Bouquets to the NRA and veterans, dead roses to the New York Times: I, Sniper by Stephen Hunter

posted at 7:06 pm on February 15, 2010 by CK MacLeod
[ Media ]   

I wonder whether Stephen Hunter still believes in the genre – mystery/suspense thriller – that he has mastered as few others have. His tone in I, Sniper is so self-conscious, so knowing about his own authorial tricks and tactics, it reads almost as a set of gestures – love bouquets to the NRA and to veterans of foreign wars, dead flowers to the New York Times, poison bon-bons for the cultural-political left – rather than as a fictional world for a reader to inhabit. Still, at a time when conservatives feel almost without representation in popular culture – Fox News, Country & Western music, and I guess NASCAR being the typical exceptions – it’s at least worth noting the beachhead, even if it’s a relatively minor one, that Hunter has taken and is skillfully defending.  At least he hasn’t abandoned and insulted his conservative readership, in the manner of Barry Eisler and Lee Child, who, during the hardest years of the Iraq war turned their heroes, respectively John Rain and Jack Reacher, into anti-Bush, anti-conservative figures.

I also wonder just how pissed off Hunter, a Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic as well as one of our best genre writers, is about what Mark Wahlberg and company did to his work when they turned the first Bob Lee Swagger novel, Point of Impact, into the only slightly better than barely watchable movie Shooter. Yet Hunter’s audacity – from an opening series of fictional assassinations of characters obviously based on well-known leftwing celebrities, to a climax built around the exposure and destruction of yet another such figure – makes up in large part for a lack of genre-level seriousness, and longtime fans will find more than enough Swaggering good-guy-ism propelled by mind-boggling detail work to read the story with apolitical satisfaction.

Anyway, most of Hunter’s readers, I suspect, will feel more like standing up and cheering than giving up on the book when they encounter speeches like the one about the “all-powerful… narrative [that] rules us… rules Washington… rules everything”:

“The narrative is the set of assumptions the press believes in, possibly without even knowing that it believes in them. It’s so powerful because it’s unconscious. It’s not like they get together every morning and decide ‘These are the lies we tell today.’ No, that would be too crude and honest. Rather, it’s a set of casual, nonrigorous assumptions about a reality they’ve never really experienced that’s arranged in such a way as to reinforce their best and most ideal presumptions about themselves and their importance to the system and the way they’ve chosen to live their lives. It’s a way of arranging things a certain way that they all believe in without ever really addressing carefully. It permeates their whole culture. They know, for example, that Bush is a moron and Obama a saint. They know communism was a phony threat cooked up by right-wing cranks as a way to leverage power to the executive. They know Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, the response to Katrina was [expletive] up, torture never works, and mad Vietnam sniper Carl Hitchcock killed the saintly peace demonstrators. Cheney’s a devil, Biden’s a genius. Soft power good, hard power bad. Forgiveness excellent, punishment counterproductive, capital punishment a sin.”

Could have been ripped from a rightroots blog.

excerpted/adapted from Zombie Contentions

Blowback