Stieg Larsson, The New Yorker, and the "Good Enough" Theory of Culture

Is there a better entertainment than watching The New Yorker try to understand popular culture? It seems to be the last pocket of the universe that can't wrap its head around a de-coupling of aesthetic merit and commercial success.

This has never been more striking than in Joan Acocella's  recent attempt to account for the popularity of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, "Man of Mystery" (sub-heading: "Why do people love Stieg Larsson's novels?"). The piece serves as one-stop shopping for newcomers to the series, those who, presumably, have seen the books on subways and in airport bookstores but have little sense of what the fuss is about. The resulting discussion, I think, tells us more about Acocella's literary sensibilities than sheds the faintest photon on America's taste for these novels.

Her distaste for the series, its success, and perhaps even the story she is writing, suffuses her discussion, right from the first sentence:

"[h]aving got American readers to buy more than fourteen million copies, collectively, of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy books-“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” (2008, American edition), “The Girl Who Played with Fire” (2009), and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (2010)-the management at Knopf has decided that it would like them to buy some more." 

Let's ignore the stylistic clumsiness of "having got" and instead focus on her view of the matter. Readers haven't wanted to read these books; they have been "got" to buy them. That the content of the books should generate such interest befuddles Acocella, so she looks for forces other than readerly pleasure, up to and including the ability of publisher to manufacture a literary blockbuster. Her project seems to be to catalog her own problems with the series ("The loss of Larsson's style would not be a sacrifice, "the most crippling weakness of the trilogy is its hero," and "[l]ike many mediocre novels, the trilogy is far better on the screen than on the page" among other complaints) more than it is a think-piece on its wild success.

Even as she turns to her conjecture about the phenomenon, she can't help but couch it in condescension: "It is clear that people like these movies, but what accounts for the success of the novels, despite their almost comical faults?"

And what does "account" (notice the weird passivity of that verb) for this success? First, she does concede (not without a dig) that "Larsson may have had a weakness for extraneous detail, but at the same time, paradoxically, he is a very good storyteller." One might expect that this begrudged attribute might be supported by the same kinds of evidence she used to detail the awkwardness of some of the dialogue, but not one specific instance of this story-telling ability is offered.

This, unfortunately, is the high-water mark of her analysis. Acocella's subsequent reasons for the series' popularity are, in order: the popularity of the revenge genre, the supposedly widespread male sexual fantasy of rape, the rise of the "woman warrior," the inclusion of modern technology, and, I kid you not, Larsson's critique of Sweden's social democracy. I find this somewhat less than persuasive.

I suppose the logic for such grasping is something like this: if something is hugely shocking, then the causes of said event must be equally unlikely. Acocella starts from a point of finding Larsson's success confounding, so the contributing factors must be likewise abstruse.

After reading and enjoying the series, I don't find the success all that unexpected, so would take the opposite tack and assume the reasons are relatively familiar. Here's how I would parse the pieces:

Pre-Existing Popular Taste: 45%
This is crime/thriller fiction, arguably the most popular brand of adult literature. Grisham. Patterson. Ludlum. These dudes move trucks and trucks of books, and Larsson, himself a fan of the genre, is operating in this vein. I don't think Larsson is really any better of a writer than these guys, but I don't think he's any worse, at least in English translation, either.

Lisbeth Salander: 20%
This, however, is not a character we've seen much of. Acocella calls her a "punk-fairy": I would describe her more like a "techno she-devil." She is at once vulnerable and fiercely competent, with a serious nasty streak: equal parts Debbie Harry, Bill Gates, and The Punisher.

Setting: 10%
There is something oddly compelling about the atmosphere of Larsson's Sweden, especially in the first book. Its cold austerity has an almost monastic quality, which plays nicely against the twisted passions of the villains.

Packaging: 5%
I'm sure people who work in publishing would be able to describe this better, but the look and feel of the series captures a certain modern urbanity that separates them from your run of the mill gold-embossed trade paperback thriller. Look at GWTDT next to Patterson's latest.

I've seen that Patterson cover 974123469 times. I've never seen one quite like The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo. This matters.


Back-story: 5%
Larsson's biography and death are definitely fascinating. He came out of nowhere and stayed there. I don't discount this sort of thing; I've seen it too many times. Cobain. John Kennedy Toole. Sylvia Plath. That guy who wrote RENT. We can't get enough of a tragic and mysterious success. This could be higher than 5%, actually.

Chaos Theory: 10%
Sometimes, the ingredients bake up in just the right way at the right time—an inscrutable emergent property that is as palpable as it is unknowable. Maybe a tiredness with a popular genre created some room for a variation of it. Maybe everyone has a tattoo and a Mac now. Maybe we all hate flying so much that the page-turning immersion these books provide is especially welcome. Maybe it's all of these, maybe none. How else can you explain the popularity of Hypercolor t-shirts in the mid-1990s or the sudden rise of bacon? I mean, bacon's always been good.

All in all, I’m not sure there’s a great and powerful Oz behind this particular curtain.

One last comment: I think we might find a clue to Acocella incomprehension in the word choice of her sub-heading, “Why do people ‘love’ Stieg Larsson’s novels?” The thinking is that if a bunch of people buy something, then they must love it. My experience, and that of many of the people I know who have read the books, is not really one of love; it was one of “hey, pretty fun read. That made my flight 28% less painful.”

I read somewhere, though I can’t find it now, that the most rated movie among Netflix subscribers is Miss Congeniality: not challenging, a likable lead, familiar, and yet slightly different. Not going to piss too many people off, but also not likely to be named to anyone’s favorite movies of all time. That doesn’t make it bad or worthy of scorn—just hugely popular.
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The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson: A Kakutani Review-a-long

So, the final chapter in Stieg Larsson's Millenium Trilogy arrived last week and the Ape has made it through to the end. As is our habit, we took a look at some mainstream reviews after finishing the novel and found a surprising, to us at least, amount of praise for this frustrated and frustrating coda. 

Perhaps least expected was the warmth with which Michiko Kakutani received The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (especially considering that she hates more than half of the fiction she reviews). So rather than offer another review, we thought we'd read along with Kakutani's. She begins: 

Lisbeth Salander, Stieg Larsson’s fierce pixie of a heroine, is one of the most original characters in a thriller to come along in a while — a gamin, Audrey Hepburn look-alike but with tattoos and piercings, the take-no-prisoners attitude of Lara Croft and the cool, unsentimental intellect of Mr. Spock.

No problem here--Salander is clearly the spinning, molten core of the trilogy. Like all great characters, we miss her when she's off-stage. This is problem one with Hornet's Nest; Salander spends nearly all of it in the hospital, writing a brief autobiography for her eventual trial and dispatching her hacker comrades to infiltrate the hard-drives of her enemies. As boring as Salander's computer hacking was in the first two novels, at least there she did it herself. Here, she just tells other people to do it. 

It is a problem, though, Larsson created for himself. As we noted in an earlier post, by the end of The Girl Who Played with Fire, Salander is so, as Kakutani writes, "incandescently proficient," that she must be sequestered for there to be any doubt about her fate. (This is something you see in other stories with characters who are simply too powerful to be interesting. Professor X exemplifies the narrative conundrum; it seemed like baldy was in a coma, drugged, captured, or in an alternate spectral plane in every major X-Men series. Dude was just too powerful for the stories to work with him around.)

So rather than follow the character we've signed on for, we have to follow around a series of cops, journalists, and bureaucrats for the preponderance of the story, which makes the following evaluation from Kakutani all the more head-scratching: "It’s also a thoroughly gripping read that shows off the maturation of the author’s storytelling talents."

To our mind, Hornet's Nest is the most confused and inert of the three. It seems that Kakutani has a soft-spot for the novel despite the absence of Salander, whom she acknowledges is the trilogy's engine: "The novels’ central appeal, however, remains Salander herself: a heroine who takes on a legal system and evil, cartoony villains with equal ferocity and resourcefulness."

Somehow, she also manages to ignore the book's heavy-handed social critique ("these novels actually don’t have any didactic thesis to convey"), even though each section of the novel is preceded by an historical vignette about warrior-women and that the moral of the story is neatly and clearly articulated by a main character: "When it comes down to it, this story is not primarily about spies and secret government agencies; it's about violence against women, and the men who enable it." 

And while it's certainly possible to enjoy the novel despite the moralizing, suggesting that there isn't a larger issue at stake seems a misreading. In fact, the disjointed ending that Kakutani herself notes is a direct result of Larsson's twin narratives: Salander's personal story of liberation, which culminates with a grizzly, caricatured battle with her half-brother, and the journalistic critique of Swedish law enforcement and constitutional oversight, which is really the main "drama" of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. 

Kakutani seems to collpase these narratives--"the real showdown in this harrowing novel is between Salander and a ruthless government cabal"--when in fact there really is no such showdown. Salander's interaction with the "cabal" is carried out almost entirely by intermediaries. Indeed, her persistent refusal to talk with anyone but her lawyer is itself a major plot element. 

In our final analysis, we find the second and third installments an order of magnitude weaker than the tight, propulsive The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, where Kakutani finds that Larsson has brought things to a close "with dexterity, ardor and a stoked imagination." 

We wish we could agree.