The Ridiculous Allure of <em>Reacher</em>
Here’s something we can all agree on: Jack Reacher kicks ass. Kicks it with relish. Kicks it with—not abandon, he’s too in control for that—but with a sense of near-blissful release. Kicks it, most importantly, in the name of justice, in the name of everybody getting what they deserve. America loved Jack Reacher from the moment it met him. Lee Child, his creator, has written 28 , all of them best sellers. But there’s a special spice, a special piquancy, to our Reacherism right now. Amazon’s , the second season of which wraps up this week, is among the most-watched shows in the country. It’s as if our collective imaginative power source, its fuses blown, has switched over to some kind of small, noisy backup generator. Enough with nuance, enough with finesse. Give us a violent simplicity. Give us an elemental morality. Give us Jack Reacher kicking ass, over and over again. Reacher, on the page, is a strange and special and severely limited character: That’s the whole point of him. His mind is a diagram. His personality is a line of code. A former military policeman with no interest in possessions or domesticity or really anything apart from righting wrongs in the most ass-kicking manner possible, Reacher is a pure creature of American space: Toothbrush in pocket, he folds his mighty bulk into Greyhound buses and diner booths, and waits for the next plot to arrive. And Lee Child makes up the plots as he goes along. The Reacher novels, as documented in Andy Martin’s fascinating book , are basically extended flights of improvisation: one take, with the barest of editing. This makes for an interesting fictional atmosphere; part of the distinctive magic of the books is the sensation that Reacher, in his adding-machine way, is puzzling through the intentions of his author:
