Frayed Man of Action With a Head for Figures
Lee Child
A WANTED
MAN - A Jack Reacher Novel
By Lee
Child
405
pages. Delacorte Press. $28.
“A Wanted Man” is Lee Child’s 17th Jack Reacher novel and
the last to be published before Reacher goes Hollywood with “Jack Reacher,” a
big Christmas movie based on book No. 9, “One Shot,” and starring — can’t say
it ain’t so, because it is — Tom Cruise. Mr. Cruise seems such a wrong choice
to play this jumbo vigilante that this is a good moment to contemplate the
essential Reacher: not just what he looks like but also what he really is.
Perhaps in sly response to a movie that will feature a lot
of action, Mr. Child begins “A Wanted Man” by
confining Reacher to very close quarters. The first 125 pages of this new novel
are about a car trip. After waiting exactly 93 minutes on the eastbound ramp of
a Nebraska highway, he successfully hitches a ride. The car contains two men
and a woman, and Reacher knows nothing about them. Being Reacher, he will spend
those first 125 pages observing every detail, watching every move, trying to
deduce as much as he can.
His enormous size counts for nothing during this part of the book. Nor
does his appearance, although he has a busted nose and is said to resemble a
very un-Cruise-like “gorilla with its face smashed in.” And he has no
opportunities to resort to his tactic of choice, extreme violence. So he rides
along an endless straight road through Iowa thinking about codes and signs and
numbers and letters (“Reacher had no patience with people who claimed that y
was a vowel”). He is a math guy at heart, and he isn’t likely to meet anyone
equally wonky until this series takes him through Silicon Valley.
On the road Reacher gradually figures out that the men, Alan King and
Don McQueen, are kidnappers. Their hostage is Karen Delfuenso, a terrified
waitress whose car they have hijacked. Reacher arranges to drive the car with
Karen in the seat behind him so that they can make eye contact in the rearview
mirror. Improbably Karen starts blinking and twisting her head to deliver some
kind of secret message. Even more improbably, Reacher cracks her code almost
immediately and finds out what she is trying to say.
A third of the way into “A Wanted Man,” his only acts of violence have
been hypothetical. “It was technically challenging to take out a guy in the
front passenger seat while driving at 80 miles an hour,” he muses while at the
wheel. Also, the 6-foot-5-inch Reacher has arms so long that he would need to keep
his elbow bent: he wants to slug his passenger, not punch out the car’s side
window. In any case, it’s time for Mr. Child to get him out of the car and
unleash him on the book’s assorted evildoers.
Outside the car, meanwhile, “A Wanted Man” has been developing one of
the best female characters in the whole Reacher series: Julia Sorenson, an
F.B.I. special agent from Omaha who is called in to investigate a potential
interstate crime. Once Reacher is sprung from the car, he encounters Sorenson,
who ought to be his natural adversary. But she, like all the women who interest
Reacher, is as smart and methodical as he is, and he impresses her with his
irrefutable, conveniently self-serving logic. He easily convinces her that
whatever is unfolding, he and she should be on the same side.
Reacher’s banter is usually more elegant than it is in “A Wanted Man.”
He can do better than this, which he aims at a trucker who is bothering him:
“Option 1, get back in your truck and get breakfast 50 miles down the road.
Option 2, get in an ambulance and get breakfast through a plastic tube.” Still,
the sang-froid of his delivery is what makes the big impression. And anyone
worried about Reacher on screen can rest easy. Just remember how dauntingly Mr.
Cruise can deliver that kind of dialogue, how greatly the character’s
intelligence outshines his brawn, and how formidable Reacher would be even if
he didn’t tower over everyone around him. Size doesn’t matter, as you will see in December.
Since Mr. Child’s titles tend to be so generic (No. 18 will be “Never Go
Back”), “A Wanted Man” is best thought of as the one with the car ride across
the Midwest. But it eventually expands into something gigantic: a scheme
involving an alphabet soup of federal agencies and the obligatory foreign terrorists
operating on American soil.
Quick action and solid detective work elevate the second part of this
book until it segues into one of the best of the series’s climactic assaults:
the expected, wildly over-the-top moment when Reacher must single-handedly
penetrate some kind of huge, geometrically interesting, top-secret
high-security fortress. This book’s version of that structure is described with
clarity. And Reacher, who has been idly showing off his familiarity with
Midwestern area codes, soil content and urban population counts, snaps into
murderously good form. In this book he seems newly thoughtful about mortality,
particularly his own.
Reacher’s
vigilante ethics, à la Dirty Harry’s, are likely to fuel much more controversy
in a movie than they do on the page. But these smart, breathless books have no
trouble justifying their hero’s acts of vengeance. And “A Wanted Man” is more
ingenious than other Reacher books have been about the underground activities
Reacher is thwarting. Mr. Child’s endings would be even better if his books’
worst bad guys, besides being swarthy and disposable foreigners, were given
tough-guy talents of their own.
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