Jack Reacher Still Won’t Quit, 23 Books Later

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From The Atlantic:

You’re on a plane. You’re on a train. You’re wheeling through American space, and you’re feeling it: the hum of the void, the up-for-grabs-ness of it all. Out here there’s no protection. Good customer service, if you’re lucky, but no protection. Out here there is only the crackling feral mind: dominance, appetite, predation, pitiless allegiance to the pack. Who are you going to read, in this condition? Henry James? No. You’re going to read Lee Child.

Someone, somewhere, buys one of Child’s Jack Reacher crime thrillers every 13 seconds. This is a celebrated factoid, and I believe it. An atmosphere of pullulating need surrounds these productions. At transportation hubs across the country, they are clutched and consumed by Americans in motion. Child, the pusher, bangs out a book a year. Born James Grant and raised in Birmingham, England, he went to J. R. R. Tolkien’s old school, and has seen Waiting for Godot at least 39 times. He has an industrial caffeine habit, and he smokes like a chimney. Heavy schedule, heavy fuel. Andy Martin’s fascinating Reacher Said Nothing, in which he literally sits in a room and watches Child write a Reacher novel, is also an account of him sitting in a room and watching Child go through coffee and cigarettes: 20-ish cups, a pack a day. And then, as the word count—and the pace—increases, sugar: Snickers bars and bowls of Sugar Smacks.

. . . .

Reacher sleeps with tough, attractive women, and he bashes up bad guys. Hit men, dealers, bullies, bodyguards, psychopaths, gunrunners, goons. Whomever. An infinite succession of guys. In Make Me,

Reacher stepped in and kicked the left-hand guy full in the groin, before the guy’s gun was even halfway out of its holster, which meant the right-hand guy had time to get his all the way out, but to no avail, because the next event in his life was the arrival of Reacher’s elbow.

Physically, Reacher is immensely skilled and powerful; mentally, he’s a kind of rogue vacancy, a fugue on legs, a field of glittering blank attention in which reality discovers itself, detail by detail. Approaching the house of a bad guy in Persuader, he notes the varying pitch of “a far-off sprinkler turning slowly and hissing against a soaked sidewalk through sixty degrees of its rotation.” In Die Trying, chained up in a barn by kidnappers, Reacher shuts his body down “like a beach house in winter” and turns his mind into “a huge black space for thinking in.” Remember the Grateful Dead song about the headlight on the northbound train, the one that shines its light through the cool Colorado rain? That’s Reacher.

Past Tense, published in November, is the 23rd Reacher novel. As usual, Reacher is arrowing across America, materially and spiritually unencumbered, when he gets ensnared in a genre: It could have been assassination thriller (Personal, Without Fail), homicide procedural (Running Blind), or gangster blowout (Persuader). But this time it’s horror: humans hunting humans, elitists with bows and arrows stalking unarmed proles in a wood. As usual, the plot includes stretches of psychedelic dullness, in which Reacher’s egoless absorption in a process or data set—his strange, beetling focus on something (the local census, in this case)—makes the page blossom with boredom. But we go along with it; we assent, dazedly, to this level of teeming specificity. Every Reacher book I’ve read is about 100 pages too long. Somehow, I don’t care.

Link to the rest at The Atlantic