Great discussions and recommendations in this thread. Thanks, folks!
Earlier this year I went on what I can only describe as a “men’s reading” binge of three books.
It started with a re-read of The Breach, by Patrick Lee, a deeply fun current-world sci-fi book that came highly recommended from a friend who’d also loved Lexicon, which is twisty and turny and tricksy and great. The Breach is also great, and if you haven’t read it, the less known about it the better. Know that it’s light as a feather, hugely entertaining, and basically never stops moving. And the only speed it knows is a sprint. A tough guy goes for a hike and finds…something…that kicks him into a wild other world. Tons of fun.
That led me to pick up another book of Lee’s, Runner, which has the same ‘perma-sprint’ quality, the same ‘our world but with some crazy sci-fi shit’ milieu, and the same kind of hyper-competent badass main character. It’s also light as a feather, but has even more Holy Shit moments, from the best inversion of a torture scene I’ve ever read to a person using a paraglider to escape a skyscraper. A lonely man comes across someone who desperately needs help, pulling him into a wild, near-permanent chase. I kept exclaiming to my wife and going “you have to read this” until I explained a plot point, and she smiled and said, “is it pretty much an, um, boy novel?” and I sheepishly realized that yes, it absolutely is. Characters are quickly sketched, the main guy is hyper-competent, and plot is paramount. And it rocks. Highly recommended.
But my binge ended with Orphan X, by Gregg Hurwitz, which features another hyper-competent badass getting in over his head. You learn that our main character, the preposterously named Evan Smoak, was raised from boyhood in the US Government black-site “Orphan” program, trained to be a deniable asset who assassinates to protect US interests. He’s just too damn moral, though, and there’s some inter-departmental betrayal, and he disappears, becoming a super-rich, incredibly highly-trained, attractive, distant, single man. That’s right. He’s basically Batman, and rather than just let the allusion sit there, super clear, on the page, Hurwitz has to call it out, comparing Smoak’s hardened penthouse skyscraper lair to the Batcave. Which was clear from about page 10, when you get a detailed walkthrough of the premises. There’s lots of explanations of the technology that Smoak uses to be a liberty-defending badass, and there was a certain pleasure in it until I realized it’s all essentially magic “he figures stuff out” tools. This is not uncommon in “men’s fiction”, I bet, and I was largely cool with this in Runner because the plot is so breakneck and the essential conservatism of the premise–loner badass protects vulnerable young woman with unrelenting violence and superior intelligence–is somewhat obfuscated.
But it is not obfuscated in Orphan X, not nearly enough for my taste. The details above–single rich vigilante protector–are enough to make you shake your head, of course, but the plot doesn’t move quite fast enough to obscure the clunkiness of the wish-fulfillment. And then there’s the slow-burn love interest, a harried, chaotic-but-intelligent, lovely-but-needy single mother that allows our main character to be drawn to someone but still act mysterious and distant, and to tutor and protect a young, fatherless boy. (there’s also a ripping-hot damsel-in-distress he gets to fuck and watch die, of course) And wouldn’t you know it, this woman has Jordan Peterson quotes around her apartment. Ones that catch our hero’s eye and cause him to muse for a bit on what a helpful little bit of advice this woman surrounds herself with. This happens several times, and Peterson is thanked in the acknowledgments, for something like ‘guiding’ the author’s thinking.
I finished the book, but found the ending lackluster and the essential conservatism of the outlook overbearing and distracting, and it ended up leaving a bad taste in my mouth. It’s competently written and plotted, and a decent entry in the men’s fiction canon, but if you’re similarly turned off by overt wish-fulfillment and conservative ideology, stick with Runner, which at least has the decency to move too quickly to notice.