Jack Reacher and the Soul of America

There are certain novels, usually glimpsed in airports and the stationery aisles of grocery stores, which exude what the kids might call NPC energy. You know what I’m talking about — the James Pattersons and Colleen Hoovers; the kind of stuff excommunicated from the realm of serious literature with epithets like “pulp” and “beach read.” Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books are some of these.

If you’re not familiar with the premise of the Jack Reacher novels,¹ and if you haven’t seen the (misguided) Tom Cruise movies or the (far more successful) Amazon series, here’s the gist: an ex-military police officer named Jack Reacher arrives in a town, often in rural America, but sometimes in Europe or New York; encounters a mystery, cracks bad guy skulls, and promptly leaves. He has done this approximately thirty times to date, depending on if you count the short stories.

I read the first book, Killing Floor, in 2022, with a healthy dose of skepticism. Muscular action fiction, particularly of the military and cop varieties, is pretty ideologically suspect (and Reacher, a military cop, actually manages to raise both red flags). Consequently, it should come as no surprise that many other readers have taken issue with the protagonist’s political resonance. Some read Reacher (who is six foot five and obscenely jacked²) as a physical incarnation of toxic masculinity — a kind of golem of the patriarchy. Malcolm Gladwell positions him as an anti-cowboy: while the sheriffs of traditional Westerns bring lawfulness to the untamed frontier, Reacher brings primal violence back to modern civilization. (For what it’s worth, Gladwell is a fan, but his analysis does highlight the undeniable, distinctly libertarian stench of Reacher’s exploits.) Professor Matthew Pratt Guterl, picking up on this line of thought for The New Republic, suggests that Reacher should be arrested and/or institutionalized,³ calling him “an avatar of white masculinity.”

That is to say: Jack Reacher slots pretty neatly into a storied lineage of knights errant and generally red-blooded dudes including, among others, Gilgamesh, John Rambo, and Conan the Barbarian. In this way, he is entirely of a kind. So maybe it’s not surprising that I thought immediately of Reacher when I first encountered the following passage from D.H. Lawrence’s 1923 Studies in Classic American Literature:

. . . you have there the myth of the essential white America. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer. It has never yet melted.

Lawrence is right. It would not be a stretch to say that violence is one of America’s founding principles. Nor is it possible to deny that it remains a mainstay of our popular narratives, where it finds its agents more often than not in that constellation of masculinity and hyperindividuality of which Jack Reacher is the apotheosis.⁴

And yet — there’s also something beautiful about Jack Reacher.

That may seem like a strange way to characterize an airport thriller. But Reacher’s appeal is paradoxical: Jenny Davidson, a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University and Reacher superfan, compares the books to the “exquisite versions of fast food prepared by Michelin star chefs.” One has the sense that they are somehow common — “I like Lee Child . . . I’m probably not supposed to,” admits one Oxford academic — but somehow, the very same traits derided by skeptics are those that make the books uniquely appealing. Case in point: while the books’ repetitiveness is often cited as proof of their vapidity, it’s Haruki Murakami’s favorite part: “Everything’s the same!”

The fact is, saying that Jack Reacher should be tried for murder is like saying Santa Claus should be detained for breaking and entering. The man is simply too absurd to abide by the laws of reality. He’s so ripped that, at one point, his pecs literally stop a bullet (Tripwire, no. 3). His only possessions are a toothbrush⁵ and a razor, and when he’s done with his clothes, he throws them away and buys new ones. (“On the issue of Reacher’s underwear,” quips John Lanchester for The New Yorker, “it’s best if we just don’t go there.”)⁶

Perhaps this is why Tom Cruise made such a poor Jack Reacher. The guy famous for riding an actual motorcycle off a cliff and sticking Miles Teller in an actual F/A-18 was simply unable to capture the poetic, ponderous violence of Child’s hero.

The way to take a blow from a bat is to get near, and get near early. The force of the blow comes from the weight of the bat multiplied by the speed of the swing. A mathematical thing. Mass times velocity equals momentum. Nothing you can do about the mass of the bat. The bat is going to weigh exactly the same wherever the hell it is. So you need to kill the speed. You need to get close and take it as it comes off the backswing. While it’s still in the first split second of acceleration. While it’s still slow. That’s why a big backswing is a bad idea. The farther back you swing it, the later it is before you can get it moving forward again. The more time you give away.

Reacher was a foot from it before the swing came in. He watched the arc and caught the bat in both hands, low down in front of his gut. A foot of swing, there’s no power there at all. Just a harmless smack in the palms. Then all the momentum the guy is trying to put into it becomes a weapon to use against him. Reacher swung with him and jacked the handle up and hurled the guy off balance. Kicked out at his ankles and tore the bat free and jabbed him with it. The jab is the move to use. No backswing. The guy went down on his knees and butted his head into the restaurant wall. Reacher kicked him over on his back and squatted down and jammed the bat across his throat, with the handle trapped under his foot and his right hand leaning hard on the business end. He used his left hand to go into each pocket in turn. He came out with an automatic handgun, a thick wallet, and a mobile phone. (Running Blind, no. 4)

Jack Reacher’s fight scenes are so ludicrously removed from human scale (much like Reacher himself) that they hardly bear any resemblance to fighting at all. In fact, the mid-paragraph physics lecture very nearly tips the whole thing into word problem territory.⁷ And although this contrast is sharpest in moments of brutality, Child’s clipped, percussive prose suffuses the the entire series with an overall sense of supreme detachment. You could describe it as sociopathic sangfroid — or, more charitably, as “the glance into warm buildings from the cold outdoors. . . . constructed around half-longing insights into the lives of others.”

Either way, ellipsis, emotional and otherwise, is perhaps the defining characteristic of the Reacher novels. In his tellingly titled Reacher Said Nothing,⁸ Andy Martin is tipped off by the phrase “no eyes, no interest” (Make Me, no. 20), which illuminates Child’s habit of double negations: no x, no y. According to Martin, Reacher is “pure Dasein . . . nothingness personified,” a figure whose lack of material attachments signifies his purity of form. (Plus, there’s Reacher’s conspicuous lack of a middle name, a quirk which earns him the occasional label “Jack-none-Reacher.”⁹) Martin goes so far as to argue that Reacher negates the story itself:

By the end of every book, Reacher has negated the narrative and returned the world to its incoherent meaningless default mode. That was the whole point of Reacher. Not justice, not violent retribution. Killing off the plot.

When Child writes his books, he does them straight through, nearly one-take performances, returning only infrequently to revise or update his earlier work. He does not outline, nor does he plan an ending before he begins. So, like Reacher — roving ceaselessly from town to town — the novels are not really shaped by their content as much as they are by the fact of their passing. Or, to take a step back: in a series about nothing, all we are left with is seriality.

This transient feel is redoubled by the fact that the Reacher books are intentionally designed to be readable in any order. They alternate freely between first and third person and between past and present, and they hardly ever refer to the events of their predecessors. On the contrary, they occasionally imply interstitial episodes that are never recounted in full.¹⁰ A stroke of commercial genius? Definitely. But this disregard for the constraints of narrative continuity also adds to the impression that Reacher is something out of a fable: a mythic figure who wanders in and out of the borders of his books as easily as he boards a Greyhound. Meanwhile, the spaces that comprise the set dressing of his adventures — diners, motels, and endlessly unfolding highways — invoke all the nomadic heritage of road trip Americana. James Parker, writing for The Atlantic, describes Reacher as “a pure creature of American space.”

Jack Reacher has plenty to say to America in 2024, to this husk of a society we’re all rattling around in, plenty to say about violence and righteousness and emptiness and who gets away with what. He’s a radical presence: a homeless man, a lone wolf. . . . Out of the desert of no attachment, the American vacancy, he comes like an anvil-fisted John the Baptist, wearing used Carhartt instead of camel hair.

“Radical,” I think, may be a stretch. But I do believe Child is hinting (reaching?) at something profound. And funnily enough, D.H. Lawrence might agree. In the final essay from his Studies (a spirited take on Walt Whitman), he writes:

It is the American heroic message. The soul is not to pile up defences round herself. . . . She is to go down the open road, as the road opens, into the unknown, keeping company with those whose soul draws them near to her, accomplishing nothing save the journey, and the works incident to the journey . . .

The true democracy, where soul meets soul, in the open road. . . . Where a soul is known at once in its going. Not by its clothes or appearance. . . . If it be a great soul, it will be worshipped in the road.

What could be more Reacher than that?

Really, in his blunt, shambling way, Jack Reacher is navigating the same contradiction that D.H. Lawrence picked up on nearly a century ago. He is stuck somewhere between the essential killer and the heroic message — between isolation and openness, massiveness and monasticism. I can’t honestly say that Reacher redeems himself as a progressive philosopher, but neither can I dismiss him as just another action hero. If I were to offer a defense, it would be this: Jack Reacher, like America, is more nuanced — and a lot bigger — than Tom Cruise might lead us to believe.