Wanted Man – by Lee Child, $27.95 HC / $13.99 E
Creative writing professors have been stuck on James Joyce for too long. I think a hundred years of exaltation is plenty for a dead guy. Professors who want to be relevant in the 21st Century should start teaching Lee Child. Where Joyce challenged the status quo and overturned dogma, his stories were aimed at a less educated, less traveled, largely agrarian society. Everyone had firsthand experience with all four riders of the apocalypse: pestilence, war, famine and death. The world is a different place.
Modern Americans and Europeans live in safer world. Our concerns about mortality are focused on dodging the Alzheimer’s bullet before ninety. We need a different type of literature to excite a different set of senses. We crave literature that takes us on a joy ride and leaves us both thrilled and somewhat better educated for the time we spent reading it.
We want literature that respects and honors our ten thousand-year-old fascination with heroism as much as it gives us the heebie-jeebies. We need it delivered in the no-nonsense, time-is-money, instant-gratification vernacular of our time.
We need literature about pragmatic hitchhikers like this guy:
…he walked under the bridge and set up on the eastbound ramp, one foot on the shoulder and one in the traffic lane, and he stuck out his thumb and smiled and tried to look friendly.
Reacher was a big man, six feet five inches tall, heavily built, and that night as always he looked a little ragged and unkempt. Lonely drivers wanted pleasant and unthreatening company, and Reacher knew from long experience that visually he was no one’s first choice of companion. Too intimidating. And right then he was further handicapped by a freshly broken nose. He had patched the injury with a length of silver duct tape, which he knew must make him look even more grotesque. He knew the tape must be shining and glittering in the yellow light. But he felt the tape was helping him medically, so he decided to keep it in place for the first hour. If he didn’t get a ride inside sixty minutes, he would consider peeling it off.
There, I’ve cut the quote off early and spared you the gruesome details of the tape peel. You owe me.
Mr. Child sets the bar for literature in our time. Not because he sets a new standard for literary descriptions of common concepts delivered from new and unique perspectives. Not because it gives us ground breaking insights into interpersonal relationships and the intense longing inherent in our beings. Not because it defines man’s inhumanity to man–or any of that other philosophical navel-gazing crap. (And yet, all those things are in this book.)
What makes Lee Child’s writing unique and worthy of collegiate study? Purity of Story. Nothing in Mr. Child’s works interferes with the story. No extraneous subplots, no unnecessary background, no diversions, no red herrings, only the details that deal with murder of an American citizen in America’s heartland. Every writer working today can read Mr. Child’s work and learning something about the craft. I’ve read all seventeen books and learned something each time. (Stop laughing, I had a lot more learn than most.) His writing is so engrossing that even when we attempt to study a specific passage, we get caught up in the story and read right through it and keep going because we’re on a rollercoaster and loving it. Like the passage below that creates plenty of tension from the minute details of a car ride:
Reacher’s eyes were closed and his nose wasn’t working, so taste and touch and hearing were taking up the sensory slack. He could taste copper and iron in his mouth, where blood was leaking down the back of his throat. He could feel the rear bench’s mouse-fur upholstery under his right hand fingertips, synthetic and dense and microscopically harsh. His left hand was in his lap, and he could feel the rough cotton of his pants, thick and fibrous and still slick with the manufacturer’s pre-wash treatments. He could hear the loud zing of concrete sections under the tires, and the hum of the motor, and the whine of its drive belts, and the rush of air against the windshield pillars and the door mirrors. He could hear the give and take of seat springs as he and the others floated small quarter-inches with the ride. He could hear Don McQueen breathing slow and controlled as he concentrated, and Karen Delfuenso a little anxious, and Alan King changing to a shorter, sharper rhythm. The guy was thinking about something. He was coming up to a decision. Reacher heard the scrape of cloth against a wrist. The guy was checking his watch.
Stop begging. That’s all you get. Just read the book.
Equally worthy of study are the puzzles Mr. Child includes in the opening of each book. The author opens with inane details like those above and reveals them as important and something you should have recognized. Almost as if he were tweaking our noses. The hero solves a few minor mysteries for you right away. This exercise serves to make the reader understand how smart the hero is and why we should trust him with the next ten hours of our lives. His established expertise allows us submit to the fiction. Reader submission is a key component of a good read. If we refuse to submit, we abandon the book. In this book, we see some mundane oddities early on that strike us as odd without knowing why they strike us as odd. Why is the water cold? Why matching shirts? What’s with the gas gauge? And then Mr. Child exposes the reasons to the reader through the mental observations of the hero. And we are amazed. The revelations start like this:
There was no element of self-aggrandizement in what he was saying. The guy wasn’t making himself bigger or better or smarter or sexier. He was telling stupid, trivial, technical lies for no clear reason at all.
Until the passage above, we were unaware that there were any lies. In the next passage, we understand how important the lies are, and from there on we can’t put the book down.
But wait. There’s more. In 17th Jack Reacher novel, Wanted Man, fans are treated to the fun side of Jack Reacher. A refreshing side. He has a sense of humor:
Then the phone rang in the office and the guy ducked back in to answer it. He came straight back out and said, “It’s the FBI, for the man with the broken nose. That would be you, I suppose.”
Reacher said, “Pretty soon it could be either one of us, if you don’t stop yapping at me.”
There are many other ‘Gems of Jack’ that make longtime readers laugh. But don’t think it’s a comedy. Far from it. This is a serious book with serious and puzzling clues. What gets interesting is figuring out which bad guy is which and why. Guarantee you won’t know until you find the Bible. (Not a spoiler, just a reference point.)
Some reviewers like to poke holes in the plots of thrillers. I’m not one of those. If I were to read a Star Wars book, I would first believe in light sabers. If I were to read a Harry Potter book (no, I’ve not. Let it go.) I would believe in Hogwarts. The bad guys in this story stretched my ability to just-go-with-it, but not to the breaking point. I was able to put aside my WTF? and enjoy the novel. That said, part of me thought the bad-guys’ raison d’etre might have been part of a joke on the reader. If it was, then it was clever. If not. Hmm. Well. Yeah, there could be light sabers out there somewhere. Probably.
Bottom line: if you are shopping for an MFA and there is no mention of class that deconstructs Lee Child, keep looking. In the meantime, buy Wanted Man and read it twice. Read it the first time for a great story about an all American hero (told by a transplanted Englishman, naturally). Read it the second time to appreciate the new standards for American literature.
Peace, Seeley James
Special NOTE: Stories about the many fake, sock-puppet, or straw-man reviews have been making the news lately. MY REVIEWS ARE MY REACTIONS TO THE BOOKS I’VE READ. I have no relationship, financial or familial, with the authors. I do not expect, but would not refuse, any reciprocal reviews or recommendations. Just sayin.
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