The new Jack Reacher is here! The new Jack Reacher is here!
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I have three authors whose next books I am always looking forward to: Thomas Pynchon, William Gibson, and Lee Child.
My all-time favorite book is also Pynchon’s most famous: Gravity’s Rainbow. It’s a rewarding read, but it’s also pretty tough; when I first had to read it for a contemporary American literature class, I couldn’t sustain 50 pages a day, it was so dense. So despite how much I love it, I’ve only read it twice. I rarely recommend it to others.
My favorite genre is cyberpunk—a noir-influenced, high tech, often dystopian branch of science fiction that influenced films like Blade Runner and The Matrix. And within that genre, my favorite work is Gibson’s Neuromancer. I’ve read that book several times, in part because I once had a habit of reading Gibson’s whole oeuvre every time a new book came out. I’ve enjoyed his work that much.
Both Pynchon and Gibson change it up from time to time. Pynchon’s two latest books, though still recognizably Pynchon, have been a bit more… let’s say, manageable, much tighter than his other sprawling works of paranoid, hallucinatory fiction (though even then he had a couple exceptions).
And though Gibson’s latest book returned to a science fiction further in the future, he has explored tech and culture in the nearer future, as well as what he has called “speculative fiction of the very recent past.” The differences among the books (or the loosely defined “trilogies” of books) are significant, so even though everything is recognizably his work, it never becomes monotonous.
In contrast, Child doesn’t change much from book to book. I mean, he might shift POV—some books are in first person, some in third. And he might change time period—some books are set during Reacher’s American drifter stage, while others are set during his days in the Army’s Military Police. But Reacher is Reacher is Reacher. And I love it.
Two things strike me as important about Reacher.
The first is his almost superhero status. Six-foot-five, 250 pounds, observant, smart, violent, fearless—he’s close to invincible. When he hits someone, it’s usually “one and done”—there are very few prolonged fight scenes in a Reacher novel. Said like that, it sounds like it could be boring. But this forces Child to create villains and situations that push his hero to the limits—intricate conspiracies, political power, gangs of thugs, psychopathy… Despite Reacher’s apparent invulnerability, Child makes him work for it.
The second is his moral standing in the world. Reacher is, in effect, that outsider cowboy in the Old West, drawn in, at times reluctantly, to defend the townspeople whose conventional moral code leaves them vulnerable to amoral predators. And like those (literary) cowboys, Reacher has his own code: he hates bullies; he gets his retaliation in first; and if you open the forbidden door, what comes at you is your problem, not his.
More important, only that code has the chance to overcome the villain’s willing cruelty.
Of course, Child is also just a compelling storyteller. His pacing is flawless; the stories move implacably towards their surprising but inevitable endings. For example, I’m reading (actually, listening to, on Audible) his newest novel, Past Tense. Child presents two apparently unrelated plot lines: in one, Reacher finds himself, by chance, outside his father’s birth place, which he decides to see (a relatively chance decision, as usual, that will lead to the heart of another over-the-top adventure); and a young Canadian couple find themselves in an inexplicable situation, which is increasingly showing itself to be very, very bad. I’m only a few chapters in, but these two stories are starting—slowly and leisurely—to converge. It’s like two distant stars have just come under each other’s gravitational pull. It will be long time before they finally collide, but when they do….