by Andy Martin
“Asynchronous wobbling and shaking, for example.”
“It’s a liberty for sure. Over-the-top. Like the guy’s waistline.”
But the “churning” (his word for the rethinking) meant that he wasn’t always happy with what he had just written. In the page that he had shown me only twenty-four hours ago, and originally proclaimed as perfect, he had already made half a dozen changes.
“I got cold feet about ‘carotid.’ I don’t want five thousand med students after me. I went more generic. Compressing the arteries that feed his brain.”
Stendhal has this trick of weaving alternate micro-narratives into the macro-narrative. Here is a simple example: Julien Sorel comes out of Madame de Rênal’s bedroom. “On eût pu dire,” writes Stendhal. “You could have said, in the style of a novel, that…” Almost as if he is not writing a novel at all himself. So you get the romantic version (all his desires have been fulfilled) and the more downbeat, realistic version (What! Is that all it is?) almost simultaneously, like parallel worlds. There is an indicative mode and then there is a subjunctive, conditional mode. Lee Child has a similarly quantum technique going on.
In the home invasion scene, Reacher rehearses mentally what he is about to do (kill three guys in fairly short order) and then doesn’t do it. Or again: we get a decent sketch of what Reacher might have done (subjunctive) with the Fat Man: confront him, tell him exactly what he is about to do and why, achieving some kind of justice for McCann and co., and then (indicative) just goes ahead and shoots him in the head, thus circumventing any “tall tales.”
Having his cake and eating it. “It’s two for the price of one,” Lee said. I would call it three for one: (1) what Reacher actually does; (2) what he might have done but doesn’t; (3) the ironic meta-layer (just like Stendhal ridiculing novels)—a contemptuous dismissal of any notion of telling tales.
ALLEGORY
THIS REALLY HAPPENED. But it’s sort of an allegory of what Lee feels about editing.
It was when he was living in the apartment downtown, the one that looked out on the Empire State Building, the one that made me think of a cartoon with Clark Kent at a window in Metropolis. He was going away for a week or two and he wouldn’t really need his housemaid to clean the house while he was gone. On the other hand, he didn’t want to put her out of a job either. She needed the money. So he said, “Why don’t you do the stuff you don’t normally do? Concentrate on cleaning up the paintwork.”
He had in mind the kitchen units, which were the kind with push-push cupboard doors. Naturally they would get a little grubby over time. They would benefit from a thorough clean with some kind of fingerprint-removing detergent. All well and good.
Except that maybe he should have been just a little more explicit about exactly what he meant by “paintwork.”
He had recently bought a wonderful painting by a certain American artist, then little known, but who went on to become a superstar. A street scene done with bravura and spontaneity, full of wild color, layer upon layer of paint, brushstrokes characterized by a high degree of swashbuckling freedom. Somewhere between impressionist and abstract expressionist. The artist had begun by using pencil to provide him with a rough guideline and he didn’t always bother to cover the marks entirely with paint, so there was a glorious rough-hewn feel to the canvas. And Lee really loved those scrappy little pencil marks, the ones that weren’t really supposed to be there at all, maybe because they showed the sheer labor that had gone into the work.
Lee returned from his trip. The apartment looked spick-and-span. He went to bed. But there was something amiss he couldn’t quite put his finger on that kept him awake. Even in the darkness.
He flipped the light back on. Some instinct guided him to the great work of art. But (a moment of confusion and disbelief) what had become of the beloved pencil marks? Surely there used to be a mark here and here! But now…He saw it all: the housemaid, in pursuit of her mission to improve the “paintwork,” had inspected the painting carefully, spotted the pencil marks, and gone out and bought an eraser. It was definitely an improvement. But she was determined to finish the job for Mr. Child. Properly. So she went out again and bought some Wite-Out. And applied that liberally wherever the artist had failed to cover up his own original marks—really, as grubby as any fingerprints you could find on a kitchen cupboard.
The masterpiece had been corrected, erased, Wite-Outed, and rectified and thus deprived of all the brio and creativity and spirit that had gone into it. Lee couldn’t live without those pencil marks.
“I couldn’t explain to her where she had gone wrong. I think she might have actually committed suicide. At best she would have felt terrible and would have been punishing herself forever. No one ever told her that she was not supposed to ‘fix’ a work of art.”
So he had the room redecorated instead, rearranged all the furniture, and quietly had the “cleaned-up” painting removed and given to someone who didn’t know what it was like to start with and would, in all probability, be able to live without the pencil. He hoped.
But ever after he was careful not to leave the maid alone in a room with any “paintwork.”
“You seen the play Art?” he said. “The one with the all-white canvas.” We were having dinner in the Union Square Café.
“I’ve seen Red.”
“Nobody much liked it in the play. But I would buy a canvas like that. White on white. In fact I think I may go out and buy some canvases and paint them all white and hang them on a wall. A white wall.”
REACHER VISITS A BOOKSTORE
HE IS THE ONLY PERSON I know, other than actual basketball players, who is taller than Lee Child (by a centimeter or so).
“You could play Reacher,” I said, “when Tom drops out.”
“I’ll have to bulk up a bit,” he said, shoving back the great mop of chocolate brown hair that threatened to bury his entire face like a giant wave wiping out a surfer or the rainforest swallowing up an ancient Inca city.
Carl Cederström had been reading Personal on the plane from Stockholm (where he taught at the business school and had once invited me to speak about the project). He loved the idea of Little Joey’s house—the one that was the opposite of a doll’s house, a giant’s house, where everyone else felt small. Probably because he needed something like that himself.
He put a copy of Gang Leader for a Day (Sudhir Venkatesh) in my hand. We were in Book Culture on Columbus. “Read that,” he said. A “rogue sociologist” gets to hang with “J.T.” in the Chicago projects. A real gang leader, with a network of crack dealers, pimps, thieves, and henchmen at his behest. Carl said it reminded him of me and Lee. I could see some parallels. A certain coarseness of language, the drug taking, the loyal lieutenants. To be fair, I estimate that a greater proportion of what Lee does is on the legal side of the line. But when I read about the college kid, the author, kicking some guy off another guy, I realized I felt a little like that when slipping in the word “sociopath,” for example. I was infringing on my subject’s own territory. It was participant observation taken to the point of active collaboration. I was involved, I was committed, I was compromised. I was on his side (mostly). Academic or gangster? I was definitely being pulled into the gangster (or, to be fair, creative writer) orbit. “In this world there was no such thing as neutral, as much as the precepts of my academic field might state otherwise” (Venkatesh). I could just about imagine Lee saying, like J.T., “You’re either with me, or you’re with someone else.”
Carl (with coauthor André Spicer) was launching his own book called The Wellness Syndrome at the time, dissecting and mocking our increasingly self-destructive drive to be not just well all the time, but happy, prosperous, sexy, and generally wonderful. And feeling guilty about it if we don’t quite manage to check all the boxes. There was a New York Times journalist in the audience, an editor from Stanford University Press, a bearded philosopher who asked me if I was interested in “barebacking,” and an older lady with a big fluffy cat in
her arms. I had just gotten back from a new exercise routine, consisting of running up twenty stories (10 stories x 2 in my building in the West Village). I could hardly stand up, suffering as I was from what I called “concussion of the calf muscles.” And I wasn’t being massively stoical about it either.
“Why don’t you just stop?” Lee said. “It’s all pointless.” He could have been talking about the exercise or the moaning or both.
He bought a copy of Carl’s book and pitched in a question in which he quoted the baseball player Mickey Mantle: “If I’d known I was going to live this long I’d have taken better care of myself.” He theorized that it was our parents’ increasing longevity that had led us to becoming preoccupied with being in better shape than them in our own later years, thus spoiling the short span of years available to us now. He was all for fatalistic insouciance and against regular exercise. He (like Reacher—see Persuader, for example, where he mocks muscle-bound workout freaks) never went anywhere near a gym. He totally scorned wellness. He and Carl were like kindred spirits. We had to resist the divisive and class-based ideology of wellness, they maintained: which I 100 percent agreed with (while harboring a secret propensity for home baking, safe sex, and hand sanitizers).
Carl was a natural member of the Lee Child gang. He was like his second-in-command or enforcer or at least attack dog, savaging celebrity chefs and lifestyle coaches of every stripe. On the other hand, he was also into the meta-book idea. So much so that he conceived a notion of writing a meta-meta-article, looking over my shoulder while I was looking over Lee’s. It was as Sartre says, in Being and Nothingness: you’re spying through the keyhole and then, all at once, you realize someone else is behind you, spying on you. “Where is this madness going to stop?” I said. “Soon everyone will be watching everyone.”
“It’s already happening,” said Lee. Then to Carl: “If I can stand him watching me, I can stand you watching him. It’ll give him a taste of his own medicine.”
The next morning I met Carl in Starbucks.
“Are you starting to write like him?” Carl said.
“I’m his opposite,” I said. “He’s making stuff up to put in his book. I’m taking his book and leaving stuff out. He’s constructing, I’m deconstructing.”
“But you’re adding as well, aren’t you? Not just subtracting. Are you making any of this up?”
Cue outrage. “It’s reportage!” I was still just leaving stuff out (more coffee, more cigarettes, more Snickers, pizzas, etc.). But Carl was a better Grand Inquisitor than I am. “Okay, okay, you bastard,” I blabbed, surrounded as I was by the typical Starbucks torture instruments of long tall lattes and croissants with jam. “I’ve been telling myself I’m influencing him. But it’s all the other way round, isn’t it? He is getting some kind of stranglehold over me.”
“Does he worry you’re going to sell more books than him?”
“Yeah. I believe it keeps him awake at night.”
We walked the block over to Lee’s. Carl slotted right in to those XXL chairs and sofas. Like they were made for him. It really was a template for Little Joey’s place. He took the proffered mug of black coffee.
“So it’s a home invasion?” said Carl. “Having Andy around.”
“Technically,” said Lee, pouring himself a mug. “From the Latin. In-vadere. It’s my home and he’s in it. But I’m not that worried.”
“Do you ever get sick of him?”
“He generally gets out just before I start feeling physically oppressed.”
“How do you see the practical purpose of having him observe you?”
“He serves no actual purpose, as such. The publishers still think he wants to destroy me. But after writing nineteen of these books I thought it would make a bit of a change. He’s a…wild card.”
It was a gang of three. I guess if you added in more obscenities, some guns, bags of coke, prostitutes, and a lot worse interior decor, we could have been back in the Chicago projects. “J.T.” always fancied that his sociologist sidekick was going to write a “biography” of him. And Lee optimistically mentioned some book about Jimmy Page, the Led Zeppelin guitarist, that had just come out, with some hazy idea that it might provide me with a how-to manual of sorts.
His default alter ego is always: rock star.
And as for feeling “physically oppressed”: all this is coming from a self-toxifier who smokes twenty a day. I was the one who should be feeling oppressed.
Carl helped Lee practice the pronunciation of the name of a Swedish noir author he was due to interview in May, then he headed off to JFK. After he was gone, Lee said, “He’s such a healthy-looking bugger, ’course he doesn’t need all that wellness crap. You know, if I was choosing a name for myself all over again, I might choose Carl Cederström. To hell with ‘Lee Child.’ Something cool and Scandi, with umlauts. It sells better. Academics and intellectuals wouldn’t mind reading something by Carl Cederström. And it’s another ‘C.’ It’s the right place on the bookshelves.”
I went back to Lee’s at the end of the afternoon. “Stop press,” says Lee. “Bookstore scene.”
“Bookstore scene? In Mother’s Rest?”
“San Francisco. They’re killing time and Reacher goes into a bookstore.”
“He doesn’t pick up a copy of The Wellness Syndrome by any chance?”
“He has a concussion. He’s rambling on about books. A bit like you.”
THURSDAY, MARCH 26, 2015
7:45 Up, straight to work
Coffee 3 (mugs)
Camels 3
9:28 Breakfast. Sugar Smacks.
9:35 Back to work
Coffee 3
Camels 5
1:29 Lunch.
Toast and marmalade and cheese (Swiss)
Coffee 2
New Yorker 1
1:55 Back to work
Coffee 5
Camels 7
7:01 Dinner.
Alpen cereal (original)
Coffee 2
Camels 4
7:34 Evening shift
Coffee 4
Camels 7
10:20 Shut down
Total number of words in the day 2,173
Total mugs of coffee 19
Total Camels 26
no texts, no calls
HAS LEE CHILD DONE HIS RESEARCH?
HE WAS CONSULTING his daughter, Ruth (thirtyish, slim, dark hair, beanie), on the vexed question of onomatopoeia. At the age of seven she queried a sign in a supermarket saying “10 ITEMS OR LESS”: “Daddy, shouldn’t that be FEWER?” She also appears in Gone Tomorrow as “a girl with a rat terrier” going along Broadway near the Flatiron Building. Now she was visiting with a couple of two-legged friends and their dog, an amiable and shaggy variety. They were all standing in the kitchen.
“I’ve got this scene,” he was saying, “in which I blow this guy’s brains out. A through-and-through shot. There’s a big hole in the wall and ‘blah blah the contents of his brain pan arrived to fill it, with a wet slap.’ Wet slap—why is that onomatopoeic? It is, isn’t it? Is it the plosives?”
She was clearly used to having her father blow someone’s brains all over the wall, and was coolly analyzing the phrase down into its phonemic parts: “ ‘T’ is a voiceless alveolar stop…dental fricative…‘p,’ a voiceless labial stop.” She made various trilling and chirruping noises to go with it.
I wondered if we might be projecting the sense onto the sound. For example, would Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony sound quite so pastoral if we didn’t have the word “pastoral” attached to it: the storm scene sounds like a storm because of the word “storm.” And so on. Lee said, “The cuckoo definitely sounds like a cuckoo.”
“Does West Side Story sound like the West Side? Or only because of the words ‘West Side’?”
Lee said, “You know that song, ‘Somewhere’?”
“There’s—a—place—for—us…”
“It’s right there in Beethoven’s piano concerto. 5th. T
he Emperor. Top of the second movement, the first violin figure. Ta—da—dum—ta—da.”
Which somehow got us back to talking about suicide. Again, Ruth and her friends didn’t seem to mind. I had been listening to Philip Glass’s 2nd violin concerto once—the slow movement—when a guy went hurtling past my window. Going down. A slow movement combined with a very fast movement. Followed by a voiceless stop.
“What floor was this?” (Lee)
“I was on the third floor. One of those NYU buildings on Bleecker.”
“Not high enough,” he said.
“The guy lived on the seventeenth.”
“Ninety-three percent probability of mortality.”
He snapped this back at me in a nanosecond. His daughter gave him this look that seemed to say: trust you to know that!
“Shotgun to the head, ninety-nine percent,” he went on. “Handgun to the mouth, ninety-seven percent. Jumping in front of a train is right up there at ninety-six percent. Driving into a concrete bridge support a mere seventy percent, but it goes up to seventy-nine percent with a seatbelt, surprisingly. Self-immolation, barely seventy-six percent. You might as well not bother. And it hurts like hell.”
“I always wonder about the guy on his way down,” I said. “He’d had an argument with his wife apparently. So instead of going out the front door and going to a bar and getting drunk the way he could so easily have done, he goes out the back door, the fast way. But on the way down, do you think he could have had a change of heart? It must have been a good couple of seconds. He could have thought, Whoa that was dumb. Or at least oops.”
“Eighty-two percent of people who jump off the Golden Gate Bridge and survive say that they changed their minds on the way down.”
Still I’m not sure if he actually does “research” as such. Information just sticks to him. “It’s almost all trivia,” he said. He gave one example, or possibly two. It concerned a Super Bowl some years ago. Britney Spears was singing at halftime. And the show was sponsored by Pepsi-Cola. Lee Child had a sudden insight. He realized two things: that “Britney Spears” was an anagram of “Presbyterians”; and that Pepsi-Cola was an anagram of “Episcopal.”