that the thing that inspired him was something Brian Epstein had once said to the Beatles, in Paris, following some transatlantic phone-call, back in the sixties: ‘YOU’RE NUMBER ONE IN AMERICA!’ Lee said. ‘My plan A was to become one of the Beatles. But this is the next best thing.’ He’s an adopted Child.
Jack Reacher drops out of the army to become a drifter vigilante hero. But the key thing is that he criss-crosses the whole of the United States, like an old troubadour roaming around Occitania. He loves it good or bad. In fact bad is good as far as he’s concerned. It gives him something to do. He might just get bored otherwise. But Lee also loves the ‘nothingness’, what Jean Baudrillard called ‘the desert of the real’. ‘I was driving through west Texas,’ he said. ‘It’s uninhabited according to the official census. Fewer than five people to the square mile, it’s “uninhabited”. I drove for 80 miles without seeing a single construction. Eventually I spoke to one woman on a farm. She said she had to drive five hours to buy anything she hadn’t grown or killed herself. And five hours back again.’
Reacher has to be huge (6ʹ5ʺ and 250 lbs) because he encompasses a continent. He loves the weirdness of America. He embraces it. I overheard a guy in the row in front of me trying to sum up the works of Lee Child for another guy, a Reacher virgin. I thought he nailed it: ‘Reacher is, like, so totally …’
Not so, Jonathan Franzen and Harold Bloom. They are the opposite of so totally. They have a European slant to their writing. Elitist. They think most Americans are stupid. Franzen refuses to go on the Oprah show because it’s too down-market for his taste. He bad-mouths tweeters and social media. Harold Bloom, self-appointed guardian of the ‘western canon’, has gone on record as saying that awarding anything to Stephen King, a writer of ‘penny dreadfuls’, is nothing but ‘a testimony to [the] idiocy’ of the awarding committee. He didn’t flat out say King was an idiot and all his readers were idiots too, but he might as well have done.
Bloom and Franzen, to be fair to them, are fighting a rearguard action on behalf of what can loosely be called the Untranslatable. They want to preserve Anything That Cannot Be Made into a Movie (especially one starring Tom Cruise). King and Lee, on the other hand, are modern mythologians. Lee is a serious writer, even if he denies it publicly, in a line-by-line way (try reading one of his books slowly – yes, put it down, come back to it, savour those sentences, short though they may be). But Lee’s and King’s stories and characters, like the ancient myths, don’t belong to any particular form. They are essentially oral and translate into any medium. (‘I’m in!’ said that other guy, by the way, in response to the ‘So totally …’ ‘Can’t wait to see the movie!’) Try making Purity into a movie. It would be worse than that Thomas Pynchon film, Inherent Vice. (What do I know? It’s now slated to become a television series, starring Daniel Craig.) Whereas Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption, both based on King novellas, are modern masterpieces.
But readers have had enough of traditionalists, Ph.D. patricians like Bloom and Franzen aristocratically pissing on them from atop their ivory towers. And the internet enables them to band together and show their muscle. Child and King are the opium of the people; and the people were definitely high at Harvard. God Save the King! Long live the Child!
11 A FRUSTRATINGLY ONE-WAY TELEPHONE CONVERSATION (EXCEPT JUST AT THE END)
We are in a car going downtown. 10 September 2015, around 6 p.m. (EST). Heading to Union Square, Barnes & Noble. The official New York launch. Lee’s phone buzzes. He looks to see who is calling. Turns to me. Raises eyebrows. Whispers, ‘Hollywood.’ Presses Accept.
HOLLYWOOD: …
LEE: Yeah, you can say that again.
HOLLYWOOD: …
LEE: Is that hardcore enough for you?
HOLLYWOOD: …
LEE: Has Tom seen it?
HOLLYWOOD: …
LEE: Seriously?
HOLLYWOOD: …
LEE: Sounds good to me.
HOLLYWOOD: …
LEE: [sarcastic] I have a dream that one day it will be made into a movie.
HOLLYWOOD: …
LEE: [checking his email] OK, yeah, I’m getting it now.
HOLLYWOOD: …
LEE: You’ll be the first to know.
He presses the off button.
‘You want to know how that conversation started?’
‘What do you think?’
‘He said, “I’ve just finished Make Me and you are one sick bastard.”’
‘Good call, Hollywood.’
‘They said if this one takes off then we get another three. A series. A franchise. Cool or what?’
The producer had just emailed him the script for Never Go Back. That was what was coming through. He promised to have a look at it. They needn’t have sent it. The contract gave him no editorial rights. Nor did he want any. Still, they respected him too much not to at least show him the current draft.
Maybe it served him right that the very first question (I kid you not) at the Q & A was, ‘What do you think about Tom Cruise playing Reacher?’
What I remember of his answer struck the right note: ‘I am the least worried guy on the planet.’ The great thing for him was that he had absolutely no responsibility. ‘If you don’t like the movie, stick to the book.’
12 ATTEMPT AT AN EXHAUSTIVE DESCRIPTION OF PEOPLE AT BARNES & NOBLE WHO WERE HAVING THEIR PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN WITH LEE CHILD
Husband and wife. Sixty-plus. Well preserved. Good hair. Cosmetic surgery? The wife goes around the table to stand right next to Lee. The husband takes the shot. ‘We’ve come all the way from …’ She is going to email Lee her address.
Hawaiian shirt. Big guy. Shorts. It’s a look.
Balding man in yellow shirt.
Her t-shirt says ‘Levi’s’ on the front.
Yoga girl.
Two women. Older, CEO type. Younger, tight pants. ‘My co-worker’. Older woman, glasses and blue top. Three copies of Make Me. ‘We’re going to see the movie.’ (Lee: ‘They make it more violent than the book!’)
Short denim shorts, frayed. Red blouse. Twenty-something. ‘I love the young Reacher stories.’ (Lee: ‘So do I.’)
Woman, black hair, jeans, fitting. Asian? Native American? Jewellery. Black shirt. Tight.
Twenties. Blonde. Purple top, shorts, trainers. Nice legs.
White button-down, Levis, glasses. Scholarly sort of guy. Artist/web entrepreneur.
Guy.
