by Andy Martin
End (finally): the second trapeze. Central Park West. Sitting by the window. Sun and air. White mug, black coffee.
“Momentous item one?”
“I’ve just passed the 100,000-word mark. It’s really a thriller now” (Lee counted 60k romance; 80k mystery; 100k thriller). “I think it’s even specified in my contract.” I was only on eighty-something, he’d gone zooming past me, Porsche Carrera to my Chevy.
“Momentous item two?”
“Stashower is dead.”
“What!?” Italics and underline. “What about the romantic enjambment and everything?” I felt obscurely betrayed.
“It’s okay. It’s still on. Stashower is dead. But long live Chang. I’ve changed the name.”
“Chang. Tintin’s best friend. Chinese. Appears first in The Blue Lotus, then decades later in Tintin in Tibet. Tintin somehow knows he is lost in the Himalayas and rescues him from the yeti. Boy, not girl.” It wasn’t until later that the obvious point occurred to me that Chang is just Change minus the “e.” “First name?”
“Still Michelle. Look,” he said, “I got it from here.” He pointed to an orange spine on the shelf over his head. Another book. Not Daniel Stashower’s obviously. The Rape of Nanking, by Iris Chang. Japan invading China. Same story Hergé was telling. Massacre. All of history right there.
“There were just too many syllables! Stash-ow-er. I was compressing it to two in my head, more like Sta-shaur or something, but it’s not going to work for the reader. It’s that ‘sh’ in the middle—it’s really intrusive. Affects the rhythm. When I think of this character in my head, I think: Great! There is coherence and there is development. But there is something wrong for sure.”
“For shower.”
“Exactly. It’s the name. In my head she is Asian. There’s a way she has of talking to Reacher. There is an Asian inflection in her voice.”
“Chinese specifically. So she’s American Chinese.”
“I don’t want to generalize. Or stereotype. I’m drawing on several Asian friends here. She’s still big, she doesn’t have to be small. What I had in my head was not what I had on the page. It was jarring all the time. I’m not doing this for diversity in the Reacher world. There was a dissonance, and I finally figured out what it was.”
“One syllable. More compact, economical. Said Chang. That works.”
“And it’s something to do with her respect for hierarchy, authority, structure. Which Reacher doesn’t have. She didn’t like getting dumped out of the FBI. Even owned up about where she’d blown it. Now the name fits the character. It didn’t before.”
It was momentous. The name Stashower will no longer appear in his book (read it and see). I was glad that she would live on, phantasmatically, in mine. I was preserving the heritage, the ancestry, the secret archaeology of Chang. Saving her from total oblivion. She had been through a lot already. She deserved some kind of recognition.
He was lying there on the sofa, looking sphinxlike behind a veil of smoke, satisfied at having all at once annihilated Stashower and yet resurrected her as Chang. “Do you remember those Tintin cartoons on television?”
Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin! We both put on the booming, melodramatic voiceover voice (halfway towards the big fight introduction).
“Do you know what my mother thought that was?” Lee said. “Thursday’s Adventures of Tintin.” She could never work out why it would be showing on a Monday or Tuesday.”
—
Lee emailed me the following day:
I always heard her voice the same, and when I thought about her without view of the text she seemed of-a-piece and coherent. But when I read what I wrote I kept tripping up on some hidden disconnect. Eventually I realized her manner/cadences/reactions (and possibly what I saw as her self-image, to get really heavy) were essentially Asian-American, and it was the “Stashower” name that was tripping me up—implying essentially a whole different cultural inheritance that didn’t match what I had in my head. Changing (ha!) the name snapped the whole thing into focus, and it feels like a big relief. Like taking a stone out of my shoe.
THE BALDACCI PROGRAM
THERE WERE ONLY FOUR sequences left to write (as far as Lee could work out, looking ahead):
1. Get down there (south to the isolated farm)
2. Oh my God, look at this!
3. Kill all these guys
4. Wrap it up
“I’ve definitely got a firm grip on the second trapeze.” There were certain matters he was still a little anxious about. Speed for one (or “pace management”). The temptation is to go fast: you’re approaching the end, let’s speed it all up. “But then you run into the reader who complains that the ending feels rushed. They want to savor it, to spin it out.” But there was an alternative criticism: this drags! Somehow he had to find the right balance between rushing and dragging. The answer, he thought, was to “vary it, so some of these scenes are fast, some slow.”
It all made sense. I’d just been rereading Gone Tomorrow in which he does just this in a complex fight scene with two women (sadistic al Qaeda ops), three knives and several chairs, a whole blood-spattered choreography, but then followed by a moment in which Reacher, worn out and himself badly cut, simply strangles one of them. It’s blunt, emphatic, pulls no punches.
But there was something else that occurred to me only then, for no particular reason. “I was thinking…I’m writing all this down.”
“So?”
“Do you think it’s possible some smart cookie at Google is going to come along and read all this and turn it into a piece of software that can write virtual Lee Child novels from now till kingdom come? Are you giving too much away?”
I mentioned the classic structuralist essay by Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roman Jakobson on Baudelaire’s “Les Chats.” A gorgeous sonnet about…cats? But Lévi-Strauss and Jakobson do not ask themselves the dreaded “about” question at all. No, they focus on the rules: the phonology, the grammar, the syntax, the metrics, and how they intersect one with another. What they are not interested in could be summarized as the “soul of the poet.” They don’t really care if Baudelaire owned a cat or was having an affair with somebody at the time or had been gloomily pondering his own inescapable fate. It’s twenty pages on a fourteen-line poem and at the end of it you have in your hand enough in the way of rules to write a computer program for generating a decent sonnet. It was pure Turing, solving the “enigma” of the poem, reducing it to code.
“Right now,” I said, “I can probably take a few words, feed them into a program, and produce an utterly pointless poem of some kind.”
“You’re wondering if you could do something similar with a novel?”
“One of your novels specifically. Could it all be done by a machine? A ‘Reacher engine.’ Maybe you could relax and go and lie on a beach or watch the Yankees all day?”
“Logically, it has to be possible,” Lee said. “The ‘Deep Blue’ of fiction.”
“Or HAL.”
“Whenever anyone asks me where does one of my ideas come from, I always think: from reading. Read enough books, you can write anything. You’re extrapolating in some way from what already exists. And you can get a machine to read everything now. Think of the Gutenberg Project. You can easily imagine, if everything is digitized, you could come up with an algorithm. Just feed it all in and see what pops out.”
“Like a Pop-Tart?”
“You could call it the Baldacci Program.”
“When Barthes predicted the Death of the Author he didn’t realize Baldacci would be taking over,” I said. “It’s a bit like Pet Sematary again: your pet is brought back to life, it’s there, but it’s a mess. Death is better.”
“You’d get the flats but none of the peaks. No flair or spark.” None of the madness, or the sublime confidence, or divine furor, or the chip-on-the-shoulder aggro. How can a machine have a chip on its shoulder?
Lee mentioned the software he uses for screenplays, “Final Draft.�
�� “It’s brilliant, you only have to write, ‘S’ and the name ‘Stashower’ pops up. It spaces it all out for you. And sometimes I’m tempted, writing this novel, to wonder if there is a bit of software I could use to do something similar here. But then I think—no, I like to have total control over every last keystroke. No auto-correct. And the spaces on the page.”
Perhaps this explained why Reacher harked back to the analog age. He didn’t really want everything to be reducible to binary bits and bytes. Not long before, Lee had written this line: “He heard the whoosh of her email or text or whatever.” He has adapted but he is not really interested in participating. His life of violence is in part a revolt against digitization. He still has the “soul of the poet.” Half Rambo, half Rimbaud.
I couldn’t help but notice, however, that when Reacher goes into the bookstore in his concussed state and starts “rambling” about books, he adopts a fundamentally binary attitude. He decides he prefers fiction to nonfiction.
And, after due reflection, he comes to the conclusion that there are essentially only two genres: “Either shit happens, or it doesn’t.”
ON THE SOFA
LEE CHILD WAS LYING on the sofa, shoes off, eyes closed, the smoke from the cigarette between his fingers curling lazily up to the ceiling.
“I know, I’m lying on the sofa with my eyes closed. But—this is going to sound self-serving—this is work. It is. Honest!”
When he went back to the keyboard he tapped out another couple of paragraphs, then he got up again and paced around. He had reached that stage of the novel where he was as tense as Reacher with a gun in his hand. He had to keep jumping up and making coffee or lighting the nth cigarette of the day (I saw a modest cairn of virgin packs of Camels piled up on a table like backup ammo) or watching the whole of Aston Villa drawing 3–3 with QPR, or going for a working lie-down.
Still, it was disconcerting: like seeing the captain desert the bridge. Or get up and leave the cockpit and stroll around the plane, chatting with passengers, having a drink and a snack, and all along his maniac copilot is at the controls, and possibly sabotaging the autopilot.
I had been reading the Stephen King book On Writing. “Stephen King says you have to stay put in that room with the door closed until the two thousand words are done, or you are not serious.”
“I like that voice of his. Comfortable. Like he’s sitting on a country porch somewhere telling you his tale.” In Under the Dome King has one of his characters call up Major Jack Reacher for a reference, so the admiration was mutual.
“You have to have loud rock music pounding away too.”
“I’ve never understood how he can do that. Led Zeppelin fan though I am. I’m trying to keep the beat of my own music—and someone else’s melody is cutting across it. Not to mention lyrics. It would be such a jarring clash. Dissonant. Or I’d surrender to some other rhythm.”
“He says you can have a lie-down afterwards.”
He was back on the sofa. Well, it was a different sofa, but still a sofa. Gazing up at the ceiling again. He said he would sometimes stretch out on my couch if the housekeeper was roaming around, but otherwise he liked to change the space too, to get away from the keyboard for a moment. “I think I would say it’s almost the opposite. The best thinking is done horizontally. It’s not a departure, it’s part of the writing day. You see, when you’re in there typing, there’s a certain amount of sheer drudgery involved, mere secretarial work, it’s technical—I’m typing for goodness’ sake, doing stupid things like correcting spelling errors and so forth—whereas here it’s pure…it’s pure something, anyway, there’s no typing. Full-on daydreaming. You’re more in the zone lying down with your eyes closed. It’s like…I’m going to the top row of seats in the stadium: I can see the whole field from here.”
All these sofas in the apartment: they weren’t sofas, they were workstations.
“Do you ever get inspired when you’re on the subway or walking down the street?”
“I’ve written a few sentences on napkins.”
“No notebook?”
“Like you, you mean? Constantly jotting? Too weird! My basic rule is, if you can’t remember it, it probably wasn’t worth remembering.”
He was in the middle of Chapter 55. He had changed things around, the way he always did. Drift was built into the narrative. Two sequences, “getting down there” (1) and “killing all these guys” (3) had merged somewhat. He wasn’t going to kill all of them all at once, but “I couldn’t wait,” he said. He was confident it would leave more time for (2) “oh my God what the fuck is this!?” The revelation section was very important, he argued. This book was a real exception to the general rule where Reacher was concerned. Normally Reacher would have it all figured out before he launched a full-scale assault; in Make Me we are about to “breach the walls,” but he is still fundamentally baffled or at least puzzled: so Reacher and the reader would make the discovery at the same time.
“It’s great: we still don’t know! The very first question and it’s still unanswered.”
The POV had swung around again, so that we had shifted away from the Mother’s Rest sentries back to Reacher (now in a diner) and his allies (Chang—the artist formerly known as Stashower—and Westwood the journalist).
“Are you going to let the bad guys tell their story?” I thought it would be fair, given that we have had multiple points of view in the narrative. “To explain why they are doing what they are doing. They have some kind of logic after all.” I recalled that Reacher didn’t give the obese Merchenko a chance to state his case.
Lee smiled and nodded. “I thought I’d turn that around 180 degrees. You know, Reacher would think about killing him straight out but the guy speaks first. A chance to spin his version.”
“Do you know what he’s going to say?”
Lee had totally inhabited the mind of evil. “They paid for this! They volunteered. Didn’t they relinquish all rights when they walked in here? And anyway, we have to make a few cents on the deal. It’s win-win!” He paused, slipped out of character again. “It’s like body disposal, but shifting it up a gear. Depraved moral agenda, of course. But it’s an attitude. It has to make some kind of sense. You have to find it plausible that someone would think that. Maybe he can finally explain the origin of the name Mother’s Rest while he’s at it?”
He got up and drifted off again, saying, “I’ve got to go and think.” I had to take a peek at the screen, naturally. There was stuff about a “second exit” and the word “trapdoor” came up at least twice. I had the keyboard in front of me. For a moment I toyed with the idea of slipping in a line from Proust or James Joyce, in a spirit of sheer vandalism, but I let it slide. Child was fine just the way he was. I found him having another lie-down. He had a cigarette between his fingers and an ashtray poised on his chest.
“What are they doing?” he was muttering to himself, smacking ash off the tip of his cigarette. “Who are they? How did they get there?” No wonder he was having to drift again: fundamental questions still unanswered.
“So what’s all this about trapdoors, then? Sounds like Houdini or something.”
“Oh yeah, you know what you were saying about the Underworld?” We had been riffing on Theseus and Orpheus and Dante and Reacher’s basement scene on Easter Sunday. “It’s right. We need to go down again. It’s only fair. We start off burying. We have to dig down again. To get right to the bottom.” The archaeological mind at work. “And it fits with the idea of the deep web. The underground bunker. It’s a natural. Something you can’t see from a satellite. It has to be invisible from aboveground. It’s not going to show up on Google Earth obviously. So it’s an allegory. But I don’t have to labor the point.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I can do that.”
THE END IS NIGH
“THE END IS NIGH.” I had actually seen a sign saying that on Fifth Avenue. The prophet was also suggesting I might want to consider repenting before it was too late and I was judge
d and found wanting. And it was true, I was really worried about the end.
Lee, just like the Fifth Avenue evangelical, had been anticipating the Rapture for some time. As I’ve said, he is a nonteleological thinker at heart, noneschatological, but as soon as he was over the 100,000-word mark, he automatically started thinking in terms of wrapping it all up. I basically hated for a Reacher novel to come to an end. I was one of those readers who would moan about him rushing the ending. Slow down, you bastard, I was saying to myself. There must be more! (as he/Reacher would say). “King says he can write 150,000 words in three months.”
“Workaholic!” he said, with a degree of exasperation. “I’m such a lazybones. But the trapeze is carrying me on. I’m still swinging.” He was over 105,000 now. “But look, what if I have a Reacher novel of 300,000 or 400,000 words. Something massive in your hand. Like Lord of the Rings.”
“Or A la recherche du temps perdu. About a million or so.”
“That’s going to look pretty weird, isn’t it? The Enemy was 140,000. I think the market has gotten slicker. I don’t think readers will tolerate something that huge and unwieldy.”
But there was another thing. It wasn’t just that I didn’t really want the novel to come to an end. After having kept track of the text for so long, faithfully following Reacher on his itinerary, getting off the train and then Oklahoma City and L.A. and San Francisco and finally back to Mother’s Rest, tracing his steps all the way back to the very beginning, I had a growing anxiety: What if I missed the ending? It was nigh, but what if I was at the other end of town or stuck on the subway or sitting in Think Coffee? And missed Lee’s final sentence. What then?