by Andy Martin
“I need you?” he said. There was a definite note of something in his voice.
“Well, okay, not need exactly. You don’t in fact need me as such. But in that not-knowing there is the possibility of an interpretive intervention.”
We were sitting in his office, he at the big old desk, me perched on the couch, as per usual. He was just back from Florida, spring break with thirty-three other guys (no women), watching the Yankees. He raised an eyebrow. “This is the psychoanalysis thing, right?”
“You okay with that?”
“Let’s do it.”
I was a Jungian at heart, obviously. Everything cohabited in some vast all-encompassing primordial web of religion, alchemy, and flying saucers, all channeled through the collected works of Lee Child. I fully embraced the totality. But the macro had to include the micro. In a word, Lee. It was time to get Freudian. “Time to get Freudian,” I said. “To get in here.”
I tapped the side of my head. But it was supposed to be his head.
He got up from his desk.
Martin had finally turned the tables on Child. I had Jack Reacher in some kind of choke hold. The Grand Inquisitor (me) had strapped this heretic (Lee) to the rack. I was going to sit at his great steel desk and he was going to lie down on the couch and reveal his deepest, darkest, innermost secrets.
“Just to get you started with a bit of free association,” says I. “Keever…”
“Yep.”
“Kiefer…or Keanu?”
“Not Keanu. But Kiefer yes could be. On account of his father wanting to play Reacher, remember.” Donald Sutherland and Lee had had quite a correspondence in the past, when Sutherland senior revealed his desire to be Reacher.
“So you off the star of 24 in the first sentence. Interesting.” Come to think of it, it was more before the first sentence.
Lee wandered towards the couch.
I had my list of questions ready. Oedipal instinct? Death wish/drive/instinct (thanatos)? Sublimation? Lacanian mirror crisis? Infantile trauma? Sadomasochistic dreams? I was trying to cover the bases. After that it was pure gravy, the satanism and the Nazi-themed orgies and all that. In my mind, I already had my pipe in my mouth, the knees crossed, the notebook with the insights on my lap, pen in hand.
“You know,” he says, ruminatively, “we could do this, or we could catch the second half of Barcelona–Man City. What do you think?”
ON THE COUCH (II)
SO HE WAS ON a couch. But he was half watching television at the same time, marveling at Messi, tut-tutting at Man City, especially when they missed a penalty (his own team, Villa, was having a revival and looked as if they might yet escape jeopardy). Also, he was worrying quite a lot about the size of Mars (which strict Freudians might regard as allegorical).
“It just doesn’t make sense that it’s that small,” he said. “Not according to our conventional conception. What is it doing right there, in that orbit? My theory is…Oh fucking Agüero, nine times out of ten he’d put those away!” He was also concerned that we had not yet figured out what happened in the first nillionth of a nanosecond after the Big Bang.
Technically, at this point, I was on the couch too. It was a huge great brown thing, so there was room for Barcelona on there. Lee’s legs still had their own sofa in front of our sofa.
“So this screwed-up childhood of yours…?”
“It’s mostly about the lacks and the lacunae,” he said. “I’ve seen it in other writers. And performers. We’re in it for the love and approval we never got enough of as children.”
“Freud was right, then?”
“Freud was basically right. If you’re messed up as a kid, you stay messed up, at some level. You bear the scars. But the real question is, what do you do about it? The analysis is fine.* But what do you do? Does Freud have any answers?”
“He says stop kidding yourself that psychoanalysis is going to help, you’re on your own.”
“So it’s pointless. Which is why the American psychiatric movement has become a branch of the pharmaceutical industry. They just offer you a witches’ brew, some alchemical cocktail.”
“Coffee, cigarettes, marijuana…”
“Yeah,” he said. He waved a Snickers bar at me. That was “lunch.” For breakfast he had had a bowl of Sugar Smacks, which are now called Honey Smacks. As he put it, “I’m eating crap till this book is done.” His only rule at the moment was that I had to go and get my own lunch so I wouldn’t have to eat the same garbage he was eating.
“You want to know what the real problem is?”
“Of course.”
“We’re looking at it.”
“Television?”
“Tribalism. Look at that crowd. Perfectly normal Spaniards. But some of them are fanatical supporters of Barcelona and others, equally fanatical, of Real Madrid.”
“Or West Ham. Or Aston Villa, for example.”
“They all have this desperation to belong to some tribe or other.”
“Which explains sectarianism and genocide?”
“It explains everything!”
It was Freud, but applied on a larger historical scale, to the whole of humanity rather than specific individuals. It was our species childhood that screwed us all up. Nobody wanted to wander the African savannah lonely as a cloud. “Back then it made sense to be part of the tribe. Now it doesn’t. But we’re stuck with it.”
Somehow we got to talking about Wayne Rooney, the Manchester United player. He’d recently been knocked out sparring in his own home. Apparently he used to be known as “the spud-faced nipper” when he started out. “We all have seven million years of evolutionary behavior behind us. Swinging around in the trees. The caveman. It’s just with Rooney the neural pathways are more open. You can see right in.”
“Reacher likewise?”
Lee said it was like the Empire State Building. You’re standing on top of it, right up on the roof, looking down. Like King Kong. “The stuff that is on your level, on the roof, that’s modernity. Everything else, all those floors going all the way down, that’s history, that is antiquity, that is us.”
* * *
* For the strict Freudians, under the heading of analysis, Lee allowed the following:
Oedipal instinct?
“No, evenhanded revulsion.”
“You sure you want me to mention that?”
“They won’t read it. Sorry.”
Death wish (thanatos)? “Yes to that. I’ve been told I’m dying since the age of seven (after the rheumatic fever). Dead boy walking. So I feel, come on, hurry up, don’t blow their expectations.”
Anything else? “Don’t sleep with people you know. Better yet, don’t sleep with anyone you’ve actually met.”
WHY THE WORKS OF LEE CHILD ARE REALLY QUITE USEFUL
THE JACK REACHER series goes down well with dyslexics and victims of Alzheimer’s, Lee was saying.
There was once a woman who used to work as a development officer for the U.S. Tennis Association. She was not only a diagnosed dyslexic, but she also had a terrible fear of flying. It was in the nature of her job, however, that she (a) had to read stuff and (b) get on a lot of planes. Double jeopardy. One fine day she happened to pick up a Jack Reacher volume at the airport. Running Blind [The Visitor in the U.K.]. She found to her amazement that she could actually read it, several pages at a time, and make sense of it, more or less. She bought the book, got on her flight, and kept on reading so avidly that she completely forgot about her fear of flying. Thus killing two birds with one finely crafted stone. Reacher to the rescue.
She wrote to the author thanking him for his miracle double-barreled cure. “I finished your book!” she wrote. It wasn’t so much a backhanded compliment, more a straight forehand drive down the line. Ever after that she would send him a handful of free tickets for the U.S. Open at Flushing Meadows. Lee was indifferent to tennis, but he was glad to have saved a lost soul.
“They use my books for illiterate prisoners too,” Lee said. “Or se
militerate, you know, late learners. It gives them a sense of achievement. You can do it!”
They weren’t “crime” books—they served to prevent future crimes.
A DEAL’S A DEAL
“ ‘A DEAL’S A DEAL.’ ” Said Stashower to Reacher. It was the last line of Make Me, as of twelve noon on March 19. The book was up to 67,188 words.
At 12:10 on that Thursday afternoon, Lee set out for me what he (vaguely) had in mind, for the next thousand or two words. Reacher and Stashower had been looking for Keever’s client, the guy who got him killed. But they couldn’t find him because he was already dead. But they track down his neighbor, then his sister, in Phoenix, Arizona. “But we are building the suspense. They are getting information, but at the same time we have to re-up the danger.”
“The agon.”
“Reacher fixed Hackett, the hired gun. But they’re not out of the woods yet. And we need the bad guy point of view.”
“The parallel narrative.”
“Do you know how Pluto was discovered?”
“Vaguely. Nineteen hundred and—something, wasn’t it? Still a planet in my book.”
“You couldn’t see it, it was too small. But you could see the other bigger planets weaving around. So there had to be something there. It’s the Pluto trope. All over crime novels.”
“Is this what this is?”
He was already tapping at the keyboard. I let myself out.
He was still there at 6:30 that evening. The word count was up to 68,626 (he was now officially ahead of me). He had produced a grand total of 1,438 words in the intervening period: say six hours, roughly 250 words per hour. He had to get to two thousand words in the day. That was his regular schedule from here on in. Two thousand every day. Eight-hour day. Intense.
He was getting up promptly and getting down to work earlier than before. Putting on the old leather jacket with lots of zips, the one he liked to write in, as if he was hopping on a Harley with the rest of his biker buddies. Around 10:30 or 11 in the morning. “It’s the first thing I think of in the morning. I’m already starting to reread yesterday’s work over breakfast. It feels good.”
But what I was really checking on was how the theory fit with the practice, whether what he thought would happen had in fact happened. “You’d think,” he said, “that mysteries would be getting stupider, logically. You’d think all the reasonable plots were used up right at the beginning and now all we’d have left is surrealist fantasies. But, you know, it’s the other way around. We’re getting more reasonable. Look at “Murders in the Rue Morgue” for example—the fucking pet chimp* did it! And do you know The Nine Tailors?
“Dorothy L. Sayers—Lord Peter Wimsey?”
“The bells done it.”
“I liked that one.”
“Or Gaudy Night?”
“The Oxford College one.”
“Some don gets her manuscript trashed. No worse crime, for Dorothy Sayers.”
Lee was calling it a “cubist narrative”: sometimes he would narrate one set of events, and then renarrate it from a different point of view. Alternate angles on the same—a little like Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style in which the same seemingly insubstantial story gets retold a hundred times over. But something had happened he hadn’t anticipated. A swerve in the narrative line.
“Reacher has this bright idea of not just contacting Westwood in L.A. but telling him to come on over to Phoenix. It will really tighten up the story.”
“How does he persuade him to come?”
“Book deal.”
“Oh yeah, the Pulitzer and all that.”
“But this is the thing—Westwood is sucked in by the notion of doing a great book on the subject of Reacher’s investigations. But the reader will therefore be wondering—could this be that book? Is Make Me the story as told by Westwood? Some kind of meta-book?”
“Or a book-within-the-book. So you’ve got a writer in the story. And Reacher is talking him into writing it. Holmes and Watson. Reacher is admitting he needs someone to record events. An archivist. A troubadour.”
He had an atlas open on the floor and he was punching the keyboard with a certain vehemence. “What about this line: Michael McCann’s disappearance began with a desire to visit Oklahoma. I was thinking—that could almost be one of those bullshitty literary novels. You know like…”
Lee mentioned one or two titles. Whatever they were, he had to be against them. All his writing was a form of retaliation. It was the Reacher model, applied to literature: one man against the world. “Yeah,” he agreed, “there’s a perpetual threat of violence or there’s nothing. It’s like DON’T MESS WITH THIS BOOK!”
There was one word that kept cropping up. “Revenge.” Lee had a revenge theory of literature. He was following on from Hamlet and Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy and, before them, Agamemnon and Phaedra. He thought that what most people wanted was revenge for all the injustice in the world—and he was providing it.
I happened to be rereading Bad Luck and Trouble at the time. Middle-order Child. Reacher 11. It starts with some very bad people tipping a guy out of a helicopter. At three thousand feet. It ends (look away now if you don’t want to know how it ends) with those very same guys getting tipped out of the same helicopter. This time at over five thousand feet—a mile high. Over the same spot. The novel read like a palindrome, the same backwards as forwards.
Karma might be a better word than revenge. It is a rebalancing of some temporary imbalance in the universe. Of course, the revised equilibrium might never be achieved without the intervention of Jack Reacher. This is his function in the novel: to rectify bad karma. For every action there must be a re-action. It’s the aesthetics of symmetry.
* * *
* Technically, an orangutan.
END OF THE THIRD MOVEMENT
Friday, March 20. Snowing again on Central Park. Chapter 39.
“HERE’S A QUESTION for you. If someone was going to Oklahoma, where would they be going to exactly?”
“No idea.”
“Could be Tulsa. Could be Muskogee—home of the Muskogee tribe. Or it could be Lawton of course, you know, because of Fort Sill nearby.”
“I vote Tulsa. It’s got the song going for it: ‘24 Hours from.’ ”*
“And Route 66.”
There was one other matter Lee had finally resolved. The question of Lydia Lair. Lydia, it was worth it. You are now the sister of the missing Michael McCann, married to a doctor, Evan Lair. And your daughter is about to get married. I just pray it doesn’t all blow up in your face, that’s all.
“You’re not going to kill her off, are you?” I felt some kind of responsibility for Lydia. If only I’d tried harder.
“Haven’t made my mind up yet,” Lee said.
“So she lives in this nice house and she has a daughter and they’re having tea and cake…hold on, don’t tell me.”
“Yep. Home invasion. Utterly terrifying. It was bound to happen.”
“Does Reacher see it coming?”
“He has a premonition.” Lee had only just thought of it himself. Something to do with having a party and then the idea of gate-crashers and then postponing it till the house has gone quiet again.
“From here on in, you’re heading inexorably towards a climax. A collision. The final movement.”
Lee parsed and dissected my two metaphors. He liked the symphonic idea. He thought that the home invasion was like the end of the third movement, “a major restatement.” But there was no collision as such. “It’s all in the first sentence, isn’t it?”
“Keever, the grave, the dead body.”
“You know everyone is going to get dragged back to Mother’s Rest. Whether they like it or not. We start there. We end there.”
“They’re all trying to get away. To Chicago, L.A., Phoenix. But there is no escape. Black hole narrative.”
Naive critics fondly imagine that Lee Child is sitting around all day working on plots. He isn’t. Quite what he is workin
g on, I hesitate to say. Maybe nothing. Especially in this book. “Listen to this,” he says. He’d just written it. “ ‘No one came back to the shuttered study…Nothing doing…An interior hallway, empty…There was no sound. No voices, no footsteps…No voices, no footsteps…No sound.’ ”
“The Book of No,” I said. “I’m doing a word count: No, nothing, nothingness. It’s a leitmotif. And it’s creepy.”
“Seems like a stronger backbone. The description…,” he says, pensive. “Sometimes what is not there is more important than what is.”
I’m not going to call it an epiphany. More a coincidence, really. But his freestanding touch pad (on the right of his keyboard) flashed up a warning message on his screen. It was running low on battery. Irritating. Lee used to have a wireless keyboard too. “Not anymore,” he stressed. “Look at that—a nice fat wire!” It connected up the keyboard to a power source in the computer. Once he had been tapping away at a novel on his wireless keyboard. He wasn’t a great typist. He used two fingers and had to look at what he was doing mostly. When he finally got around to looking up he discovered that the last immortal paragraph did not exist. Instead there was a message:
CONNECTION LOST!
“God, I hate that,” he said. “A whole paragraph up in smoke. Not even smoke.”
This was what he was doing all day (when not feasting on Snickers and Sugar Smacks). Making connections. It didn’t have to be cause and effect. Who is doing what to whom? All that stage business that can be classified under the prosaic heading of the “metonymic” (following Roman Jakobson’s classic essay “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances”). Which, in Raymond Chandler’s terms, is having a guy walk through the door with a gun in his hand. Lee Child was more preoccupied by the metaphoric (or the “poetic function” as Jakobson would say). Which didn’t mean he was coming up with improbable metaphors all the time (remember the waterbed of the second sentence); no, the point was to connect up stuff that wasn’t obviously adjacent or contiguous, but linked at some dark symbolic level. Adjacent ideas, obscure but harmonious images, resonances, affinities, recurrent phrases/words/refrains, syntactical echoes, the whole vast realm of the intransitive, governed only by association and similitude, all singing out to one another across the deeps, like blue whales miles apart in the ocean, like the distant rhymes of a lyric poem or song. (Example: consider the backhoe in Make Me—it’s function but it’s also form; or the four-word structure; or the frequency of “coffee.”)