Re-examining the role of the tough guy
The literary stars at the 29th annual National Kidney Foundation authors luncheon — at the Hilton in Union Square on Nov. 4 — include Joyce Maynard, Lisa See, Daniel Handler and Lisa Brown, Christine Carter and Lee Child, whose 22nd Jack Reacher thriller, “The Midnight Line,” will be published in November.
Child has been writing the best-selling series for 20 years. The hero of the tales, a former member of the Army military police, is a he-man with “a two-fisted decency,” wrote Janet Maslin in the New York Times. He fights, he shoots, he outsmarts the bad guys. I wondered, after reading “The Midnight Line” — I’m a wuss, so it was my first encounter with Reacher — about Americans’ love for tough guys, as exemplified by Reacher.
It’s “because of what he is able to do” as a fictional character, said Child in a phone conversation. “People want to do the right thing all the time. But in real life, they can’t. Maybe they are physically incapable. At work, if you make waves, you can get fired. So people live with a constant sense of frustration. They can’t do what they want to do. But a guy like Reacher, he does the right thing all the time. If they can’t do it, he does it.”
In keeping with that, has Donald Trump proclaiming himself willing to say what people are thinking altered people’s perception of tough guy-ness? The difference, Child said, is “that I think the current president is a phony and Reacher is not . ... There’s a lot of presentation going on now, but little achievement. And people can very quickly sniff out the difference.”
Will the current crop of news makers give tough guys a bad name? “I think people like Trump and Kim Jong Un will not discredit the tough guy. We cling to the fictionalized ideal . ... We maintain even more preciously the idea of what tough guys should be in our imagination, rather than the compromised version we get in reality.” Reacher, he added, “is pretty much a no-nonsense sort of tough guy. He’s got very little patience with bull—, he just likes to get things done.”
Guns are featured prominently in “The Midnight Line.” But “Reacher says never to tell a soldier that guns are fun. They are tools,” said Child. “He finds it odd that guns are such a fetish . ... Soldiers given a gun would use it, but not fetishize it.”
British-born Child, who describes himself as an immigrant, says he is in the United States “because this is a great country ... because of its Constitution.” He would support the Second Amendment, “but I am offended when people pick and choose. If you are going to support the Second Amendment, then support the First, Fourth, Fifth, 15th, and the ones that some people find inconvenient.”
And as to the current controversy about patriotism and “taking a knee”: “Funnily enough, in the new book, I think there’s a line that says, ‘We fought for freedom, and this is what freedom looks like.’ And I think that’s the thing that people need to grasp.”
Tickets for the luncheon: www.authorsluncheonsf.org
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