing except that we were both living in Southern California and, as the saying goes, in different worlds. There are so many different worlds here, separated by distances of twenty or thirty miles, that people live in tribes rather than as a community. The world outside is something you see from a car."

[Matt Hancock · Rating 5 out of 5]

In my minds eye, this novel very much lives in the same world as Joan Didion’s early depictions of Los Angeles and Robert Altman’s adaptation of The Long Goodbye. Post-Manson Los Angeles gripped by the fallout of 1960s idealism, told by Lambert in all of its glorious glamour and decay.

[Christina E · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did not like any of the characters in the book … but it was well written! Kinda like Uncut Gems…. But Gatsby vibes … but LA version

[matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5

[Dean · Rating 4 out of 5]

I will defer here to Christopher Fowler, who has written the following review (excerpted) of this deceptively simple, deceptively complex, novel - a series of three character studies - about Southern California circa 1971. I should add that while reading this book I often felt as though Joan Didion was looking over my shoulder.

˜The Goodbye People" isn’t an industry novel; its characters only brush against the film world, but their lives are affected by the dreamlike hedonism that wafts temptingly around them. The people of Southern California are presented as separate tribes that only cross paths when their chieftains visit each other during festivals, and the world outside is something you see from a car.

Susan is left wealthy by the death of her film producer husband, and adopts a lifestyle of self-improvement that insulates her from virtually all human contact. She learns several languages, but has nobody to talk to. "I've come to realize," she explains, "the mind can achieve anything so long as reality doesn't get in its way." She mouths platitudes from books designed to increase her sensitivity, but impulsively tries to take her own life. She's fond of describing her new awareness in cringe-making hippy terminology, but can't see that she's moving toward good old-fashioned self-destruction. Gary is younger and more pragmatic, dodging the draft, sleeping around, aware of the power of his sexuality, using it on both sexes with a shamelessness that catches the charm of youth. He needs to be found irresistible, and can't love because he can't imagine himself being loved. Lambert's characters are narcissistic, selfish and manipulative. They are forever changing their addresses and phone numbers, but can't decide who they're running from. They create a culture of loneliness that prevents them from ever achieving anything. Gary explains that he doesn't read books because the characters always get somewhere, and this frustrates him. "Isn't that the trouble with most books?" he asks. "They look so good on paper."

Lora, the third character, is little more than a phantom, a forgotten actress whose celluloid presence exists at the edge of other people's memories. The narrator linking these three lives is a screenwriter who acts as their confidante. Susan uses him as an emotional sop, Gary for sex and a sense of belonging. For Gary, youth briefly holds the excitement of discovery; a surreal rock concert, a death-soaked LSD trip, awkward self-questioning. But he drifts away to a grim commune and starvation-level existence, losing the one commodity that made others love him; his easy charisma dies in the panic for survival. ˜When time's running out," notes Gary, "you get a touch of the fever."

For Susan, pushing forty, life has dried out into an arid wasteland. You sense they all feel they will cease to exist if they are no longer found attractive. The answer, of course, is to grow up by taking responsibility, but this is something that Hollywood prevents them from doing. She and Gary play at being doomed until they fail to realize that they aren't playing anymore. The book ends after an orgy, and a young girl emerging from a pool in morning light. "Is there anyone you should call?" asks the host, "anyone who'll be wondering where you are?" "No, there's no-one in the world" she replies.

The writing is spare and non-judgmental, which makes Lambert's style so modern that flower-power phrases feel awkward – as awkward as they must have felt in the mouths of the middle-aged Hollywoodites press-ganged into using them for fear of losing their edge. Lambert is less concerned with plotting, which is as arbitrary as the weekend plans of his cast, and more interested in pinning on the page characters who possess powers of attraction like gravity, natural and immediate. Lambert was in a position to know his world. He wrote the screenplays for "Sons And Lovers" and "The Roman Spring Of Mrs. Stone," and was twice nominated for Academy Awards. "The Goodbye People" is his dark glory, melancholic, becalmed and effortlessly resonant. Its greatest strength is its delineation of a town that disfigures all with its luxurious blankness. What disturbs most is the thought that Lambert's studies of lost lives are more accurate today than ever before.

[Antonio Depietro · Rating 4 out of 5]

An incredible little book that takes 3 seperate stories -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 . . .- and make them whole. These people who inhabit this portrait of Southern California at the end of the 60s.. Yet the stories seem so relevant to today.
I must give credit to the Jason Diamond newsletter "The Melt".

[Marin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly beautiful novel- reminiscent of the golden age of Hollywood, but lost in time as each character’s story becomes more haunting and lonely.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

[Grayson Dunst · Rating 3 out of 5]

very eve babitz vibes. i thought this was fine, kind of left me with a little haunting feeling weirdly. spooky

[E · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked the prose. The first two sections were stronger than the last. Somber, nostalgic and beautiful. Makes me want to read more by Gavin Lambert

[Talia Pomp · Rating 4 out of 5]

This guy would write a great chapter about the main character from play it as it lays

[talia ♡ · Rating 4 out of 5]

there is nothing quite like southern california melancholy...

[Stefani · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gavin Lambert skillfully captures the zeitgeist of late '60's Southern California with its suffocating sense of ennui and aimlessness betraying the promise of perpetually sunny skies and easy living. The reader is introduced to three characters, each with their own chapter: a draft dodger/drifter that reminded me of Joe Buck from Midnight Cowboy and two has-been actresses. All are alive in the sense they live and breathe, but their presence seems as flimsy and ephemeral as youth or fame. Unconnected to a particular place or job, they drift in and out of the author's life, disconnected phones and abandoned homes often announcing their departure to another location or plane of existence. They dabble in drugs, cults, and Jungian philosophy, but never quite inhabit any of these movements with enough vigor to allow it to seep into their conscious; they are perpetually in search of greater meaning and purpose as it continues to elude them. I'm reminded of Joan Didion's Play it As it Lays— a novel I truly hated, by the way — but The Goodbye People is far less mired in existential hell. Lambert does treat his subjects humanely, and less as nihilist casualties of the failed post-counterculture movement. Though I realize the reviews for this book have been less-then-enthusiastic, I appreciated the insider's look at Hollywood's fickle nature and brutal culling of actresses whose stars have dimmed. There's a poignant sense of melancholy and sadness that infuses the entire novel, a grim realization that physical beauty does not determine destiny, that actresses without a hit movie are often remembered in the worst possible light, if they're remembered at all.

I fell into thinking of Susan as someone in my past. I suppose that was part of her character, too. In a life with many gaps and flights and farewells, two or three months than pass and the silence is unbroken and the phone number is changed yet again, and maybe she's gone forever this time because she was so seldom here.

[nathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

READING VLOG

If you were ever curious about the backdrops of all of the parties attended by Eve Babitz. Martinis with sex in the air. Bi men and crazed women.

I can't help but think of Isherwood's 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘞𝘰𝘳𝘭𝘥 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘌𝘷𝘦𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨, specifically the party scenes, but they lose me in their jejune details. Perhaps too much melancholy, which lead me to DNF it. But I might pick it back up when I return to LA.

I bring up Isherwood because he blurbs the book: "These are the most truthful stories about the film world and its suburbia I have ever read. Gavin Lambert knows and loves what he describes; he neither sneers nor sentimentalizes nor cries sour grapes."

But the difference between Isherwood and Lambert (both British-born LA transplants) is that Isherwood is jejune and Lambert is blase. Lambert is blase in the Cuskian sense. There's so much heart in his characters where, either post-coital or post-whiskey, they will turn themselves into talking heads of sincerity. There's heart in these character, and they mean every last inch of their words, their breaths. And then they are gone. They are the very essence of LA if you've ever been to those parties in the Hollywood Hills. People you meet in an instant yet forget a moment later, but there is a profundity. Their words, their sorrows. Their dreams, their desires. All wrapped up in these lonesome bodies seeking meaning through connection.

Lambert asks us to examine the ways in which we connect, in how we shed shields to invite intimacy in.

[Emma Grayson · Rating 4 out of 5]

book 7

immediately feeling a sense of melancholy - especially after just coming off Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, for that old-world Hollywood glamour during the second half of the 20th-century

…”that airs of joylessness which surrounds so many rich, powerful and clever people that makes then truly dangerous. They want you to know they’re lonely and vulnerable underneath it all. I’m afraid it was this quality that attracted Susan, for she could talk in the same way about the loneliness of being beautiful. They held in to each other because they saw themselves as two people who had everything and nothing.” p 13

but i hate the idea that my face is my fortune. It’s pretty insulting to the rest of me. p 90

lambert has a feminine-like way of writing that is earnest and frank at the same time

three separate true stories of his time with aimless characters in CA, starting with melancholy model Susan Ross then detailing wistful draft dodger, Gary Carson, then Lora Chase with small ties between each story connecting these characters in Gavin’s mind

“I suspect that for him (Gary) any relationship is a contest from which he had to emerge the winner. It’s his only way if not admitting that people really intimidate him.” p 113

“…the great thing about being a guest is, you’re bound to win one way or the other. Either they’re happy to see you arrive or happy to see you go.” p 130

Emerson said a weed is only a plant whose virtues haven’t been discovered yet

nothing, however beautiful is permanent p 166

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed this snapshot of people living in the shadow of the California dream of the 1960s. Three separate but interconnected novellas each starring a different self-absorbed object of the narrator’s interest. Beautiful, clear writing and sense of place is maintained throughout, and when the lines are good they’re fantastic.

Rings a little hollow at its core which is often the point, though it sometimes shies away from the marrow of a situation, the narrator having a little too cool a distance from people he is otherwise transfixed by. “I didn’t want to argue, to wonder whether he was really free or just possessed by something new.” I could say the same for the narrator, but I doubt he had any illusions about his freedom.

[Jeremy Hurd-McKenney · Rating 3 out of 5]

Closer to 3 1/2 stars--the prose was beautiful, although definitely of its time. Laid out in three loosely connected acts, I found myself hating this at first. The character of Susan was so self-centered an unappealing that I was glad when that section ended. It wasn't until I was halfway through the second act and found myself hating Gary as well that I realized that was the whole point of the book--vignettes of the people that float into your life, suck up your time/energy/money while offering nothing in return, then vanishing from your existence just as quickly as they came. After I figured that out, I quite enjoyed the back half.

[Kc · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is set in the Hollywood of 1971, between the end of the studio system and the beginnings of the new, de-centralized power structures. The story perfectly captures the zeitgeist of that time, with its cast of old Hollywood castoffs and young people trying to make their way in the new movie and television industry. It's structured in three related long stories, tied together by a common narrator, a writer whose career started in the studio system and who is also looking for a place to stand in this radically shifting world. An insightful and haunting view of this time and place.

[Burt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Edward R. Hamilton had a remainder copy of The Goodby People, so I bought it. When I came down with the flu and was relegated to camping on the sofa, I read all 217 of its pages in a day.

The book is about three of Los Angeles’ “beautiful people” (or “jet set,” if you prefer). Lambert had a gift for describing people and settings. He excels at both in the Goodby People. But the book just spins its wheels - nothing ever happens.

Lambert had a talent for prose and perhaps he wrote better books. But I can’t recommend The Goodby People.

[CJM · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a more than worthy addition to a shelf of Books that chart the blasted psychological landscape of Los Angeles—a space that might include Nathaniel West, Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald, Eve Babitz, Bruce Wagner, Mike Davis, and, of course, the Queen of SoCal existential dread, Joan Didion. Lambert’s prose is direct, unsentimental, and profound. His descriptors and metaphors are never strained or over calculated. Highly recommended if you like this sort of thing, which I do

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

"He stood aside for me with a low, ironic bow. The moment turned into something else, as solitary remembered fragment of a dream. It was as if I'd just wakened up haunted by it, wondering how I'd arrived as this clear, vaguely scented darkness, why Gary wanted me to look through his telescope, and knowing it was somehow a gesture of farewell."

[Courtland Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Haunting tale of the lives of Los Angeles suburbanites in their post-Hollywood lives. First few characters are wildly intoxicating. Last character and chapter took book off an understandable but weakly-linked sojourn. I wish there’d been a few more chapters and characters in the middle — which may indicate how much I enjoyed reading this.

[Anthony Holliday · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 I enjoyed the writing and less so the characters. The book was less a cohesive story and more a loosely threaded short story collection. That being said it was interesting at times. I understand why people liken it to Joan Didion and Eve Babitz but I enjoyed this slightly less. To me it was more reminiscent of the feeling you get when looking at a Hockney painting.