by Andy Martin
I had a feeling that Make Me wasn’t going to be a hymn of praise to that little farmhouse on the prairie. Not one with a backhoe, anyhow.
Lee went and sat back down again, finally running out of steam. He settled himself back in the chair and put his feet back up on the desk, crossed them, and gazed fondly at the screen.
“I’m feeling good about it. I think it works in and of itself. It’s not overlong. And it gets you going. I wish I knew more. But it raises some great questions.” It was something he had written for the “Draft” column of The New York Times in 2012, under the heading “A Simple Way to Create Suspense.” “Ask or imply a question at the beginning of the story”—and then…“delay the answer.” It was easy for Lee to delay, because he really didn’t know the answer. “Who is Keever? Why is he dead? What happened? This is what we want to know. The questions are there. Yes, I’m feeling good at the moment.”
He nodded to himself, by way of assent to his own statement. And then he added a qualification. “But also I’m feeling a bit challenged by the next scene. What is Reacher even doing there? How come he’s getting off the train anyway? Why here?”
Clearly Reacher has been doing nothing of great import before the book starts up. Just roaming about, no dramas. When he steps down off that train he is reentering the world of action, that realm in which things happen and must be reported on. Lee didn’t feel the need to keep tabs on the quiescent Reacher, his well-behaved, decent citizen, peace-loving twin. “Look at Robert De Niro being Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull. Classic method acting. He had to be Jake. Just as there are method actors, so too there are method writers. They will write out whole bios and calendars for their characters and pin them up on the wall.”
I glanced at the walls of his office. They were blissfully devoid of little bits of paper stuck to the plaster.
“A lot of readers come up to me and say—or send me emails and say—‘How come Reacher gets into all this mayhem all the time? Can there be that much drama in these little towns?’ You could do ‘Waiting for Reacher,’ but I’m not into that.”
He had seen Waiting for Godot about “forty times,” he reckoned. (“Forty!?” “Thirty-nine maybe.”) He denounced a recent production involving Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen. It was too local, too Northern, and they weren’t really trying. Self-indulgent. I said something about Hamlet, about how not much happened for long periods, it was all anticipation and retrospective on things that really had happened off. Lee didn’t fully approve of Hamlet either. Self-indulgent. Too long. Were they paid by the minute? “Only Macbeth would you leave alone. All the others you would want to speed up. I hate these Richard IIIs which are supposed to be authentic and they’re just too long and slow.”
He wasn’t overly enthusiastic about the comedy in Shakespeare either. “It’s just not funny enough.”
I asked, “Do you ever want a comic touch in your books?”
“Of course Reacher has more in the way of sardonic humor than he is given credit for. But I’m allergic to comic thrillers. We’re talking about killing here. That doesn’t seem like the right place for a lot of humor. There are moments—when Reacher leaves a body in the trunk of a car for the rest of the gang to find.”
“Classic Reacher sense of humor.”
“But I’m not going out of my way to try and be funny. Look…” He scanned the screen. “ ‘Only one thing went wrong…’ That is almost funny. It’s wry.”
He kept on contemplating what he had written. “It indirectly involves Reacher. The train is Reacher. Another big guy—as you say, an alternative to Keever.”
“As big as a silo.”
All this talk of size brought us around to the subject of how much he hadn’t written exactly. On that particular day. We understood—it was implicit—that it was all about the quality not the quantity. On the other hand Lee liked to crank it out, if possible. Steadily. Day by day.
“So is that the first page, then?”
“It’s two pages—of a book. Five hundred words. Half a percent of a book. On day one. That’s not bad. On a good day, fairly relaxed, I can do fifteen hundred words.” Lee liked to use the word “efficient” or “efficiency” in relation to his work. “The efficiency is severely hampered by not knowing what’s coming next. So it’s inefficient. But it’s efficient because I don’t do revisions.”
“Not at all?”
“Not much. And I certainly don’t let other people do revisions for me.” Which started him off on another of his rants. “Look at this word,” he says. “Waterbed. Or nothingness or whatever. Barring catastrophe or the end of the world, I know that this will be published, and in this form. Waterbed will remain. Right there, where I’ve put it. So I care about that word. In the movies, it’s a completely unreal feeling. How can you care about this word or that one—because you know it’s not going to be there further down the line. A lot of other people are going to come along and rewrite it. Waterbed will be gone. You can’t care about it in those circumstances. This is why I’m writing novels and not films.”
Feeling. It was all about the feeling. Everyone thought that it was the thing that was left out in a Lee Child novel. Whereas the truth was that it was all feeling, all the way through, every last word was feeling. And it had to feel right.
“That is why I can’t change anything. The book is like a diary of how I felt at the time. I can’t change that.”
“I lost count of the cigarettes. Do you think I should be adding up the butts? Making a tally. People probably want to know what the optimal number of cigarettes is, how many per thousand words.”
“Too many cigarettes. End of a paragraph; end of a sentence: another cigarette. Normally I’d have had more coffee too.” He turned and looked right at me. “I am writing on the verge of a stroke. I’m teetering on the edge.”
“Hey, you haven’t finished the book yet. You’ve barely started. We need to know who the hell Keever is.”
It was the first time the thought had occurred to me. Is that why he had let me in on the whole thing?—to bear witness, just in case this was the last time. Before it was too late. Despite a solid collection of bad habits, he looked healthy enough. For now. I needed a full medical report. A brain scan maybe. Lungs too.
Lee was like an aging boxer. Muhammad Ali or Joe Frazier coming back for one more big fight. Another twelve rounds in the ring. Another payday. But conscious all the while this could be his last shot at the title. Right up against the odds. And I was his only spectator.
Which reminded me, just a little, of Reacher: this is what he does, he bears witness. Without Reacher it’s just another tree falling in the forest, silently.
—
The old split between “office” (downstairs) and “home” (upstairs), in the Flatiron District, had gone. Now it was all one. Which was probably why we were quarantined off, in the dedicated office, at the back of the apartment. Lee reckoned the trouble with working from home was that you are never done, you are always on. And so it proved. He got back to me later that night with some small but significant revisions to what he had already done in the afternoon. A few points had been nagging him.
This is the email he sent me:
Went through what I wrote again and made minor changes that I think snap the voice into better focus—following James Wood’s Flaubert theory [in How Fiction Works], the “semi-close 3rd-person” voice there should subtly modify to better characterize the actors. Now I think I have it down, so at the page break we’re really going to feel the country villains stepping off stage, and Reacher stepping on.
There was one thing about what he had written that, to my way of thinking, was definitely wrong. But I didn’t like to mention it to him. I thought it would be stepping over the line. Like making some kind of sarcastic remark to Reacher.
FUCK YOU, LEE CHILD!
FOLLOWING DAY. Back in the office. The first few sentences remained the same. Keever was still Keever. “I think Keever will always be Keever,” Lee sa
id. He admitted later that maybe there was an echo of Cheever in that name (i.e., John Cheever the writer).
But then came the comma. So he did revise after all! He felt the need for a comma. It would make it more “rueful and contemplative,” he said.
And they would use the air for a guy like Keever
had, overnight, become
And they would use the air, for a guy like Keever.
The comma picked out and emphasized the importance of Keever—but it also served to draw attention to the thought process of the parties unknown—or rather known but unnamed—who were preparing to bury him. “The punctuation not only makes it stronger—it reflects their being mentally slow. You can hear them saying that.”
And then there is a whole word changed in the next sentence. “It seemed to me ‘spotter’ sounded too trivial.” Now that sentence reads: “They would use SEARCH planes, and helicopters, and maybe even drones.”
In the second paragraph, “the only man-made structure their side of the horizon” was a problem for Lee. Whose horizon? he wanted to know. It was too definite. And possibly “confusing.” “Here they are in the middle of nowhere. They don’t even know where the horizon is.” In the revised draft this reads:
“the only man-made structure their side of any horizon…”
“It emphasizes their position in the middle of nothingness. They no longer have a clear horizon—it’s limitless.” It was subtle, but Lee was weaving between the phenomenological point of view of the characters and the omniscient observation of an anonymous narrator. Horizon was more him, it was (implicitly) more Reacher.
Lee loves repetition. But he is also sensitive to overdoing it. One of his immediate revisions was to take out one repetition too many. I had become quite attached to the safe enough phrase. Ironic (with Reacher in town, who is safe?) and incantatory (like they have to keep saying it to themselves). But where previously he had “So, safe enough. No prying eyes,” now he has only, “Therefore, no prying eyes.” The second paragraph first sentence contains “safe enough” already. The third paragraph, as we know, is nothing but “safe enough.” The point was made. No need to overdo. And maybe he had a soft spot for the word “therefore.” Their assumption of some kind of step-by-step irrefutable logic in what they are doing is anything but well founded, especially when Reacher is about to step off the train.
And when it came to the description of the hog pen, Lee wondered if he had been over-embellishing. Enjoying it too much. Rubbing it in. “The dirt was always freshly chewed up,” comes out, in the slightly more compressed version, “The dirt was always chewed up.”
“We don’t need freshly. Adverb. One word too many. Better styling. Economy.”
I wasn’t interrogating him: he was volunteering these thoughts. I wasn’t doing any analyzing. He was analyzing himself. Being really rather professorial. Maybe he could get a job as writer-in-residence, at Columbia for example. For the moment, I was his only student. This wasn’t an inquisition. Lee had made a big pot of coffee and we were knocking it back, mulling things over. Seminar-style.
There was something he hadn’t changed but still wasn’t sure about. “I’m still not sure about shit and piss,” he says. “I want something different, but it has to be honest. Would they use ‘waste’? I don’t know. Ordure, for example, is clearly a nonstarter.”
I had thrown in “ordure” just for the hell of it and got it thrown right back in my face.
He turned to me and said, with feeling, almost like a reprimand: “But it has to be honest.” Lee likes to stress certain words, mentally italicizing.
“Only one thing went wrong, and it happened halfway through the job.”
Halfway? On second thought, Lee reckoned, this was “too retrospective.” He wanted something more immediate. Now there is no halfway, etc. It’s “right then”: “it happened right then.”
I was thinking, there is still a problem with the timing though. If the train comes through only five hours late, that places it at midnight, when they are only just starting work. Shouldn’t it be more like six? This was my issue, the one I didn’t dare mention to Lee, in case it put him off (or he head butted me in response). He would take care of it, I was sure.
He was more focused on the train going by at that point, what it looked like, not the timetable. The hallucinatory effect. He had swung back to point of view. “It has to be like a vision in a dream. I wanted to emphasize that they were dumbstruck and there was nothing they could do about it. It’s beyond their control.”
Another thing. Lee didn’t want Reacher stepping down into the dirt. He often got dirty, of course. But this dirt has been too closely associated with the rural natives and the hogs. We don’t want Reacher getting right in the hog pen, surely? So when the train eases to a stop and the doors wheeze open, now we have
Jack Reacher stepped down onto a concrete ramp in the lee of a grain silo bigger than an apartment house.
It’s more solid. “I wanted it slightly higher tech, not dirt. We’ve had enough dirt. Dirt is for the hicks. And we need to know it’s all industrial agriculture, not bucolic at all.”
—
Later that day I’m with Lee in the back of a limousine riding to another TV studio downtown. Chauffeur-driven. All very suave. The sales figures were just coming in from the U.K. First week of publication. Personal was number one. But the really interesting thing I noticed, poring over the stats, was that it was outselling the next thirteen combined. “Wow. It’s a massacre,” I gasped. “The opposition has been comprehensively annihilated.”
“I almost feel bad about it,” said Lee, barely suppressing a wicked grin.
The also-rans included people like Martin Amis and his holocaust novel, Zone of Interest.
“It’s good to have the literary guys around,” Lee said. He stretched his long legs out comfortably.
“Are they dinosaurs?”
“Writing is essentially a branch of the entertainment industry—like soccer is—and I’m Chelsea, at the moment. Almost exactly. Doing well on the field, but only because there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes talent and investment supporting me.”
We had been talking about the Premiership earlier. His old team Aston Villa had made a flying start to the season. Seven points out of a possible nine. (“But I’m sure they’ll break my heart later. They always do.”) Whereas my team, West Ham, had only managed to scrape three together. “Surprisingly, the American system is much more egalitarian. The revenue-pooling system, the draft, it levels the playing field, gives every team a chance. In Britain…remember when Villa were winning the league and Ipswich were right up there challenging them? Now…the first really are first, and the last are last. It’s harder than ever to make up the difference.”
A big fat New York bus cut brazenly across our car. The driver was spluttering after stomping on the brakes. “The bus is bigger than you,” Lee said reassuringly, leaning forward. “And he doesn’t care.” He could see the point of view of a bus. He knew what it felt like to be a juggernaut.
—
I bumped into Joel Rose that evening. Joel is a writer, of the noir persuasion (e.g., Kill Kill Faster Faster and corpse-strewn graphic novels), with mad professor hair, goatee, and John Lennon specs. He was less successful than Lee. Everyone is less successful than Lee. So naturally I happened to mention those sales stats. Lee Child annihilating the competition and all that. The Napoleon of literature. We were standing around on the corner of Charlton and Varick in the West Village. Joel thought about it for a while. Weighed the pros and cons. Then gave utterance to his considered judgment:
“FUCK YOU, LEE CHILD!”
THE SONG OF REACHER
“PROFESSOR ANDY MARTIN,” Lee says to me. “Come on in.”
Apparently Maggie had been checking my academic credentials, such as they were. His people didn’t want some maniac creeping up on him in the middle of the night. Or stealing his Renoir or whatever. Technically, I wasn’t even a professor (I was only a “
Doctor”), but Lee didn’t seem too worried about the detail. He had an unwarranted faith in the moral integrity of academics.
He made coffee. He reckoned there was some milk somewhere, but he wasn’t too sure about its status. I took it black.
Lee hadn’t shaved; he had Reacher-worthy stubble. But he was in a jovial mood, really enjoying being at the beginning of something. He liked it so much he didn’t really want to leave the beginning alone.
He had been thinking about the word “like.” Of course it was in the second sentence of Chapter 1—simile—but he was thinking of the contemporary verbal tic (I’d mentioned it in some article he had read to do with roaming around New York like a Trappist monk for twenty-four hours). “It’s actually quite economical. I like like. When someone says to you, ‘He was like “I’m so into you,” ’ it’s not that he actually said, ‘I am so into you.’ It’s more, ‘He behaved in such a way that a reasonable observer might conclude he was so into me…’ Which carries an element of doubt. Some kind of approximation has been conceded. So really you’re abbreviating the sentence, and implicitly acknowledging the power of impression, while also acknowledging the impossibility of knowing for sure…but it’s all still there. What was it Ezra Pound said—all poetry is condensation?”
His own Chapter 1 remained stubbornly condensed too. We went into his office and he gave me a fresh printout of page 1. There still wasn’t a page 2. It was Friday, September 5. He had started the whole ball rolling on Monday and he was still on the first page. He hadn’t added substantially to what he had already written. But he had been finessing. Now he was focused entirely on what Reacher was doing or thinking at the moment he got off the train. Everything was contained in that moment.