| It's Clancy fun in the son
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The son in "The Teeth of the Tiger" (Putnam's Sons, $27.95) is Jack Patrick Ryan Jr., whose father is the longtime Clancy hero who rose through the CIA ranks and became U.S. President. He is now retired, counting his money and writing his memoirs. Except for a constant litany of flattering references, he never appears here, making him Clancy's first casualty. The second is any pretension about America's values and ideals. The good guys - to abuse a perfectly good cliche - are as racist, sexist, materialistic and homicidal as the bad guys. This time around, it's Jack Patrick Ryan Jr., 23, recent Georgetown grad, who picks up the baton. He's sharp as a tack, and most discreet - Dad apparently doesn't know the kid has talked himself into an analyst's job with "The Campus," a secret agency set up to kill America's enemies. The absurdities keep coming. The first two killers recruited are twins, one an FBI agent, the other a Marine officer, who also are - hang on - Jack Junior's cousins. The plot is something about terrorists, mostly Saudi, cooking up a plot to spread panic with terrorist acts that begin with a simultaneous attack on shopping malls. The cousins are buying sneakers in Charlottesville, Va., when the shooting starts, and kill all four terrorists there. Clancy took a critical hammering in his last couple of high-tech thrillers, which may explain why he has passed his neoconservative homilies, car and gun talk, and contempt for due process, to another generation. In truth, Clancy may have recharged his storytelling batteries - the last big scene here, on the Spanish Steps in Rome, almost surely means a sequel. The only women here are whores, but compared with the men, who are pure cardboard and an inch deep, they show a little personality. There is something very creepy about Clancy's protagonists. All are developmentally arrested, all are obsessed with manliness and machinery, and all are posturing frat boy conversationalists. It's possible that Clancy, who has a lot of tight ties in the military and intelligence communities, is simply reporting the way people there talk and think. Or he may only have tapped into some male fantasies of paranoia, secrecy and avenging violence. Not that it matters. The guys are circling the block even now, ready to lay down their money and start reading. The good news is that at 431 pages, a novella by recent Clancy standards, it will not take forever to finish. |
I agree!
And nobody will ever say that my characters are pure cardboard and an inch deep.