Outsider heroes: Lisbeth Salander and Jack Reacher

The reclusive Swedish movie star Greta Garbo is famously supposed to have uttered the phrase that followed her to the grave: “I want to be left alone” (often erroneously repeated as “I want to be alone.”) Now comes another solitude-seeking young Swedish woman, Lisbeth Salander, the fictional heroine of the worldwide best-seller trilogy of The Girl Who…. thrillers by the late Stieg Larsson.

Salander will defend her loner’s ways tooth and nail, and even with a well-placed Molotov cocktail if she thinks the occasion calls for it. Lisbeth is as outside the pale of society as her genius at computer hacking can place her.

Back in the U.S., the British-born author Lee Child is running the thriller tables with his Reacher novels, now 14 in number, which follow the solitary exploits of Jack Reacher, who is so far outside that his only luggage is a collapsible toothbrush and an ATM card. Reacher buys new clothes at an Army-Navy store every three or four days and dumps the old duds in the nearest trashcan. He wears clunky British-made brogans that will last years. He travels light and he travels fast— and always alone.

She boxes, too

Lisbeth Salander is a little wisp of a 98-pound, maybe five-foot thing, who sports a bunch of tattoos– the most famous being a dragon on her upper back– and various piercings. She rarely speaks and takes no shit from anybody. She studied boxing with a former champion and she’s as quick as a lizard with a punch like Rocky Balboa. Lisbeth is uneasy with friendship, although she is deeply cared for by three people: a crusading journalist, a kickboxing half-Chinese hardcore lesbian, and an aging lawyer who was her legal guardian until Lisbeth was well into her 20s.

Reacher is six-five, 235 pounds, built like a tight end, and can kill you any number of ways, beginning with his bare hands. In his indeterminate 40s, he is a West Point graduate and was an Army MP major until he saw the handwriting on the barracks wall at the end of the Cold War and resigned before he could be downsized. Now he wanders. He’s a Marine Corps brat who was dragged from post to post all over the world, and likes his rootless lifestyle. In all 14 books, Reacher has never been called by his first name; even his late mother called him simply Reacher.

Stallone's perception

What Salander and Reacher, so physically different, share beside a passion for personal space is that they’re both astoundingly bright and intelligent. Intelligence is by itself simply a natural gift. Both these loners possess an accompanying level of brightness that lets them put their intelligence to use in unraveling a breathtakingly complicated array of criminal puzzles. Salander uses her hacker’s genius– and her quietly pugnacious nature– in her sleuthing, while Reacher is “the sort of guy who sees things five seconds before the rest of the world,” according to an awed cop in the latest Reacher novel, 61 Hours, which is set in a blizzard-stricken small town in South Dakota. In crime-busting, a five-second edge can mean the critical difference between life and death.

Say what you will about Sylvester Stallone, but I have always admired him for tapping into two deeply rooted aspects of the American psyche. In the Rocky films, Stallone appealed to our passion for the underdog; and in the Rambo movies he focused on the American fixation on winning and the accompanying desire to avenge our so-called defeat in Vietnam.

Information overload

So it is, I think, with both Larsson and Child and their loner heroes, both stubbornly obsessed with not becoming part of the lonely crowd they see about them. At some deep level, most of us instinctively realize that in this frenetic, cyber society spinning crazily about us, we risk being overcome by the maelstrom of messages and information that constantly bombard us. We see the old, comforting ways slipping irrevocably away into a whirlpool of change and frustration that threatens to drown our individuality and swamp our sense of self.

In both Lisbeth Salander and Jack Reacher we see two individuals who haven’t surrendered to the mass life and won’t. That daydream exerts an extraordinary appeal today, as witness the more than 21 million Girl Who novels that Stieg Larsson has sold worldwide and the Jack Reacher fan clubs that have sprung up here like dragon’s teeth sown on a supposedly infertile field.

Her 21-room apartment

There is a great irony in the Salander character: She uses the engine of much of the hurly-burly of modern life– the computer– to hack her way outside the pale. If she needs information that can only be found in a supposedly secure police computer, she hacks her way in. Her master hacking stroke was stealing more than 2 billion Swedish kronor and using 25 million of it to anonymously buy a 21-room apartment in the most exclusive neighborhood in Stockholm. The kicker is that she only lives in three of the rooms. Loner paradise.

The juvenile computer obsessions of Facebook and Twitter have no place in Lisbeth Salander’s cyberworld. Social networks are the last thing on her computer agenda. She doesn’t need virtual friends; she doesn’t even need real friends. To Lisbeth, the computer keyboard of which she is a true virtuoso is simply a means to her ultimate desire: to be left the fuck alone.

She and Jack Reacher could easily share his collapsible toothbrush. At the risk of oral hygiene, I'd like to share that toothbrush, too. Both Lisbeth and Reacher are personal heroes for me, albeit fictional ones. I understand they are fictional, but their creators, Larsson and Child, are examining through these thrillers problems and aspects of the real world-- like greed, cruelty and corruption-- that require heroic measures to deal with. The violent solutions proferred by Salander and Reacher are not, of course, the ultimate answers to the world's problems. But until politics and corporate cultures undergo doubtful sea changes, at least we have these brief fictional interludes before we troop back out to reality.♦



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