Book Review “PERSONAL” – a Novel
Lee Child – 352 pages – Delacorte Press - Reviewed by: Jeb Ladouceur
Call it blasphemy … but in “PERSONAL” the great Lee Child has finally gone to the well once too often. Now, even his most devoted fans (among whom I once numbered myself) are looking with a jaundiced eye at the most recent account of ‘Jack Reacher’s’ exploits and shaking their heads in disappointment.
The dismay is not over the dynamic prose the expatriate Brit employs in describing the two or three encounters his six-foot-five, 250-pound protagonist uses to reduce his adversaries to pulp—they are as vividly rendered as ever. The problem is, the encounters consist of perhaps two dozen pages out of 350, and the rest of the time there is little to justify the reader’s six or seven hours invested in wandering the mean streets of Paris (‘Nine drivers out of ten on their cell phones.’) … Arkansas (‘Not much grew there except small, hardy weeds and bushes.’) … or London (‘The outer hinterland felt vast, and the bus was slow…’). And those were the more intriguing parts!
Your humble critic is well aware that non-stop violence can be as boring as three hundred and fifty pages of Parisian cell phones, hillbilly weeds, or English trams, but there’s got to be a middle ground somewhere. Or maybe not.
In the insipidly titled “PERSONAL,” gone are the compelling descriptions of small-town America that riveted us in Child’s dynamic “ECHO BURNING” where a small Texas town, ‘Echo,’ itself becomes one of Child’s characters. Gone is the sense of loss we felt when the shabby little village was torched like a miniature Atlanta in ‘Gone With the Wind.’ And all that remains is the hulking former military policeman whom author Lee Child refers to in this new book as “Sherlock Homeless.” Surely that’s not the cleverest nickname he can dream up.
This so-so ‘thriller’ represents the second shock to Child’s reputation in a couple of years. In 2012 shrimp Tom Cruise was cast as the huge ‘Jack Reacher’ in the film of the same name, and in the face of criticism by ‘Reacher’s’ disbelieving fans, Child offered the following lame statement to support the obviously misguided casting choice: “Reacher’s size in the books is a metaphor for an unstoppable force, which Cruise portrays in his own way.”
In other words, ‘You’ve just been had, folks. And I, the omniscient Lee Child, will make up any excuse I want, to have the magical heartthrob name, Tom Cruise, attached to one of my books.’
Well, the justification limps just as badly as one of tough guy ‘Reacher’s’ victims who’s been kicked in the family jewels. Perhaps Child would have us believe that Parisian cell phones are metaphorical connections to the netherworld, that permit him to know in advance when a bullet is going to be blown aside by a gust of wind (in “PERSONAL” that really happens, dear Reader). Or maybe Arkansas crab grass is symbolic of the durability which is ex-cop ‘Reacher’s’ hallmark. And it could be, I suppose, that the snail’s pace of London transport is intended to alert us to the sluggishness of Child’s next chapter … and the next … and the next…
Ironically, those drawn-out spells of leisurely movement and lifeless dialogue are made all the more intolerable as we await the re-emergence of the invincible ‘Jack Reacher’—the one we know and love. Because we have to give Lee Child this: He is unparalleled at coming up with new and nasty ways to have his hero fell four opponents at a time … all without breaking a sweat … usually with his bare hands.
That ‘Reacher’ resorts to rapping an adversary with a foot-long monkey wrench in this, the author’s nineteenth novel, might itself be a metaphor for the fact that Child is (dare we think it?) finally running out of steam.
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Award-winning Smithtown writer Jeb Ladouceur is the author of eight novels, and his book and theater reviews appear in several major L.I. publications. In Ladouceur’s next thriller, “Harvest” due this month, an American doctor is seized and ordered to perform illicit surgeries for a sinister gang of organ traffickers in The Balkans.