by Andy Martin
“What do you think of the word ‘onto’?” he asked me.
“I don’t have strong views,” I said, knocking back the coffee.
“To me it sounds ugly. I just don’t like onto. But I’ve written, Reacher stepped down onto a concrete ramp. That is ugly. So I’ve changed it. Look.”
I looked down at the page in front of me. “Jack Reacher stepped down to a concrete ramp.” The on part of onto had gone.
“It’s better, don’t you think? I’m not having onto. Never liked it.”
“ ‘…down to a concrete ramp.’ Well, you changed what he is stepping down onto, I guess you might as well change the preposition, while you’re at it. To will work.”
“I was thinking about what you were saying about dialogue. There’s no dialogue at the beginning. But it’s all dialogue, in a way, if it’s first-person. Nothing but. There’s a Nevil Shute novel. The alleged narrator meets some old mate of his in the gentleman’s club, who proceeds to regale him with some tale—and that is the story.”
“A bit like those old Isaac Bashevis Singer novels.”
“Exactly. Shlomo comes up to him and tells him a story. It’s all dialogue, really.”
“But that was Personal. First-person narrative. This is third-person. So it’s not dialogue. It’s reportage.”
“It’s funny. I feel as though I’m still just quoting. I did do two first-person narratives in a row. But generally I try to vary it. This time, I didn’t feel it had to be third-person. There was no real sense of obligation. But the thing is, I knew it was something happening beyond Reacher’s knowledge or perception. So it couldn’t be his voice at the beginning. It had to be someone else’s. Third party, so it’s third-person. It’s all down to the voice—or voices.”
I was back on the couch. Lee had given me his one-page printout and I was—I was going to write leafing through it—but how could I be leafing through a single page? Anyway, I was reading it. And naturally I was wondering what was coming next. Where does Reacher go from the concrete ramp?
But before we got onto—or rather to [delete on!]—that, we had to consider the question of “bigger than” versus “as big as.”
“Hold on,” says I. “You’ve changed this bit, haven’t you?”
“It had to be,” he said. “I was trying to work out why I wasn’t really happy with ‘a silo bigger than an apartment house.’ Obviously it’s adjacent to Reacher himself, so I wanted to associate him with the silo. But then he is associated with Keever too. So I realized I needed to echo the first sentence.”
Moving a guy as big as Keever…
a grain silo as big as an apartment house.
It made sense. The first section starts with the mysterious Keever. The second section switches to Reacher. But there are parallel constructions—to do with comparative sizes—hooking the two of them together. At one level, the novel was all about momentum, forward movement, the sprung or “tripping” rhythm that would “lead the reader by the hand” through the narrative; at another, it was all about the links that cut right across the story line—little subterranean echoes, rhymes, parallels, repetitions, variations. There was a horizontal, linear, syntagmatic axis, propelling you forward, but there was just as much a vertical, paradigmatic axis, a network—at the level of phonology and semantics—holding everything together, keeping it tight and connected. It was prose, of course, but it was just as obviously poetry. Make Me is the song of Reacher.
Make Me, that hugely resonant and imperative title, had just acquired another meaning in my mind: this was the novel itself speaking to its author, its maker, crying out to him, Go on, then, Make Me, and make it as good as you’ve ever made anything.
THE LAUNCH (BARNES & NOBLE, UNION SQUARE, SEPTEMBER 3)
JOEL (text): I have tickets for Yankees v Red Sox. Virtually the last game of the season.
ME (text): Damn. Have to go to book launch. Personal!
JOEL (text): And they’re good seats! Near the front.
LEE (voice): Go to the game! I would.
In the car
KATE (editor): So I hear you’re in love with Jack Reacher too.
ME: I used to be. I fell out of love when I realized that coming out with lines like, “You can either walk out of here, or you can be carried out in a bucket,” could get me into a lot of trouble.
LEE (laughing at his own line): Carried out in a bucket.
ME: Now I try to stay detached and cool.
LEE: Critical distance. You need that.
MAGGIE (minder): I love Make Me. It has to be Make Me.
KATE: We’re already working on the jacket.
SHARON (publicist): And I’m writing the copy.
[Sound of a phone ringing]
LEE: I don’t want to sound like a drama queen, but I need to take this call from Hollywood.
Union Square interview
DAVID GRANGER (editor, Esquire): So you bought into the American hardboiled tough guy tradition?
LEE: It’s not an American invention. It goes back to the Middle Ages and beyond. The Scandinavians before that. It was a European tradition for sure. Something to do with the Black Forest—full of peril. Then the Black Forest became sanitized, controlled. Wolves all died out. You didn’t need tough guys anymore. So the myth migrated to the U.S.—where there is still a frontier feel. You needed the tough guy all over again. I guess America gave it a particular urban resonance.
DG: [Some kind of movie question]
LEE: If you’re on a plane and you let the guy sitting next to you know you’re a writer, his second question is always going to be, “Have any of your books been made into a movie?” As if the book doesn’t really exist until it becomes a movie. As if the book was only a chrysalis waiting to burst forth as a movie. I don’t see it like that. A book is a book. A movie is a movie. But books managed perfectly well for hundreds of years without movies to justify them.
DG: Do you do a lot of research?
LEE: I don’t do any research. Your entire life is research.
GUY IN AUDIENCE: Do you ever get writer’s block?
LEE: I’m not worried about writer’s block. It’s not real. This is not rocket science. It’s not curing cancer. You just have to sit there every day and write.
The book signing
OLD LADY: I just love Jack Reacher.
LEE (whispering): And he loves you too!
GUY IN HIS TWENTIES: My dad—he died of cancer last year. He hadn’t read a book for twenty years. But he read all of yours.
LEE: I hate to lose a reader.
WHITE-HAIRED GUY: Now I have to wait a year for the next one!
LEE: I just can’t write them any faster. It takes me a year to write and you’re done in a day.
TEENAGE GIRL IN PINK SHOES: What a thrill! This is for my mom. She introduced me to Reacher.
LEE: Always listen to your mom.
The following day
JENÉ LEBLANC (email): I was astonished by the interviewer’s assertion that there is no sex in Personal. I wanted to stand up and say, “No sex, are you kidding? What do you think goes through the mind of all women when they are reading about Jack Reacher?”
THEN REACHER STEPPED OFF THE TRAIN
LEE WANTED TO KNOW what I thought about the launch at Barnes & Noble. Invited me over. I said I was impressed by the sea of humanity. It was the phrase that sprang to mind when I looked out from the stage and contemplated all the people lining up to get their copies of Personal signed. It was a real cross-section, a spectrum of society. Demographically diverse. Black and white, young and old, beautiful people, not so beautiful. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. Any and every segment of the population could be up for reading Reacher. And in fact Reacher is the strongest brand in fiction. It was in Forbes magazine. How likely is the reader of one novel by an author to buy another by the same author? Lee Child came out top. Stephen King was second, Grisham third.
“That’s the power of a series character,” Lee said. �
��It’s not really me that comes out top. It’s Jack Reacher.”
Another piece of research had been carried out in the U.K. Apparently Lee Child was the author more readers wanted to get to know.
“Yeah,” I said, “I’m living the dream right now.”
Lee said, “Maybe a degree of mystery is better.”
The second subject in the U.K. research was to do with blurbs on the covers of books. The mini-eulogies excerpted by publishers in the hopes of pulling in more readers. According to the survey, readers didn’t trust extracts from newspaper or magazine reviews—they assumed they had been bought and paid for and were automatically untrustworthy.
“Funny, isn’t it?” Lee said. “Reviews—no one ever pays a cent for them, as you know.”
“Please, somebody, anybody,” I said, “come and corrupt me.”
Whereas (according to the research) people trusted comments from other writers. Journalists were lying (or saying anything they were told to say), but novelists were telling the truth, only saying what they sincerely believed.
“Even though we are paid to make stuff up.”
Which is what got us onto (now I can’t help myself) the way authors are perceived at large. I said that thriller writers were seen as a species of idiot savant. Lucky fools who had chanced upon some winning formula.
Lee swatted that idea with a dismissive hand. “How can you write—or even just read—and not be attentive to language and how it’s put together?” He loved to read books about how it’s done. Stephen King, for example, on his own writing. Or James Wood’s critical essay on Flaubert. He admired King’s recent novel, Under the Dome, in which a giant dome comes to be plonked down on top of a whole town, and saw it as a sly critique of the Republicans. But the only writer he thought was similar to him was Michael Connelly with his detective hero Harry Bosch. “He has a flat, deliberately affectless style that suits the subject.”
He was sympathetic to Joel’s Fuck you, Lee Child! “I would probably feel the same way,” Lee said. “In fact I have said something like, ‘Fuck you, Tom Clancy!,’ in the past.” Now he faced the perils of popularity. Every time he had a book come out he would get letters saying that he had stolen someone else’s story in a blatant act of piratical plagiarism, but they would be prepared to settle out of court for $10k or whatever. “I just ignore them,” said Lee. “No one can say they invented the lonely hero, that’s for sure. It’s a big tradition. But there is a whole scam industry out there. I imagine they send out these letters to all authors. Maybe they even sucker a few of them, maybe because they really have plagiarized someone.”
He wasn’t about to say, “Fuck you, J. K. Rowling!” Lee Child and J. K. Rowling were the only two authors who bestrode all the bestseller lists simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic. But he admitted that she outsold him by a huge margin. “She’s a billionaire!” he said, with a degree of respect. “If you look at writing as on a par with music—she is Paul McCartney. The pay scales are eerily similar.”
But he wasn’t tempted by the Rowling tactic of adopting another name and writing a completely different kind of novel. “Why does she even need to do the typing?” he wondered. “She should just lie on her sofa daydreaming.”
He stood up and stalked around the room. “That’s what I’m paid to do. There’s the relatively boring business side of writing—you know, the typing, the publishing minutiae, getting the book out there, marketing, selling it, if you can. But the first half is daydreaming. I live in a permanent daydream. I get paid to daydream narratives.”
At breakfast in a SoHo café that morning, a friend had wondered why it was that Lee Child wasn’t seen out and about town more often, being photographed going into clubs and suchlike. “I can’t stand clubs!” Lee said. “For one thing.” But there was something else too. “I don’t think the paparazzi are even slightly interested in taking my picture. Why would they be?” Every now and then he would be recognized in the street, maybe once or twice a week. “But get real. I’m never going to sell a single newspaper or magazine.”
He had written an article for The Wall Street Journal on the subject of William Styron and Sophie’s Choice which argued that Styron was really the last of the big lions of literature. “The last of the guys big enough to be photographed going into clubs,” Lee said. He included Norman Mailer in that list. Arthur Miller. It was a short list and they were all dead now.
I told him about the time I had gone up to Norman Mailer in a bar in London and how we had fallen into conversation, mainly about blondes as it turned out. Lee had once done something similar with Jimmy Greaves, the soccer player. He’d seen him hanging about in a television studio and had gone up to him and said (as I did), “I don’t normally do this sort of thing,” i.e., accosting a celebrity. And he told him he thought he had been the greatest thing ever when, as a kid, he had seen him play back in the 60s. Greaves had looked up at him with his big spaniel, veteran alcoholic eyes and said, “But what do you think of me now?” Lee had gone to the same school as Enoch Powell (the Tory politician), Jonathan Coe (novelist), Ken Tynan (theater critic), and (an earlier generation) J.R.R. Tolkien. One of the old direct-grant grammar schools, in Birmingham. “It was a high-powered school, but I didn’t particularly enjoy it,” he said. “I guess that is just me.” Jonathan Coe’s novel The Rotters’ Club had been based on a sixth-form (the first year of high school, for Americans) club at the school. It was a book I liked a lot but Lee didn’t think too much of it. “Look at Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending. All that stupid nostalgia for schooldays! What is it about these guys? What is their audience? They are all fifty- or sixty-something white males who think that the most fascinating people they met were in the Lower Sixth. A pretty narrow constituency. And they’re all dying anyway.”
Lee lamented the passing of the great writers, the “public intellectuals” of the past. “It’s just politicians and comedians on Question Time. They don’t know who to put on anymore.”
Oddly enough I had recently given a paper at a conference on the fate of the public intellectual. From Zola onwards. “J’accuse…?” and all that. Lee went and poured himself another cup of black coffee in the kitchen. “The public intellectual is dead in America,” he said. “Over the last fifty years we’ve had them. Now we’re at the end. There is no more Gore Vidal or Norman Mailer. Maybe that’s a good thing, I don’t know. Maybe we overestimated them in the past. Now we underestimate.” In America he thought the decline of the intellectual went back to Reagan and the 80s. “We had a smart generation of people coming out of the 50s and 60s. The Reagan era demolished all that.”
His wife has an MA in Anglo-Saxon. Lee was sympathetic to academic institutions, but also conscious of how crazy they can be. “There’s this guy. Built his whole forty-year career on just this one word. It’s in a poem about the Battle of Maldon. One word in it, nobody can really figure out what it means. That’s the word. This guy has taken possession of it. It’s his territory. He owns it. One word.”
He looked at me quizzically. “I guess that’s the kind of thing you do, right?”
I looked down at his page. “I was thinking waterbed…or maybe nothingness. More philosophical. Do you think I could make a career out of that?”
But the reality is that Lee himself was liable to get pretty worked up about a single word. Or a phrase. Or the weight of a sentence. And this sense of the consequences of what he wrote next was holding him back. “Everything hangs on this next sentence or two,” he said. “First of all it’s, what does he see? It’s his point of view. But then—what is the town like? Who’s in it? What’s in it?”
“Like Margrave in Killing Floor. Everything so spick-and-span and polished and manicured—and it’s all a lie.”
“Exactly. Just describing a place and we’re already getting some sense of the weight of the plot. It all matters. It matters a lot. And he’s going to run into the no. 2 character. Potentially this could be a colleague of Keever’s. A she? Look
ing for him. But then Reacher maybe looks like him. As you said, Reacher even sounds like Keever. I can imagine her making out the silhouette of Reacher as being Keever. Yes, I can see some play with that.”
Reacher, stepping down [on]to that concrete ramp. One more step and everything else would follow on, automatically.
“I need to chill and ruminate,” said Lee. “Is it purely local—or could it be something more global? A terrorist thing? I have to get the density of it. To set up the scene.” He lit a fresh cigarette and took a thoughtful drag. “This is the downside of not having a plan. Or a plot. This is distributed thinking. It’s all about mood and tone and foreshadowing. It’s not a plot, it’s more like a symphony—all the meaning has to resolve itself into that final chord.”
The end was entailed by the beginning, but it remained somewhere over the horizon or around a mountain, like a train, even if you could see the plume of smoke and feel the rail vibrating.
Lee hated injustice—and it was everywhere. He had been reading a book set in the 50s—“within my lifetime, or almost”—somewhere down south. Devil in the Grove. Florida. A black kid working in a store—“he just used to sweep the floor and did a fine job of it”—sends a Christmas card to a white girl also working there. Says, “I hope you send me one.” For that he is lynched. Or rather, he is taken out and marched away to be lynched. But, as if that wasn’t enough, his father is marched right up there too and made to watch and is unable to do anything about it and has to say sorry to his son that he is powerless while he is right there in front of him, being hanged, for no reason by a bunch of white supremacists.
“That is so terrible. At least in Ferguson,” said Lee, bringing it right up to date, thinking about the recent police shooting of Michael Brown, “there is rioting too. There is protest. Back then no one even noticed. No one thought of getting justice.”
Then Reacher stepped off the train.
MOTHER’S REST