Billy Summers, Jack Reacher, and the unprecedented value of literary escapism
Retreating from the processes of real human beings inevitably leads me to more engagement with fake ones, and the fleeting companionship remains reliably awesome
Over the past weekend, the steady if haphazard stream of text messages I regularly receive from various sources about non-vital issues eased to a dribble, and in many cases has dried up completely. I suspect almost everyone with access to electricity has become glued to television and online coverage of the Russia-Ukraine hostilities.
None of that is for me; as a glance at this blog’s more popular entries quickly confirms, I dislike bullshit-laden media output no matter its provenance. When the goal is sowing dangerous levels of confusion and discord within the citizenry, the product sometimes becomes so distasteful that I see no point in exposing myself to it solely for the purpose of describing—in gratingly profane and callous posts—its galactic factual and ethical deficits, mostly to other chronic nose-holders and face-averters who unconsciously start reaching for the scotch while reading the first paragraph of these dispatches and are knee-walking drunk before they finish them. And anyone who insists that I need to be informed about what’s happening in Ukraine and should turn on my television is convicting theyselfs on at least two counts of felony stupidity, and should remand theyselfs to a period of strict monastic silence (including typed communications) lasting a minimum of one thousand years. Or at least direct they’s imprecations for me to “stay informed” toward more credulous associates.
What “information” can I avail myself of my watching or reading corporate news? That male primates can become female primates by personal fiat, and that any denial of this is both blasphemous and hateful; that riots and property damage qualify as “mostly peaceful” depending on, well, factors; that BLM activist and dumb-kid-with-a-gun Kyle Rittenhouse was in fact on his way to Kenosha, Wisconsin to shoot black people; that you should continue getting vaccines you have watched fail with your own eyes and being bolstered by a federal agency blatantly hiding pertinent data; that fact-checking is actually gutless narrative-checking, but that you should trust it anyway because every other source is white supremacist; and that suspended American distance runner Shelby Houilhan (but not Shelberina Houlistrova) is almost certainly the victim of either a plot or a dining accident. Perhaps most chillingly, the collective worldwide spank-bank of straight men—and, I reckon, lesbians—has been polluted by the lurid invitation by Victoria’s Secret to sexualize a young woman with a total of 49 chromosomes and luscious knockers—a gambit that has boggled even the most shameless incels in my sizable stable of wank-happy, middle-aged pals. (I asked a few. They assured me this is uncool.)
Distracting myself from the various versions of sham reality on offer remains the central dogma of my existence. The most reliable way for me to do that without incurring significant social, medical, and financial costs is reading novels, a habit that claimed huge portions of my ample childhood free time, but one I have strayed discouragingly far from in an electronic world despite arguably having more free time than ever. I’m usually working my way through at least one book, but at only maybe 10 percent of the manic pace I once achieved. But because I didn’t take any of my keyboards with me (the kinds that produce tones) on my recent road trip, I suddenly had an hour or two a day to fill with something besides badly imitating music from many decades ago, including Gregorian chants.
Reading intentional fiction, in fact, has never been more alluring; it’s the only reading material left that presents invented narratives, stories that simply never happened, while admitting to and even advertising this attribute. The two most recent novels I finished are Billy Summers, Stephen King's latest novel about a troubled writer, and Better off Dead, the latest installment in Lee Child’s twenty-five-book-long Jack Reacher series. King has been among my favorite writers for over forty years, while the Jack Reacher books represent a specific psycho-emotional appeal that I don’t quite extend to Child’s prosaic style itself.
I’m not a literary critic, and in fact am not licensed in any sanctioned brand of criticism. I don’t do book reviews, either, and may have just repeated myself. But King’s Billy Summers character shares a lot of overlap with Child’s Reacher, and right before I picked up Billy Summers—a purchase inspired by driving through small Colorado mountains towns that reminded me of the settings of some of King’s work—I happened to watch season one of Reacher, an Amazon Prime production based on Killing Floor, the first novel in the Jack Reacher series.
Without giving away plot details, I will offer the opinion that even for dedicated King fans, Billy Summers is a solid, fast-paced, and clever novel that tastes even better after viewing all eight hours or so of the pleasingly faithful small-screen rendering of Child's iconic badass. King has unfurled his share of male hero-figures over the years, but few resemble Jack Reacher to the extent Billy Summers does. Both are ex-military powered to different degrees and in different ethical directions by peculiarized but defensible senses of grass-roots justice. Summers is a skilled sniper, whereas Reacher is a physical brute borne into modernity on the traditions of epic poetry. Both men are highly intelligent and adept at concealing this trait, which adds greatly to the tension in Billy Summers.
King the man began exploring feminist and empowerment-of-women stories in roughly 1973; I think Carrie Counts, along with Dolores Claiborne, and Gerald’s Game, and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, and Rose Madder, and Lisey’s Story.) If you want to draw grim and obscene pleasure from works in the abusive-male-cop-gets-his-supreme-comeuppance genre, read Rose Madder.) The second major character in Billy Summers is a 21-year-old rape victim that Billy rescues and protects while navigating the perils of the young woman’s misplaced but understandable crush and being double-crossed on a job for the Las Vegas Mafia.
King has evidently returned to often including Colorado in his stories, a habit that started when he used his earnings from Carrie to move to Boulder in the mid-1970s and work on both The Shining and The Stand there.
From page 338:
They get an early start and are skirting Denver at eight in the morning. It’s flat. They drive through Boulder at quarter of nine. Also flat. Then boom, they’re in the mountains. The road is every bit as twisty as Billy thought it would be.
Alice sits up straight, her head on a swivel, her eyes wide as she looks from deep gorges on her right to the steep wooded upslopes on her left. Billy gets it. She’s a New England girl who’s made one short and ultimately unpleasant side trip to the mid-South and this is all new to her, all amazing. He will never believe she had to get raped in order to be here in the Rocky Mountain foothills, but he’s glad she can be. He likes her amazement. No, loves it.
“I could live here,” she says.
They drive through Nederland, a little town that seems to be a mere adjunct to the sprawling shopping center on the outskirts. The parking lot is jammed. Billy, who can believe almost anything, would be hard-pressed to believe that in the early spring of the following year that parking lot will be almost deserted on a business day, with most of the stores closed.
With the story unfolding at the end of 2019, that last bit is a dark ode to the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, a reference King repeats elsewhere in Billy Summers. And King is a Jack Reacher fan: Although he doesn’t do so in this novel, King has slipped references to Child’s creation into at least one of his own novels, like bespoke literary Easter Eggs.
The main attraction here is, or should be, a video I was somewhat irked to learn about: A talk seven years ago featuring Child and King discussing how they work, asking each other questions, and fielding questions from an informed, if starstruck, audience of younger readers. The reason I was irked to learn about it? YouTube could only have displayed this to me given access to my purchasing habits. I kind of want to fire a missile into Google’s main headquarters for this and a slate of other intrusive offenses, but I remain stymied in this by basic lack of access to the proper weaponry (itself mostly a money issue).
If you’re unaware of the Reacher character beyond my having described him as a brute, understand that he is an obligatory figure in American literature, specifically “guy fiction.” Just as men are not enchanted by traditional romance novels in significant numbers, I don’t imagine a lot of women being turned on by the graphic descriptions of a 6’ 5”, 250-pound fighting machine with almost unbreakable bones winning fight after fight despite being outnumbered and outgunned, but never outsmarted. (John Sandford, author of the “Prey” crime novels featuring Lucas Davenport, also writes what is decidedly “guy fiction,” chiefly for commercial airport users.)
When asked how he produces the language and envisions the specific choreography of Reacher’s virtuoso fight scenes, Child amusingly describes having been a bully of sorts at age nine or ten, when he had a growth head start on the other kids, and fighting almost exactly like Reacher does—just crudely flinging his bigger limbs around, being dirty, and relying on basic physics as much as skill to prevail. Jack Reacher really does fight like a huge kid would if afforded a slightly expanded strategic world view.
Jack Reacher appeals to every guy who has imagined himself prevailing in a physical fight against multiple opponents, tuning out the snapping of bones and the unseen exploding of internal organs as while expressionlessly and vehemently conveying the message that someone messed with the wrong apparently homeless and unquestionably feral-looking galoot. Reacher knows how to maim his enemies precisely to the extent their crimes merit, but almost never kills except in self-defense.
Perhaps I’m an over-consumer of too many old-school, shoot-’em-up video games, but stories rife with lethal violence about nonexistent actors can be fun and rewarding to read and watch. I suspect this is because everyone has a serious conscious or sublimated grudge against someone or something unreachable by conventional means, and these stories allow for a short but meaningful fantasy ride into “I fuckin’ showed them” territory.
But real violence is a different matter. And warfare—lethal combat with rules, y’all!—represents the absolute and inevitable nadir of the shit-streaked and babbling human mammal.
Warfare is not a misanthrope's dream but his most powerfully validating nightmare. It proves anew that the intelligence of human beings is perfectly calibrated to recognize how much better we could do while actively shitting on the entire prospect of even flinching in that direction. Our 1,400-cc brains hone our capacity for greed and deceit for more astutely than they ever could our potential for cooperation and any useful application of happiness- or fairness-maximization. We recognize the value of adhering to truth and shared values, then elect the most rapacious, idiotic, and narcissistic polydeviants to leadership positions all over the world on macro and micro scales. If God were real and all-powerful, even that sick motherfucker couldn’t invent a more morally dilapidated creature even if bribed with the prospect of a blowjob from Satan’s own insatiable hotwife, who divides her time between alt-right chat rooms and Ivy League sociology departments. (Little of this made it into the King James version of the Bible, depending on how one interprets the Book of Revelation.)
Perhaps most odious among our uniquely reprehensible foibles is our slavering, ever-increasing need to see the absolute worst in people, and trumpet these alleged shortcomings far and wide, as if that helps anything. Humor and comedy—not just certain kinds but the very concepts—have been scandalized, and humor’s venerable progenitor, irony, will soon succumb as well, a victim of the same relentless cunt-force trauma. We suck.
Individually, however, we can be lovable in the extreme; were this not the case, I’d be dead already, either by misadventure or from a bullet fired through whatever gel inside my head performs something akin to executive cognitive functions. But when we assemble in noisy groups, we advertise why this species and any like it would be doing the cosmos a favor by cheerfully and nonviolently sunsetting itself. Evidence of this is found everywhere you look, but you can start with the thousands of social-media users claiming to be absolutely certain about things that are either demonstrably untrue or just as certainly beyond the reach of March 2022 human knowing. Twitter COVID-19 zealots whose personal lives are running smoothly are as scarce as Wokesters topping the fuckability charts (and I consider Branch Covidians and Wokish people two distinct subpopulations of misguided and misled gadabout; the overlap between the two is significant, but not absolute). Anything that fits into the maw at the feeder end of the distraction-mill.
I prefer reading fiction labeled as such to its delivery in news-packaging, and perhaps I will enjoy a renaissance in that area now. It reminds me of being a kid in a good way, as does consuming this increasingly scarce quaff. I may not get through the book I just started before someone tries to infect me with more reality, but I have enacted complex mechanisms to keep most of that shit at bay, such as yelling “La la la la FUCK YOU!” and hanging up with profound prejudice on interlocutors who start sentences with “Did you hear what” or “Did you watch what.”
I was encouraged today to see smiling faces and not just eyes above cloth in the aisles of King Soopers this morning. People have been waiting to do that for months, even me. The idea of perma-masks can only appeal to people who really want no part of society at all, and it’s hard to fathom that there are apparently millions of Americans who would prefer a permanent state of pointless theater that hasn’t been working at scale since the onset of covid because even the most ardent zealots have been fucking cheating the masking rules all along anyway.
Blue-checkmark Twitter shitlords now pretending they didn’t just Google everything they’re writing about the geopolitics of east-central Europe seems like the perfect addition to the muddle-minded rabble ordering everyone to vaccinate all three layers of their face-masks at least once a week. Everyone can see how miserable the members of this crowd are in their lives overall and how desperately they want society to suffer in perpetuity right along with them. That’s what the coronavirus zealotry reduces to now: People who wouldn’t even know there was technically a pandemic afoot for all but maybe ten non-consecutive minutes a day if they simply chucked their smartphones.
But as perfect as this discordant symphony may be from a theater-of-the-macabre perspective, observing it is a grossly imperfect addition to the day of anyone who has already given up. Not “given up” in the sense of sitting around in sweatpants hammering back half-gallons of ice cream, and seeing whose lives can be upended in the name of “supporting” people who demand that fully functioning penises be grafted onto their chins in time for their middle-school proms, but on the idea of an America that remotely resembles the one we’re told still exists—where a free exchange of ideas (including those mistrustful of the government) is encouraged and the media is a skeptical tool of and for the people rather than an instrument of the government. The free exchange of ideas—not just specific ideas, but the notion that everyone deserves to have a say, and without fear of insanely disproportionate reprisals—is being actively suppressed by the very media traditionally charged with investigating rather than abetting that government, and almost everyone yelling about misinformation is a primary source of it (see also: Racism, abusive rhetoric, hypocrisy, double standards, etc.).
I have a draft of a semi-anti-war post explaining why it’s not incoherent to see humanity itself as disposable, yet be staunchly averse to its individual members and their families experiencing needless obstacles to personal flourishing, never mind suffering. Meanwhile, the reliably rapid accretion of chum in the running media and meta-media continues unabated, and I’m working on a different post about a trail-running figure who expends a hundred words for every ten he needs in the service of saying, in the end, precisely nothing, unless you count “I am Training Theory, hear me roar.” The same post will feature another escalation in racist rhetoric and body-shaming blather from 300 pounds of barking, grifting spite waddling around in a series of 150-pound HOKA-emblazoned garbage bags, like a version of Aunt Jemina subsisting solely on her own ultra-high-calorie, crowd-funded crystal-meth syrup. I don’t mean to be vague, and the last thing I want to do is entice anyone to return for details, but that’s what’s now in the reverse-direction Beck of the Pack sewer pipeline, along with some running-related content. I want to do some deeper reviews of some of my own older running-related articles, both to analyze whether the more popular stuff was really any good in real time and what I’d change about it today either way.
The Boulder weather is suddenly great, with the temps going from zero to sixty almost overnight (actually, I think it only got down to 2 degrees Fahrenheit last week, but it was well over sixty today). Those who enjoy decorating the sound wall along the Foothills Parkway in Park East Park have been quick to take advantage of this warming trend and issue declarations that may or may not also qualify as fake news. For my part, I got a possible album cover out of the deal.
