NEVER GO BACK, by Lee Child. Delacorte; 400 pages; $28.
Lee Child takes an unusual amount of time to rev up his new Jack Reacher novel. Suffice it to say that Reacher arrives in Washington to meet Major Susan Turner, the woman he's become interested in through phone conversations during A Wanted Man, the previous Reacher novel.
Through a series of machinations that don’t bear sustained inquiry, he is informed that he’s back in the Army, that he’s being sued for a wrongful death that happened 16 years earlier, and that he may have a child, conceived during his career in the army. The mother of said child wants money.
That’s an awful lot of back story, but once all the pieces are in place — somewhere around page 85 — Child gets down to what he does best: create sustained parabolas of tense action, interspersed with dialogue exchanges that read as if Hemingway was writing high-end genre entertainment:
“Have you had many sexual liasons in our life?” Reacher is asked.
“That’s a very personal question.”
“I’m your lawyer. Have you?”
“As many as possible, generally. I like women. I guess it’s a biological thing.”
“So many there may be some you don’t remember?”
“There were some I try to forget.”
Given the multiple domesticities rearing their head, Child’s lone wolf character is in danger from more than the bad guys. Reacher’s charm is in his independence, and Child seems to know it, but he plays around with some of the dubious entanglements that eventually made Robert Parker’s Spenser such a dull dog after a promising beginning.
As for the bad guys, they’re code-named Romeo and Juliet for what turn out to be good reasons and employ a nasty piece of work named Shrago, whose ears were cropped by the Taliban:
“His ears had the center whorls intact like any other guy, but the flatter parts around them had been cut away, probably with scissors, very tight in, so that what was left looked like pasta, like uncooked tortellini florets, the color of a white man’s flesh. Not exactly hexagons.”
What in somebody else’s hands would be garden variety pulp sadism is rendered funny by Child’s invocation of tortellini.
Luckily for us all, Child backs off on the terrors of domesticity — the last thing anybody wants to see is Jack Reacher nursing a martini while coping with a sullen teenager. Child also works fairly hard at keeping Reacher in constrained circumstances. Most of the book takes place in and around Washington, D.C., and government and military bureacracies.
In other respects, it’s business as usual. Reacher remains Reacher, with “a six pack like a cobbled city street, and a chest like a suit of NFL armor, and biceps like basketballs, and subcutaneous fat like a Kleenex tissue.” In line with that, there’s a doozy of a fight that takes place in an airplane bathroom.
It’s not giving too much away to say that Susan Turner turns out to be just the kind of woman Reacher likes: independent and smart. It’s also not giving too much away to say that most of Child’s characters talk alike, which means that teenage girls use words like “parturition.”
No matter. If “Never Go Back” isn’t at the very top rank of the Reacher novels — there are now 18, along with a few e-books and some random short stories — the overall achievement is extremely high. Child deserves every bit of his huge success.
