This Christopher Buckley review just might qualify as one of my favorite book reviews ever. Notice how Christopher skewers a popular writer, a very bad writer, who is racist, sexist, superficial and just plain silly. I've enjoyed reading this review over and over and over.
By the way, with The Iron Dream, science fiction author Norman Spinrad wrote a satirical novel modeled on comic book superheros forever battling the forces of evil. After reading (a quick read I must admit) this Tom Clancy, I repeatedly imagined a comic strip based on his novel. But unlike Norman Spinrad, Tom Clancy never intended his book to be satire - the guy actually wrote this piece of crap as serious fiction.
Christopher Buckley reviews Debt of Honor by Tom Clancy
SOMEWHERE, if memory serves, Mark Twain said of one of Henry James's books, "Once you put it down, you can't pick it up." "Debt of Honor," the eighth novel in Tom Clancy's oeuvre, is, at 766 pages, a herniating experience. Things don't really start to happen until about halfway through this book, by which time most authors, including even some turgid Russian novelists, are finished with theirs. But Tom Clancy must be understood in a broader context, not as a mere writer of gizmo-thrillers, destroyer of forests, but as an economic phenomenon. What are his editors -- assuming they even exist; his books feel as if they go by modem from Mr. Clancy's computer directly to the printers -- supposed to do? Tell him to cut? "You tell him it's too long." "No, you tell him."
Someone, on the other hand -- friend, relative, spiritual adviser, I don't know -- really ought to have taken him aside and said, "Uh, Tom, isn't this book kind of racist?" I bow to no one in my disapproval of certain Japanese trade practices, and I worked for a man who once conspicuously barfed into the lap of the Japanese Prime Minister, but this book is as subtle as a World War II anti-Japanese poster showing a mustachioed Tojo bayoneting Caucasian babies. If you thought Michael Crichton was a bit paranoid, "Rising Sun"-wise, well then, to quote Mr. Clancy's favorite President and original literary booster, Ronald Reagan, "You ain't seen nothing yet." His Japanese aren't one-dimensional, they're half-dimensional. They spend most of their time grunting in bathhouses. And yet, to echo "Dr. Strangelove" 's Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, "the strange thing is, they make such bloody good cameras."
The plot: Japan craftily sabotages the United States financial markets, occupies the Mariana Islands, sinks two American submarines, killing 250 sailors, and threatens us with nuclear weapons. Why, you ask, don't we just throw up on their laps and give them a countdown to a few toasty reruns of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Because, fools that we are, we have got rid of all our nukes in a mad disarmament pact with the Russkies. (Plausible? Never mind.)
For a while it looks like sayonara for Western civ, until Jack Ryan, now White House national security adviser, masterminds such a brilliant response to the crisis that he ends up Vice President. To make way, the current V.P. must resign because of charges of -- sexual harassment. I won't be ruining it for you by saying that Ryan's ascendancy does not stop there; the President and the entire Congress must be eliminated in an inadvertently comic deus ex machina piloted by a sullen Japanese airman who miraculously does not grunt "Banzai!" as he plows his Boeing 747 into the Capitol. Former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman has recently had the arguable taste to remark, apropos this episode in "Debt of Honor," that this particular fantasy has long been his own. I don't like Congress either, but Abraham Lincoln, Lehman's fellow Republican and mine, did go to some pains to keep the Capitol's construction going during the Civil War as a symbol of the Union's continuity. Oh, well.
To be sure, the war enacted here is not the fruit of national Japanese will, but rather a manipulation of events by a zaibatsu businessman whose mother, father and siblings had jumped off a cliff in Saipan back in 1944 rather than be captured by evil American marines, and by a corrupt, America-hating politician. But that hardly lets Mr. Clancy off the hook, for the nasty characteristics ascribed to Yamata (the former) and Goto (the latter) are straightforwardly racial. To heat our blood further, Goto keeps a lovely American blonde as his geisha and does unspeakable naughties to her. When she threatens to become a political hot tomato, Yamata has the poor thing killed. It all plays into the crudest kind of cultural paranoia, namely, that what these beastly yellow inscrutables are really after is -- our women. (A similar crime, recall, was at the heart of Mr. Crichton's novel "Rising Sun." Well, archetypes do do the job.) Her name, for these purposes, is perfect: Kimberly Norton. "Yamata had seen breasts before, even large Caucasian breasts." To judge from the number of mentions of them, it is fair to conclude that Caucasian breasts are at the very heart of Goto-san's Weltanschauung. Farther down that same page, he expresses his carnal delight to Yamata "coarsely" (naturally) in -- shall we say -- cavorting with American girls. Jack Ryan is therefore striking a blow for more than the American way of life: he is knight-defender of nothing less than American bimbohood.
IT must be said that the hapless Kimberly Norton is a glaring exception among Clancy women: so much so that you wonder if he's been reading Susan Faludi under the covers at night. With this book, Mr. Clancy stakes his claim to being the most politically correct popular author in America, which is somewhat remarkable in such an outspoken, if not fire-breathing, right winger as himself. Practically everyone is either black, Hispanic, a woman or, at a minimum, ethnic. The Vice President is hauled off on charges of sexual harassment; the Japanese Prime Minister is a rapist; the deputy director of operations at the C.I.A. is a woman; there is Comdr. Roberta Peach (Peach? honestly) of the Navy; Ryan's wife receives a Lasker Award for her breakthroughs in ophthalmic surgery; one of the C.I.A. assassins is informed, practically in the middle of dispatching slanty-eyed despoilers of American women, that his own daughter has made dean's list and will probably get into medical school; secretaries, we are told again and again, are the real heroes, etc., etc.
All this would be more convincing were it not for the superseding macho that permeates each page like dried sweat. Ryan's Secret Service code name is, I kid you not, "Swordsman." And there's something a bit gamey about this description of the C.I.A.'s deputy director of operations: "Mary Pat entered the room, looking about normal for an American female on a Sunday morning." His feminism, if it can be called that, is pretty smarmy, like a big guy getting a woman in a choke hold and giving her a knuckly noogie on the top of her head by way of showing her she's "O.K." (Preferable, I admit, to the entertainments offered by the officers and gentlemen of the Tailhook Association.) And there is this hilarious description of Ryan's saintly wife saving someone's sight with laser surgery: "She lined up the crosshairs as carefully as a man taking down a Rocky Mountain sheep from half a mile, and thumbed the control." You've got to admire a man who can find the sheep-hunting metaphor in retinal surgery.
Tom Clancy is the James Fenimore Cooper of his day, which is to say, the most successful bad writer of his generation. This is no mean feat, for there are many, many more rich bad writers today than there were in Cooper's time. If Twain were alive now, he would surely be writing an essay entitled, "The Literary Crimes of Clancy." He would have loved "Debt of Honor," the culmination, thus far, of Mr. Clancy's almost endearing Hardy Boys-"Jane's Fighting Ships" prose style:
"The Indians were indeed getting frisky."
"More surprisingly, people made way for him, especially women, and children positively shrank from his presence as though Godzilla had returned to crush their city."
" 'I will not become Prime Minister of my country,' Hiroshi Goto announced in a manner worthy of a stage actor, 'in order to become executor of its economic ruin.' "
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