by Andy Martin
“You’d better get here early tomorrow,” he would say, filling me with alarm. “It could be all over. The contractions are coming thick and fast now.”
Then he’d email me. “Who am I kidding? There’s still loads of stuff to be done. No rush.”
WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT, THEN?
I WAS EXAMINING some of the books on the shelf: Dictionary of American Slang; Dictionary of Military Terms. Lee Child was worrying about tenses. This is what he had written:
“Guess how many files they had…” [The answer is 200…and now it had gone up to 209.]
“Does that sound like ‘the number of files they had already accumulated’ or just ‘the files they had on that particular day’? I can’t be too precise. Remember these are two guys talking in conditions of extreme stress.”
“Stick with the preterite,” I said. “Let the reader work it out.”
“Okay,” he said. Then he switched to the pluperfect. “It’s a ridiculously small nuance. But it’s better to get the tense right.” It was like he wanted to apologize for being so obsessive about matters of detail. More academic than an academic.
He leaned back and zoomed out. “Today is the Big Reveal.” Even though we both knew it was coming, it was still a magical moment, pure prestidigitation, pulling the rabbit—or something more like an elephant—out of the hat. It had taken Reacher and Co. this long to catch on. It was unbelievable. They had to physically see the evidence to believe it. The horror. “We are finally there. All my efforts, all the reader’s efforts, are at an end. But we don’t want to pile it on!” Lee hated to overdo anything (he called it lard or larding). “Less is more here. It’s the final oh-my-God moment. It only needs a few short pars.”
He said he felt “delicate” about it. For two reasons. (1) “You have to be not beating anyone over the head with it”; (2) Yes, the content was extreme. He would let the reader fill in the blanks. “But,” says he, swinging around, “you can’t afford to be coy about it either. Reacher is never coy.”
Lee comes up with a series of movie titles in this passage. “Which are banal but economical” (e.g., McCann and his friend become “Sad Couple with Something to Be Sad About”).
“We have arrived at exactly that,” he said. That was the secret at the core of Mother’s Rest. We had started discussing it in January. “But the route we have taken could not have been predicted.”
Lee was feeling pleased that the various “ideas” that he had “cast out” at the beginning were now “coming together.”
I can personally testify, hand on heart, that when Lee Child wrote that first sentence about Keever back in September, he really had no idea what that was. That emerged spontaneously. “People are going to say it was all cunningly plotted.” There was a note of sadness in his voice. He would be unable to convince the die-hard skeptics. “It looks planned, but it totally isn’t. I’m really happy with the way it is all tying up. It’s vectoring in. It’s a good trajectory. But I didn’t know what was ahead when I cast off.”
His technique of drifting could be better thought of as surfing: there was a lot of art in just staying on your feet and avoiding the wipe-out, let alone doing it stylishly, but it all depended on the wave; without the wave there was nothing. Lee didn’t think it was the unconscious at work (“it could have bubbled up, but that’s all unfalsifiable, and it doesn’t feel like it”). Nor that his narrative was a “found object,” as Stephen King would have it: “You can have found scenes, the ones you have no intention of writing at all.” But there were too many “strands” to a narrative for it to be found. “Imagine a boy dives down into the sea and comes up with a pearl. You’d be impressed, wouldn’t you? But now what would you say if you knew that the boy had previously scattered a whole lot of pearls on the seabed? It’s not so impressive, is it?”
He was satisfied that now (after the Big Reveal) readers would understand “what the book is all about.”
“Do you know what it’s all about?”
Lee thought the “about” question was fair. He didn’t mind answering it, but he would give different answers depending on the occasion. “There used to be this slogan in publishing, there were supposed to be just three words that would govern all the communications between author and editor and printing and publicizing, everyone. And the first two of those words were: It’s about…So I’d say it’s about suicide.”
Lee believed in the right to self-directed death or “assisted dying” (and invoked Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande). “It’s a calm and ethical argument,” he said. “But if you look at it through the lens of thriller requirements, obviously I had to throw in some doubts. There always had to be more. It was never going to be just suicide. One word, it’s ridiculous. Give me forty-five minutes on NPR and I’ll give you a better answer.”
This is just a voiceover. Or voices. I’m leaving out all the movie. Condensing (“Dichten = condensare,” Ezra Pound). Lee was always tapping or hopping up and down and making coffee or going to put his feet up for five minutes and so on. I would go and stand by the window. Across the street the gray bones of Central Park were finally greening up.
And the situation he was describing or unfolding on the page—the that was hurting him, even as he was writing it. Lee (lying down on sofa): “You know, I think this is the most…affecting thing I’ve written.”
I was lying on the couch, looking up at the model plane that dangled from the light fixture in the middle of the ceiling. I sort of wondered if, although he himself believed in the right to die, he had nevertheless conspired to undermine the case, by showing how it could be exploited. He felt he had covered all sides of the argument, one way and another, but that it always came back in the end to Reacher. “Reacher is a bit like Spock (of Star Trek fame), he is crippled by logic. It’s like he is actually handicapped by it. No one asks to be born, he realizes.”
“It’s the Heidegger argument, isn’t it? We are thrown into the world. The condition of thrownness (Geworfenheit).”
Lee was back at the keyboard now, so I was probably interfering with the forward momentum of the prose. For which I repent. “Reacher says, ‘So it’s like taking the sweater back to the store.’ You have a right. Of course, Reacher doesn’t even own a sweater and has never taken anything back to the store in his life. But readers have, so they will get the point.”
“Is there a point, then?”
“Nah, where would the point be? It’s all particles…More of an agon. I like that. A conflict. It has to be. This is my NPR version. It’s a novel about the collision between the ultra-new and the ultra-old. Fighting it out.”
“On the ultra-new side, it’s the Internet and DIY filmmaking. On the ultra-old, it’s…”
“Vicious bastards for seven million years.”
“And you’re saying the ultra-old is still…”
“Colonizing the new, yeah it must do.”
“So the Google Brave New World mentality? Everyone will behave better with a smartphone.”
“Are we making progress? I don’t think so. The funny thing is, there are so many references to Google in here, people are going to say it’s product placement. They haven’t paid me. We can delete that if they do. But it’s more a satire if anything.”
Lee thought it was part of being a “pro,” being able to answer the “about” question. It was like the “elevator pitch.” But he knew it was awkward and didn’t mind putting other people on the back foot with it. One day he was taking the subway at 34th. And there was a whole bunch of guys selling commentaries to the Bible. He put on his best English accent and pretended to be a tourist, just off the boat. And a particularly ill-read one at that. “Oh a commentary to the Bible, that’s nice,” he said to one of the pleasant young men manning the stall. “What’s this ‘Bible’ all about, then?”
“You haven’t read it, sir?” The kid was flummoxed.
“No,” he said. “I’ve heard the title a lot though. Tell me what it’s all about. Maybe I will.”
NO EXIT
“WE’RE THROUGH the oh-my-God,” Lee said. “It’s intricate. Which is why it’s been fun.”
He was still having to get up and roam around every fifteen minutes or so, trying to work out either what was happening or what might happen next. This was the problem, he said, of making it up as you go along. Even as he approached the end, he still wasn’t quite sure how he was going to get there. He wanted it to appear seamless, but it wasn’t. It was full of seams, he just hoped nobody would notice too much.
“They get into the farm. They hypothesize the remaining two guys are locked in the tornado shelter. They reason that guys like this—that anyone, really—will always have a second exit. They trap them by parking a car in the way. But…WHAT IS ALL THIS SCRAP METAL? It’s lying about the place. In front of the hatch. Is it bits of metal fencing? No, it looks all wrong for that. Oh my God, it’s manacles…”
“Instruments. Medieval.”
“The hardware horror that provides an intro to the software horror.”
There was one outstanding tactical question, to Lee’s way of thinking. How to introduce the real meaning of “Mother’s Rest.” Who was going to deliver the truth? It could be the main man at Mother’s Rest—as he is giving Reacher his spiel. But Lee felt that “seemed wrong.” It could be a local FedEx driver, a few chapters back. He might know, local knowledge and all. But Lee didn’t want to “shoehorn it in.” Lee felt it had to be something fairly left-field; it couldn’t be lame. He’d done all the lame explanations. A translation from the Arapaho? Could it come via Twitter? And therefore Westwood. And then Reacher would have to be educated in the way of Twitter.
“So it’s like talking, then?” says Reacher (this is the conversation Lee imagined).
“Yes, but it has to be less than 140 characters.”
“Works for me!” says Reacher, naturally laconic.
Reacher, meanwhile, in the midst of the “deeply affecting” scene, is still managing some kind of sardonic graveyard humor. He conjures up the title of a film that might be made about Westwood, had he been one of the Mother’s Rest customers, as he was purporting to be: “Hack Attack.”
Lee was still puzzling over what was going to happen to all his characters. So he went back to see if the previous paragraphs would give him some forward momentum. But then he shook his head and turned away from the screen with a kind of horror. “You know I mentioned optimism? You put these things down and you try to keep it crisp and economical and not beat anyone over the head—and then you go back…AND IT MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE!”
I mentioned the photograph in Gone Tomorrow that is eventually destroyed, unseen. No explanation of what was so embarrassing to Osama bin Laden. “Yes,” he said, “people don’t mind if you give up on the McGuffin. But they do get upset if you lose track of the minor characters. They really care about them. Do you remember Chester Stone and Marilyn Stone in Tripwire?”
“The businessman and his wife who get imprisoned and tormented by Hook Hobie?”
“Some readers wanted to know what really happened to them at the end of the story. Because it wasn’t there.”
“What did you tell them?”
“I tried to have a rational conversation about it. I tried to be smart. I said, ‘You tell me what you think happened to them!’ You know, your guess is as good as mine.”
“They didn’t like that, I bet.”
“They thought I was pulling their leg. How were they supposed to know?”
“Knowing—that was your job.”
“Why buy a dog and bark yourself? as they say in Yorkshire.”
Lee spent a few minutes pondering the word “they” in the text. There was an ambiguity over the pronoun. “It’s not clear who they are anymore,” he said. He replaced it in the end with the word “con men.” Reacher and his team would pin down the con men and get their story, their explanation. They knew where they were. Didn’t they?
“I feel a terrible need to list caveats all the time,” Lee said. “So, for example, there are two guys down there, right…UNLESS there are actually three, or maybe four, who knows? Sue Grafton said, ‘I know it’s true because I made it up myself.’ But I’m not so sure: each logical step has about a thousand caveats attached to it. They’re there, I just don’t spell them all out.”
Sometimes he felt he was stretching the “suspension of disbelief” so that it was “as long as the Severn Bridge.” But then again, he guessed that something like what he was describing was already happening. He had done this once before that he knew of: in A Wanted Man he had dreamed up a camp to house witnesses of undercover operations who had seen more than they should but were guilty of absolutely nothing: a sort of high-security motel. Then an FBI contact told him that they already had something just like this in the back of beyond. “Same thing here,” he said. “I’m not making this up at all. I’m probably not making it bad enough, that’s all.” He felt as though he was somehow intuiting stuff that he had no firm evidence about.
“I think it was Tom Clancy who said the difference between fiction and nonfiction was that fiction had to make sense. You know, cause and effect, culpability, crimes actually get solved, justice is really done.”
“It’s what Sartre said in Nausea: you have to choose, live or narrate, you can’t have both. The funny thing is you seem to get away with it. Because you don’t have an ending, you’re not working back from the ending, you are rolling forwards, not really knowing where you’re going, so it’s more like life.”
Lee was quite struck by this. But he didn’t turn around. He wasn’t typing but he peered more intently at the screen and everything he had written on it. He scrolled through a few pages. “This whole process is like living for me. I don’t want to know what’s coming. But also, in a very existential way, I am doing this Walter Mitty thing all day. But it’s exactly the same as living, isn’t it—it’s all just electricity in the brain.”
He plowed on for another paragraph or so. “A year from now,” he said, “my memory of all this will be about the same as if I had done all this. And it had all really happened.”
Then he tapped out a sentence and said (or sang or cried out) “Ta da!,” excited about what he had just written. “Look, this has all worked out quite nicely. I really like this passage. It’s efficient in so many ways. Descriptive and narrative. They’re in the basement, you come at it obliquely. You move the car blocking the second exit. Reacher and Chang take up positions around the hatch. Remember Reacher is still below par with the concussion. Here is the pedantry issue coming up. Look, Westwood flings back the hatch and…”
There was no hole.
Those were the last words Lee had written. A four-word sentence. It had only one “no,” but the “hole” kind of counted for a second. Like “no-no” almost. It was a double negation, a double bluff. No Exit. “This is a dummy exit!” Lee roared, as if to say, You idiot, Reacher! How could you miss it?
“He was suckered because he was not pedantic enough. He had forgotten about all the caveats. Suckered by a lack of pedantry. He should have been asking, hold on—what if there is a third or even a fourth exit? If there are two exits, then logically there can be an infinite number of exits.”
There was something Reacher had once said that came back to Lee now. “It was one of his most profound statements: You can’t hit a guy less than once.”
THE OPPOSITE OF THE CERN LARGE HADRON COLLIDER APPROACH
THE TRUTH WAS I had not read a single page of Make Me. I had read pixels of it on the screen. I had dipped into a few scrappy printouts. Not a genuine cast iron page among them. So I couldn’t say if it’s a “page-turner” or not. And like one of the worst-ever readers, it’s taken me between seven and eight months to plow through it (even though “it” did not fully exist for 99.99 percent of this period). Thus probably qualifying as the slowest ever read of a Reacher novel. By and large, people (and I includ
e myself in this baggy category) tend to “gobble” or “devour” the Reacher novel. It is “unputdownable.” Other commitments in life tend to get put aside. A baseball manager once texted Lee Child to say that he was glad there was a World Series rainout so he could carry on reading the latest Jack Reacher, just published. In any case it is clear that total and unstinting dedication to rushing through the novel at top speed is the norm, perhaps even a categorical imperative.
I, on the other hand, was limited to authorial speed. A cheetah having to get in step with a snail. I was taking a class in readerly slowness. And the surprising thing is: the “pleasure of the text” (or jouissance) was if anything only greater. If Phileas Fogg could go around the world in eighty days, then he could have done it twice in the time it had taken me to read Make Me. In fact, come to think of it, I still have not read Make Me: as of today, I still do not know how it ends. And there are whole chunks of the text the author has not allowed me to see and that therefore remain mysterious. And he is still going back and “churning” bits of it. So all in all I’m still nowhere near the end. Time for one more lap, Phileas, I should think, before I’m really done with it. If I ever am.
Then again, I have read quite a few of the 100,000+ words that it is made of, many of them more than once. I have read lines of text, certain sentences, even whole chapters quite studiously. For once there has been no question of deconstructing anything. It would be like trying to deconstruct one of those New York building sites which consist mainly of a great hole in the ground and a lot of equipment lying around and a few heavy machines, a backhoe perhaps, and only one guy in big boots flapping his arms to keep warm while waiting for the rest of the team to turn up. Deconstruction would presuppose some prior construction worthy of the name. A towering edifice. Solid foundations. Elegant art deco architecture. Make Me is nothing like the Chrysler Building or the Empire State. It’s more like the Hudson River if anything, when not entirely frozen; or the traffic steaming along the West Side Highway, only to come to a halt at stop lights; or the crowds in funny hats on Fifth Avenue on Easter Day. A form of pre-Socratic flux, equipped with endless cups of coffee.