by Andy Martin
I think something like this was happening when I sat in Jack’s café on Sixth and looked across the street and said to myself: Aha! The [Hard Way] fireplug! (No Mercedes with a million dollars inside, alas.)
THE PROPOSAL OF A ROMANTIC NOVELIST
IT WASN’T THE FIRST time Reacher had been under the care of doctors. Look, for example, at the end of Tripwire, where he has been shot (while amply reciprocating), and is hors de combat for several weeks. And in Gone Tomorrow a paramedic is about to administer a painkiller (Reacher warns him off), but this is only after Reacher has been laid out by the kind of anesthetic dart normally used to knock out a gorilla. But this may be the first time that Reacher has walked into a doctor’s office while still conscious.
On the one hand this shows the seriousness of the injury Reacher has sustained (from the blow to the head). But it also shows how seriously he takes the advice of Stashower. She insists, he—for once—accepts someone else’s advice to go and see a doctor. So it’s physiological and romantic all at once.
Lee was voicing both parts. It was like listening to Samuel Beckett playing Vladimir and Estragon. In this case it was Stashower checking on the sanity and cognitive abilities of Reacher. They are in the bathroom at the hotel in San Francisco, where Reacher has been checking to see if he can still walk in a straight line. Soon they will go about acquiring weaponry (mainly from local drug dealers). As a final test, Reacher has to recite the opening of the Gettysburg Address, which he does rather well. The next morning, as they leave the hotel, the journalist Westwood is complaining that some lunatic kept him awake reciting the Gettysburg Address. A shift of point of view, so that we see the full absurdity of Reacher.
Lee laughing at his own hero.
But he mainly had in mind the evolving relationship between Reacher and Stashower. Reacher has never before been quite as vulnerable as he is here, physically and emotionally. As he says, there is a “first time” for everything—as he goes meekly to the clinic. But, more pertinent, is this Reacher falling in love? Is this conceivably a durable relationship?
“Now the romance has deepened, logic dictates that Stashower should be shot and killed, so as to liberate Reacher all over again. You know, have someone blow her brains out. So I’m not going to do that. I’ve made a crucial strategic decision. Stashower gets to live.”
Lee admitted he had been sentimentally affected by a woman. He had been out for a drink with her the previous evening and she had been offering him some romantic advice. Made a serious proposal in fact. “Give Reacher a longer relationship,” she said.
M. J. Rose was a writer and publicist and specialist in romantic fiction. She and Lee liked to get together from time to time and talk insider talk. But she was also very much a Reacher fan. And she basically loved Reacher. “So she was seeing it all from a Stashower point of view,” Lee said. “I gave her a few details. Naturally she wanted to keep it going. Didn’t want her killed off just as their relationship is warming up. She would go on a date with Reacher like a shot.” What M.J. was loving in particular was that Reacher was “not lonely anymore,” that there was someone “taking care” of him for a change, looking after his needs. And he was admitting that he had needs, which was a rarity in itself. And this is what she was voting for. More of that. She argued that readers (women readers in particular) would really appreciate it.
You could call it a cliffhanger of sorts: Reacher’s major relationship with Jodie, daughter of General Garber, in Tripwire. Which tumbles into the next one (The Visitor—Running Blind in the U.S.), before she dumps him, in favor of a career move to London. “The women are too smart for him,” said Lee. “That’s what happens. Then he takes it out on the bad guys.” But at least he gets a temporary stay of relationship execution: in effect, a romantic enjambment overflowing from one book into the next. And maybe something similar could work here, in Make Me.
Having admitted to being “influenced” by his romantic publicist, taking her advice just as Reacher was taking Stashower’s, Lee argued that you could reasonably draw a parallel between the thriller and romantic fiction. “They both offer the kind of satisfaction you don’t get in real life. Not often.” There was “a similarity in mechanism,” in his phrase. In one genre, you are granted one wish (get rid of anyone who arouses your anger); in the other, you are granted a second (go to bed with someone who arouses your desire). Hypothetical wish-fulfillment. With built-in safe sex. “You finally get to fly to the Caribbean with a beautiful woman,” he said. “Or, in your case, Cincinnati.”
WHERE IS THE PIPE?
THIS IS WHAT REACHER wanted to know: Where exactly was the exhaust pipe? He was analyzing Google Earth photos of Mother’s Rest. According to the website there ought to be an old Chevy with its exhaust pipe all hooked up. The website was very precise and very lyrical about it. That and the Nembutal and the concierge service in a restful ambiance. No way of checking the Nembutal, of course, but from the photographs you could reasonably infer there was no exhaust pipe. Therefore, Reacher is justified in concluding: “their website is a lie.” As he has been saying for some time: There has to be more.
It had been Lee’s slogan since before September 1: there has to be more, and more, and more. And there still would be more, in the final sequence. Discoveries must be made as well as justice being seen to be done. No one really knew the awful truth. So there was a twin track to be followed, at once military and epistemological (adversaries decreased, knowledge increased). And then, looking further ahead (another chess move, approaching checkmate), the “wind-down.” Lee spoke like a grand master who knew that he had won, even though the game was far from over. “I’m feeling a sense of relief,” he said.
He was back in the chair; I was back on the couch. “The great thing is—I managed to miss out the middle again. Just like last time [in Personal]. The chorus is belting out the ‘Ode to Joy.’ ” He had adopted my Beethoven’s 9th analogy. “We’re at the point where the final theme is stated with total conviction.” There would be a “pastoral moment” and then “all hell will break loose.”
I remembered how much he said he hated the middle phase. Which might kick in around day two. After the “gorgeous feeling” had dissipated and then the hard work began, like Sisyphus, or like Jack Reacher digging yet another swimming pool, by hand, shoveling and sweating. “So you mean you kept the beginning going all the way until it just blended right into the end? It was just a single continuous stream of inquiry?”
“The middle would be like…a digression. You’re going off at a tangent. You really have to work at it. I didn’t have to do that. It was more like…going downhill all the way. I didn’t feel like I was adding, I was only leaving stuff out.” He liked words like ellipsis, elision, eliding, which all implied an aesthetics of omission (leipō = “I leave”).
“It’s like, I’ve left the first trapeze. I’m flying through the air. Are you going to grab hold of the other one swinging towards you? Or are you going to crash? I know now, I’m definitely going to make it.” The first trapeze and the second trapeze: the beginning and the ending. Somehow he had managed to swing from one to the other without touching earth in between. A high-wire act. There was no middle. That was the ellipsis.
He was looking back over Chapter 51 with a view to making a start on 52, swinging from one small trapeze onto another. Enjambment, overflowing into the next line. “One thing I’ve noticed,” he said. “If you polish the dialogue, till it sounds right in your head, if you write it properly, it sounds right in any accent. It can sound like Michael Caine, it can sound like Tony Curtis, it still comes out right.”
“So what accent does Reacher have in your mind? Does he have one?”
“Well, he was in the army, which is homogenous, with everyone sounding like everyone else. But I hear it as slightly inarticulate, slightly downbeat…a bit like Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves.”
“The voiceover. Right, like a diary. Reportage. But naive.”
“That was fo
undational for Reacher, I can’t deny. A major influence. But also, speaking of voiceovers: Do you remember Days of Heaven? Richard Gere. But the voiceover—it’s the point of view of a young girl. Magnificently laconic. Her voice was so sensationally economical—the elision, the nuance—I knew that was what I wanted for Reacher.”
“What about Beckett? Talking of laconic. I know you’ve seen Godot thirty-nine times. That must have had an impact?”
“Remember how much I hated that production with Ian McKellen and…who was it?”
“Patrick Stewart.”
“Yes, those two. They played it like they were end-of-the-pier comedians in Blackpool. But the thing you have to remember is that Beckett was not English. He was an Irishman writing in French. And thinking in French. The key to understanding it is, it’s French not English.”
Lee, like Beckett, was coming at another language, i.e., American English, from the outside. He spoke it fluently, he inhabited it, or it inhabited him (his accent was somewhere between Michael Caine and Tony Curtis), but he was always conscious of its strangeness at the same time. He didn’t take “backhoe” for granted, for example. Or “elevator.” He was also a great fan, oddly enough, of “blacktop.” Every now and then he had a problem, for example, with the phrase “Not a problem!” “I ask for a coffee and someone says, ‘Not a problem!’ and I think, well, in what conceivable universe could selling a paying customer a cup of coffee be a problem?” (Although he blamed this phrase mainly on the Australians. Similarly the abbreviation “uni,” for university, which he hated.)
I went back to Days of Heaven. The young girl’s voiceover is oblique, fragmentary, flat, affectless, but at the same time wonderfully evocative of a mood and a life in constant crisis. There is a point towards the end of the film where everything is coming apart (several deaths and a plague of locusts) but the girl and Bill (Richard Gere) and Abby (Brooke Adams) are sailing away from it all down a broad river. “You could see people on the shore,” the girl (V.O.) is saying. “But it was far off and you couldn’t see what they were doing. Prob’ly calling for help—or trying to bury somebody or something.”
Calling for help and trying to bury somebody: they were prob’ly the twin themes of Make Me. And that scene helped to explain another of Lee’s metaphors, when he was talking about how he liked to steal from movies. “We’re all in the same river.”
But that wasn’t really the point. The point was that Lee didn’t have a narrative “voice” at all, he had only a narrative voiceover. And the point about the voiceover is that it never has to tell you everything. You are relying on the movie to do that. The voiceover is an extra layer of information, going off from the narrative at an angle, with a particular perspective and accent and bias all its own. It had a built-in inadequacy. It left out nearly everything. It was commentary, a form of meta-discourse. You didn’t really need it, à la rigueur, but I had a soft spot for it myself (try to imagine, for example, Big Wednesday without it; or Stand by Me).
Setting aside all talk of Tom Cruise, goats (“the book was better”), and that time he got invited to dinner by a movie star and turned her down (“it would have been overly exciting”), I think I had finally worked out a general law as regards the Lee Child philosophy of the relationship of text to film:
Life is a moving picture; the book is a voiceover.
STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN
IN AN IDEAL WORLD, we should have been singing the “Ode to Joy,” preferably in the original German. If I were scripting this, it would have been “21st Century Schizoid Man” (King Crimson); if Lee were scripting, I would guess, an old Led Zeppelin song, maybe “Stairway to Heaven.” In fact, our duet went like this:
“Now hands that do dishes can feel soft as your face…
With mild green Fairy Liquid.”
We were rehearsing a bunch of classic TV commercials. No good reason. Unless it was something to do with “a portal on the culture.” Lee fondly recalled the old Oxo ads and Hamlet cigars and “a Mars a day helps you work, rest, and play.” And “the sweet you can eat between meals” (Milky Way). He recalled that the Chesterfields ad had a big impact on him as a kid: “Doctors say, for the sake of your throat, smoke Chesterfields!” He didn’t care if it was a total lie. In a way, it was actually true.
Lee (taking a defiant, doctor-certified drag on his Camel): “Doctors, having been paid a generous sum by Chesterfields, really were saying it. Maybe they even believed it. Or was that Lucky Strike? Whatever. Everyone was smoking then. Look at JFK, the Oliver Stone movie. Remember those documentary clips? They’re all smoking! The entire Warren Commission. Ashtrays all over the desks. It was hard work trying to fit up Oswald for the crime; they needed a fag.”
He was supposed to be working on the “pastoral scene,” purely descriptive, a tranquil prelude to the final showdown. But he was more critical than Goldilocks. “This has to be exactly right,” he was saying. “But is it?” This was the detached, omniscient perspective. He had his feet up on the desk, looking at the screen from afar. Then he sat up. “Am I making the same point twice here?” I noticed that the word “infinite” or “infinitely” was coming up. It’s dawn. Lee was describing the transition between night and day. A gradual blossoming of light over Mother’s Rest. He had used the word “lumen,” which he agreed was a “rarity.” There was a celestial or cosmological feel to the writing, with reference to the stratosphere and stars and luminosity. A hint of “Stairway to Heaven” after all. Or Phoebus and his chariot. And a reminiscence of Shakespeare or Chaucer or maybe Wordsworth in the description of the day invading the night. “Okay, I’m taking out a few words here. I hate doing that. But I’m pushing the image too hard.”
He lit up another Camel. He was stringing the cigarettes more tightly together, like pearls on a necklace. He said of water (which I was drinking), “What’s the point, unless it has been run through a coffee machine?” And he felt something similar about air—what was the point of breathing in air not laced with nicotine?
He hopped up to make coffee. There was a big glass jar of cookies on the table in the kitchen. “Chocolate chip?” I asked.
“Oatmeal raisin,” he corrected. “My fruit intake for the day.”
“So this chapter is lyrical?”
“But we also have to have the sense of a configuration of forces. Players on the board. It’s the calm before the storm. But there is a sense of anxiety: Is it too quiet?”
We are back at the desk. The nothingness is back. The vastness and emptiness of the open plain. “They’re staring out into the nothingness…But now it’s working against them.” Lee was gradually bringing in the point of view of the sentries manning the ramparts of Mother’s Rest, specifically the immense grain silos, which are like watch towers or a panopticon.
Lee stared at the screen. “How much nothingness? That is the question.” It was a semi-Hamlet-like mini-soliloquy. “Before something starts up.” He more or less answered his own question. “I feel it should plow straight ahead now. No artificial delays!”
I couldn’t help wondering: “Any chance of the backhoe making a comeback? A come-backhoe?” I put my feet up on the couch, hands behind my head. Surveyed all the framed photos of New York Times bestseller lists with his name right at the top (Worth Dying For, 61 Hours, One Shot, etc., etc.).
Lee nodded as if to say, of course. Not taking his eyes off the screen. His Tintin quiff leaned into it like the cornice of a rock face overhang. “That backhoe has definitely been in the back-hoe of my mind. It could be something unexpected. For example, here we are at Mother’s Rest. But the bad place is twenty miles south of here at an isolated farm. How do you get Reacher from one to the other? What kind of vehicle can he acquire? Maybe he could improvise with all that agricultural equipment. Could he drive a backhoe all the way there? Or a bulldozer?”
I thought that would suit him, physiologically: big, bulky, never going to be elegant, but, yes, very effective.
“It’s all beginning now. There’s s
omething incoming from the West. Then something else from the East. Train from the South. And then I thought I’d throw in a couple of helicopters. God knows what they are supposed to be doing. This is going to be good. It’s exciting. But it’s also: What the fuck is going on?”
RISEN AGAIN
“TWO MOMENTOUS items to report.”
That was it. Lee’s emails tended to be terse. As always I had to know. So I headed on over to his place. But, unlike his, my narrative was digressive. There was a definite middle phase. It was Easter Sunday after all, it deserved a digression.
Beginning: (gorgeous feeling) I set out from Charlton Street, the sun on my back, caught my usual C train at West 4th. But got out at 59th and backtracked and sidetracked till I hit Fifth Avenue around 49th.
Middle: (digression) Fifth Avenue on Easter Day—it’s not a hat party, it’s a ritual hat orgy, Dionysian hat revelry, hat frenzy. I was wearing my Orlando Palacios from Worth & Worth (Joel, sick of me borrowing his, had insisted), technically known as a “Belmondo”: coffee-colored, with a big brim, and a band. Up against stiff competition from the likes of people wearing wedding cakes, or buckets of eggs, or pink rabbit ears, or bowls of fruit. One guy actually had a black cat on his head, but eventually the cat got tired of all the attention and sloped off.
I was there mainly for the organ recital at St. Thomas Church on 53rd. A Rutter organ duet (how rare is that?), some rousing Bach and Duruflé, but also a lovely, lyrical, ethereal piece by Widor, “Choral” from his Symphonie Romane (hitherto unknown to me). Everything else cried out “the anguish and the triumph” (to recall the title of that Beethoven biography), but the Widor was toned-down and blissed-out. Obviously we were all resurrected, sublime and shimmering, there was no struggle about it, no pain. It reminded me of Fauré’s Requiem, gentle and lilting, lots of piccolo, almost like a lullaby: Oh death where is thy sting? No Underworld, no Dantean descent into the inferno, no wrestling with the Minotaur, just an elevator direct to Paradiso. It was tempting. I could understand the customers lining up at Mother’s Rest.