by Andy Martin
“The street was quiet. Just seven similar houses, three on a side, plus one at the dead end. No moving vehicles, no pedestrians. Not really a Neighborhood Watch kind of place. It had a transient feel, but in slow motion, as if all seven houses were occupied by divorced guys taking a year or two to get back on their feet.
“I thought it was okay, but then I went back. Was I really getting the point across? So I put this in, between ‘pedestrians’ and ‘Not a Neighborhood Watch’:
No eyes, no interest.”
“No eyes, no interest,” I said, mulling it over. “I like it. It’s not a double negative—Reacher wouldn’t do that!—it’s a double negation.” It was true: Reacher, for all his rough-hewn manners, was a stickler for grammatical correctness.
“It’s funny,” said Lee. “It’s like I’m more into Reacher’s thoughts when I’m doing third-person. It’s his point of view. Right there on the page.”
He printed out thirty-five A4 pages for me and I took them all away to meditate on the four-word sentence. I couldn’t really get beyond the four.
Lee liked it because of the Flaubertian point of view: the sentence is registering Reacher’s perception, as he studies the road, of something not being there—and the thing that is not there is anyone else’s POV. No eyes. We are focused on Reacher’s POV exclusively at this point. He has eyes and it is through his eyes that we are seeing things. No one else’s.
And then there was a slightly military feel to it. A little like “no guts, no glory” or “no pain, no gain.” But these were conditional phrases: in effect, if you do not have pain, then you will not have gain. Was “no eyes, no interest” like that? Or was it more parataxis, where the two clauses are not logically related? (Lee was more parataxis as a rule, stacking up clauses one after another in an egalitarian way, deemphasizing logical links, light on “because” and “although” and “therefore.”)
But the thing that caught my eye was, of course, the comma. In the dead center of the sentence. He had added a comma, way back on the first page, to produce a “rueful, contemplative” effect. And here it was again. Maybe the “no eyes, no interest” sentence could be read as half an iambic pentameter (thinking of Shakespeare), but to me it looked more like a compressed alexandrine, like two half hemistiches rotating around a caesura. The comma is like the fulcrum, with the two clauses seesawing around it. Phonologically it was five or six syllables, depending.
And then it hit me (I was sitting in Think Coffee at the time, on 4th and Mercer, at the counter, on a stool), the crucial thing here was: what was not here. The clue was in the sentence itself: it was saying, Look at what is not here: 2 x no; 2 x noun. But no verbs. No action. It was pure description (of the negative kind). This was what was surprising about a sentence that the author himself was so fond of: the action hero was really an inaction hero at heart. He liked doing nothing in particular. And here he favors the absence of “interest.”
It was an amazingly bold statement for any kind of author to write, because in effect it was saying: “Right now, this is actually kind of boring. There’s nothing much going on.” It was really throwing down the gauntlet. Go on, then, throw the damn book down, see if I care. And while you’re at it why don’t you start bitching on Amazon about how there isn’t enough “action” in this Reacher novel and poor old Lee Child is really losing his touch and to think he used to be a good writer.
I could hear, in Reacher idiom, the “double-tap” (as in Echo Burning, “He fired a double-tap, two shots in quick succession, with his hand rock steady”). The four-word construction was like a double-tap, Lee firing off his two-shot, sawn-off syntax, blowing away all verbs.
In the same paragraph, another very similar sentence: “No moving vehicles, no pedestrians.” And then, for no reason, I happened to be flicking through Persuader (the one where Reacher goes undercover as a “cop-killer”).
No creaking, no cracking…No talking, no movement. (Persuader, Chapter 5.)
And then, later in the same chapter:
I saw nobody. No cops, no ambulances, no police tapes, no medical examiners. No unexplained men in Lincoln Town Cars.
Not as elegant as the four-worder. But a lot of no’s. A world defined by absence.
Again, no-no, the double-tap: “No desk, no computer.”
I went back to Make Me.
“No museum, and no monument.” (Reacher looking for the origin of Mother’s Rest.)
“No cell phone and nothing to do.” (Stashower saying it feels like Sunday in her freshman year in college.)
Make Me was the Book of No: “No briefcase. No computer bag, no fat notebooks, no handwritten pages.”
I slammed the pages down on the counter. Not in disgust, but in astonishment. The double-tap was one of his most characteristic moves. If Lee Child could be programmed, the Reacher app would be firing off a double-tap every few pages. Pow-pow.
AT LAST, THE WHOLE POINT OF REACHER
IT WAS WHEN I was not reading anything for once, just walking along Houston in between Broadway and Sixth, with my collar turned up against the wind, going west, on the north side of the street, near those NYU Pei-designed blocks, that it all fell into place for me. I started remembering some stuff Lee had been telling me about the plot. Which he still didn’t know that much about. He had only inklings, glimmerings.
I rehearsed the conversation in my head. We were in his back office at the time.
“What I’m trying to do is…I’m asking myself: What is the pitch of the bad guys here?”
“Okay, what is their pitch?” I was fishing, but there was no fish. Maybe a shrimp.
“I don’t want to escalate anything. I’m aware of that. Think of Personal. It’s America and Europe. London, Paris. A lot of international flights. This is the opposite of that.”
“Great.”
“I wanted to go back to Reacher’s terrain. His home ground. Really, where he was born. The normal Reacher milieu. It’s nowheresville. The bad guys are fairly normal-looking. We get a good picture of the town in this section. The motel, the diner, the general store, the laundromat, the gas station. This is a long patient investigation.”
“And the store that sells nothing but rubber aprons and rubber boots.”
“Yeah, I planted that.”
“A seed?”
“Maybe it will develop, maybe it won’t. We’ll see. But the game is small. Maybe there is even an ethical debate at the heart of it. It could be not a hundred percent evil. This is not SMERSH. This is not a plot to blow up the world. I’m seeing it small. It’s a small-town plot, something organic and spontaneous and not really all that well thought out.”
It was what he tended to say about his own style of writing, his methodology, to the extent that he even had one. He didn’t like to “think too much,” he relied a lot on “instinct,” the writing had to be fresh and “spontaneous.” He didn’t really have a “plot” in mind. It was a small-town criminal approach to writing. But, like Reacher, he is trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Is it something or nothing? And Reacher runs into the same kind of problems that Lee has, in trying to make sense of the narrative.
“They don’t understand him, of course. They think he [Reacher] really is up to something. They don’t get that he is there on a whim. If they didn’t suspect him he wouldn’t suspect them. But they do. So their fear and anxiety are what sets alarm bells ringing.”
He was looking at his screen, scrolling text. “You know what I find I keep asking myself?”
“What?”
“Can I—the storyteller—get away with this?”
Lee was being radically minimalist. At this point everything in the book looked like digression. Lee held on to the idea that it was linear, at some level, “but in the absence of information.” How frequently does the reader need some kind of injection of information? It was all about postponement—but how long could he postpone? And what was he postponing anyway?
The town has a name, but where is it?
When is it? It’s all a little hazy. The “nothingness” is what is emphasized. We know that Kansas City is somewhere not far away—a few hours’ drive. But which state? “For once I don’t specify time and place: I’m usually a stickler for that.”
And then it looks fairly retro, technologically. It’s a time warp—cellphones do not work there. People rely on old landline phones. There are no computers. No easy access to information. Many references to the Wild West—Pony Express, wagon trains. It’s like a reaction against the abundance of data. “This isn’t the Wild West anymore,” says Reacher—but maybe it is.
The clues are virtually imperceptible. A handshake. A sudden gesture. The size of someone’s bag. Small things.
Then Lee said something surprising—especially for anyone so convinced of the existence of Jack Reacher that they know what he ought to look like (or not look like).
“There are only two real people in this transaction.”
“You and me?”
He spins his chair around to face me. “The writer and the reader. Everything else is just a fantasy, a figment of imagination.”
“So no Reacher?” Or, as per the double-tap, No Reacher, no Stashower?
“The characters are not real, come on, you know that.”
He was in that it’s not real mood (another day it would be, “Hey, Reacher, what have you got for me today, old buddy?”). “So much of writing theory is just airy-fairy to me.”
“For example?”
“They say a character is supposed to want something on every page.”
“Emma Bovary wants something—a new hat, a dress, or Paris, another guy.”
“No! It’s the reader who wants something on every page. Not the character. The character does not exist. It’s just a way of mediating the wants of the reader.”
“What does the reader want, then? Coffee? Pancakes?”
“The reader wants a sensation of progress—picking up the pieces.”
“But it’s not easy.”
“There have to be endless difficulties. That is my job. To make it hard. Think of it the other way around. If Reacher was a really smart guy, he’d figure it all out in a minute. The book would be one paragraph long. He’d work it all out on the first page.”
“What would that sound like?”
“God, it would be so easy,” he said. “What do they call those summaries at the top of a Scientific American article?”
“Abstract?”
“This is the abstract: ‘Reacher got off the train, saw something bad, fixed it, killed everyone, got back on the train.’ ”
“The End,” I chipped in helpfully.
“And it would have absolutely no interest.”
“No eyes either, I imagine.” I was still riffing on his double-tap.
“Whereas this way around I’m perpetually skating on the edge of in-jokes.” Lee got up and grabbed one of my printed-out pages. “Look, here is a phone call. Reacher is only hearing one end of it. He has all sorts of different interpretations running through his head. ‘The context was unclear. In the end Reacher gave up on trying to construct a plausible narrative, and just waited.’ ”
“It’s more Samuel Beckett than Reacher.”
“Plot is essential,” Lee said. “But you’re always fighting against it. There are lots of writers who have nonstop plot. It’s a hundred miles per hour all the way. But ultimately that’s too relentless. It becomes the same thing as flat. It’s plodding.”
“It’s not so much writer and reader,” I said. “It’s more story and discourse, as the Russian formalists would say. The more discourse the closer we are to Beckett, the more story the closer to Agatha Christie. It’s the fundamental violence in the book; Lee Child is not telling a story, he’s fighting story.”
This is what I realized, as I was walking down Houston, like Reacher wandering about Mother’s Rest, going up and down the streets, quartering the blocks. Reacher really didn’t like plots. At some level, neither did Lee. He was a classic anti-narrativist, an anti-Hegelian. Like all good existentialists, he didn’t want everything to cohere and be meaningful. He preferred meaningless and incoherent, given a choice. It was always the other guys who were big on narrative: “They’re deep in conversation, plotting and scheming, you mark my words,” says the diner’s counterman, when in reality Reacher and Stashower are only debating the meaning of Mother’s Rest. By the end of every book Reacher has negated the narrative and returned the world to its incoherent meaningless default mode. That was the whole point of Reacher. Not justice, not violent retribution. Killing off the plot.
It was right there on page 27 of my printout. “Reacher strolled back down the wide street, thinking: nap or haircut?” This is not a narrative kind of guy, unless he really has to be. It was all about being for him, not doing, or having. Pure Dasein.
It explained—I now understood—why it was Lee was so attached to the double-tap. It was his way of articulating the nothingness, twice over.
Flaubert said his novel (Madame Bovary) was a novel about nothing. Pure form, nothing but style, floating free. And that, oddly enough, was Reacher’s whole ethic right there: float free, carry nothing with you (other than a toothbrush). He was pure form—just a rather large pure form. And, as Lee said (sometimes), he didn’t exist either. He was nothingness personified. The characters do not exist, only the nothing is real.
Plot is always summoning up something you want—if not hats and dresses then coffee, gallons of hot black coffee, and clues, almost imperceptible ones; but the point of the double-tap is to come up with nothing. As someone once said of Waiting for Godot: “Nothing happens—twice.”
THE GREAT COFFEE CONTEST
THE CLASH OF THE TITANS. That’s how it was billed, anyway.
In one corner: Lee Child, who drinks around twenty cups of coffee on an average day—straight out of a big fat filter machine (Cuisinart) that squats on his kitchen work surface like a garden gnome. His record is thirty-plus.
In the opposing corner: Joel, who drinks only three or four, but using a completely different apparatus (Alessi) and a different technique. We were supposed to be having a blind coffee-tasting contest. But Lee, the great Jack Reacher, chickened out. Backed off. Deferred to Joel’s superior coffee wisdom straight off the bat. “I’m a quantity man at heart. I only drink it for the caffeine. I just need regular injections.” He drank it black, but not too strong. He had rejected some other old machine because it came out too much like espresso. Couldn’t really drink espresso all day long. He preferred the americano that Reacher drinks in huge quantities in every diner in the land (particularly if they have a “bottomless cup” policy). He didn’t really want to be able to stand the spoon up in the coffee, à la Balzac (who died of his habit, probably; that and writing like a maniac).
Joel on the other hand was more of a quality man. He had mantras. Theories. “Thou shalt not tamp” and “Aluminum is bad.” The coffeemaker has to be stainless steel. Otherwise all you can taste is aluminum. And you have to heat it up over the stove too. “Look—you can’t fill the reservoir above the nipple.” Obviously the beans have to be fresh and freshly ground. You don’t actually have to go to a certain little village in Costa Rica and buy them direct from the grower, as Joel had, but clearly it helps.
We were chez Lee, so Joel had brought his own grinder. Lee had respect for the craftsman. For no reason, Joel and I were debating how bad David Baldacci was (morally and aesthetically) for ripping off Reacher in his Puller series. Puller is a military policeman; he is very big; he head butts people; and he is called Puller. No wonder Reacher takes pleasure in breaking the arms of a character called Baldacci in Never Go Back.
“You know he has a subtle critique of Reacher in one of his books,” I said.
“HE has a critique of ME?” says Lee. “That’s a laugh.”
“I think Puller tends to steer clear of coffee. More of a tea guy. Herbal, jasmine, whatever. He’s lining up to pull the trigger and says if he had
been drinking pots of coffee—Jack Reacher–style—then he would be too jittery and wired to make a decent job of the shot. His trigger finger would be all over the place.”
“Bastard!” said Lee. “He ripped that off too! In One Shot I have a scene in which a guy is being called upon to make a shot but is worried that he has drunk too much coffee to keep the gun steady.”
—
They both had mugs bearing the legend THINK COFFEE. Which I had given them, by way of recognition for their services to the bean. Well, it was almost Christmas. You could see the lights of the Upper East Side, on the far side of Central Park, through the windows, glimmering like stars light-years away across the interstellar vacuum. We ended up talking about the war, mostly, while we drank our coffee, savored it, tested it. Any war. Lee grew up wondering how he would have behaved in a war environment. He was too young for the Second World War. And then Harold Wilson (the prime minister of the era) kept Britain out of Vietnam. “Lyndon Johnson was the most persuasive American president ever,” said Lee. “And Britain was still in hock to the U.S. It was a miracle he managed to keep us out of it.”
Joel’s father was a real war hero. He was in Italy in ’43–44. He and a bunch of his comrades were holed up in some farmhouse. Joel senior went out collecting eggs from the chickens. The chickens started clucking. And suddenly they were surrounded by German tanks. Blasted the bejeezus out of that little old farmhouse. When the smoke cleared, Joel’s dad was the last man standing. He saved a comrade who had had his leg blown off by using his own belt as a tourniquet. Then carrying him several miles to safety. They met up again decades later and the first thing Joel’s father said was, “Hey, where’s my belt?” The guy was a well-heeled jeweler by this time and paid for the trip.
Joel had a distinguished Vietnam career, mainly protesting as one of the leaders of the antiwar student movement, organizing sit-ins and strikes at Columbia.