Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Wednesday December 8, 2010
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WORTH DYING FOR
Lee Child
Delacorte
ISBN 978-0385344319
384 pages
$28
Reviewed by Daniel Stashower. Daniel Stashower's most recent book is "The Beautiful Cigar Girl."
The last time we saw Jack Reacher, he was in a hell of a spot. In the final pages of "61 Hours," published earlier this year, Lee Child's iconic hero -- the ex-military cop turned vagabond -- was trapped at the center of a conflagration so intense that it triggered alarms on missile-tracking satellites. "No attempt was made to quantify human remains," Child told us. "It would have been a hopeless task." This scorched-earth cliffhanger set the Internet humming. Mother of Mercy! Is this the end of Reacher?
It comes as a relief, if something of a puzzlement, to find Reacher upright in the opening pages of "Worth Dying For." We're told that he's hurting -- "Every tendon and ligament and muscle from his fingertips to his rib cage burned and quivered" -- but even at half-strength he's still able to crack a few heads when the situation demands it, which it does soon enough.
Child keeps us waiting for an explanation of how Reacher survived the earlier carnage. In the meantime, he sets his "250-pound gutter rat" off on a fresh round of mayhem.
Longtime readers will recognize the pattern: Reacher washes up in a small town and stops for a cup of coffee. By the time it cools, he finds himself pulled into a web of intrigue, locking horns with a drug kingpin or foiling a political assassination.
This time he is passing through a remote corner of Nebraska, where the "land all around was dark and flat and dead and empty." When he intervenes in an apparent case of spousal abuse, he runs afoul of the powerful, creepily evil Duncan family, who are desperate to protect their interest in a mysterious international trafficking scheme. At the same time, he digs into a cold case involving a missing 8-year-old girl. "Her ghost, man," a local boy tells him. "Still here, after twenty-five years. Sometimes I sit out here at night and I hear that poor ghost screaming." Over the course of 15 books Reacher has demonstrated that, as more than one character remarks, he's one who "knows how to do things."
In this book he kills a man with a single punch, disables an oncoming truck and resets his own broken nose. In lesser hands these feats of derring-do would seem cartoonish, but Child has a gift for structuring the violence as a plausible, necessary expression of this latter-day cowboy's code of honor. "Tomorrow there are going to be three kinds of people here," he tells one of the locals. "Some dead, some sheepish, and some with a little self-respect. You need to get yourself in that third group."
At the same time, Reacher's detective skills are shown to be a natural extension of his time in the military police. Child scrupulously avoids the cliche of the talented outsider who makes fools of the boneheaded local cops. As Reacher attempts to unravel the long-dormant case of the missing girl, he finds that the original investigation was thorough and above reproach. "He could hear it in his head right then, the same way they must have heard it all those years ago," Child writes, as Reacher reviews the police files: "the sound of a case going cold."
Some readers may feel that Child's explanation of how Reacher survived the inferno at the end of "61 Hours" is a trifle thin, given the care that went into fanning the flames in the earlier book. (My brother-in-law, convinced that Reacher was dead, sent me an anguished text: "No, Lee Child, say it ain't so!") Fans have long since come to expect a certain tight-lipped reserve from Child's hero; the oft-repeated phrase "Reacher said nothing" has even made its way onto a T-shirt. In this case, perhaps, another line or two would not have gone amiss.
Be that as it may, "Worth Dying For" is a model of suspenseful storytelling and an outstanding addition to a series that stands in the front rank of modern thrillers. Lee Child, like Reacher himself, is a man who knows how to get it done.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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MY READING LIFE
Pat Conroy
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday
ISBN 978-0385533577
337 pages
$25
Reviewed by Carolyn See, who reviews books every Friday for The Washington Post.
One of the things literature does is provide the dedicated reader with an extended family. Without seeming, I hope, too presumptuous or intrusive, I've always thought of Pat Conroy as a cousin or a brother or an uncle. He might be surprised to know that as he was producing his early volumes, he was the subject of quite a few of our family debates. "Resolved: My mother could beat up the Great Santini while walking on a tightrope and practicing her clarinet." They weren't very lively arguments because we all agreed from the beginning. My mother could whomp Conroy's dad, maybe not in the short term, but emotionally, spiritually, over the course of a toxic lifetime. And these weren't lighthearted observations. There were, by then, dead bodies involved -- innocent relatives consigned to their graves.
For the few who don't know Conroy's heartbreaking work, he grew up as a military brat, one of seven children, son of a Marine Corps pilot whose hobby and solace was to beat his wife and children until they cried "uncle." But in abusive families, there are always some wives or kids who won't give in. They'd rather die, literally. Pat Conroy hated his dad and let it show and got the most beatings. He was later sent to the Citadel, that famous Southern military college, and the people there were very hard on him, too. He got a job teaching elementary school on a lonely outpost called Daufuskie Island, S.C., where Gullah was still spoken and the African American kids living there didn't know they were surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean. This was during the last, septic days of segregation, and there were enough racist whites on the Beaufort, S.C., school board to make sure he got fired after his first year for trying to educate his students.
But Conroy is a writer who thrives on injustice and relishes revenge. By his early 30s, he had published three books and had enough material left over to last him a lifetime. This attractive little book, shamelessly packaged to make a perfect holiday gift, takes advantage of his literary wealth and ranges back to those early days in Conroy's life. Its implicit subject is how a serious artist is made, with particular emphasis on what it's like to grow up as a writer in the South. These are mostly beautiful essays, elegantly and scrupulously written, and they would seem at first to be the perfect gift for any Conroy fan. But be warned: "My Reading Life" is astonishingly sad, beginning with this disconcerting dedication: "To my lost daughter, Susannah Ansley Conroy. Know this: I love you with my heart and always will. Your return to my life would be one of the happiest moments I could imagine."
Am I wrong, or does this place something of an undue burden on Conroy's readers? If we've read his books, we're all too familiar with the haunting images of abused children pitched about like bowling balls. We shudder at the thought of Col. Don Conroy, the original Great Santini, even though we're told here that the novel was actually a "love letter" to his stormy dad. We've had reason to become suspicious of Conroy's mother, who spoke in honeyed tones as she recommended books to her children but collected poisonous snakes as a hobby -- and let the abuse go on. We've been subjected to endless scenes of terrible injustice in his pages. Even he admits, toward the end of this collection, that "though I have always known that pain was a ham-fisted player in my novels, I didn't understand that I had used the radiant lacquers of the language to mark the wounds and fissures I had forced upon my characters. ... I was aware I hurt and damaged many of the characters I'd grown to love in my books."
Does he mean he has hurt the characters in his novels, or the actual human beings he pushed, rather cavalierly, into his novels?
In "The Water Is Wide," the 1972 memoir of his year spent teaching the kids of Daufuskie Island, the young schoolteacher is heroic and put upon; the school board is repellent. In "The Great Santini," the young son is heroic and put upon, and if this is a "love letter" to Dad, I'd hate to see the author when he's riled up. In "The Lords of Discipline," the young cadet is heroic and put upon; the school is populated (mostly) by creeps. Yes, Conroy has suffered injustice, but his revenge has been as subtle as an ice axe. Reading this book of essays written so much later, you have to ask: When -- if ever -- will Conroy get his outsize sense of grievance under control?
The people we meet in the pages of "My Reading Life" are pathological in their loneliness. His high school librarian is an unlettered alcoholic. ("Her disposition was troll-like and her demeanor combative.") At his first writers' conference, he was "thrown out of a poetry workshop by Adrienne Rich." Sometimes he befriends the people who insult him, but often he doesn't.
These essays are sad and pleasing by turn, but I came away feeling unsteady about Conroy, as though maybe he wasn't our uncle or our brother anymore. I wanted to tell him to concentrate more on having fun and to cut down on the everlasting drama. It's over. Our dragon-parents are dead, and we don't have to write "love letters" to them anymore. Actually, it might be time to grow up.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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