As you've probably heard, the big news in publishing these days is a trilogy of Swedish thrillers by the late Stieg Larsson. The first was titled The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which Entertainment Weekly calls "the hottest book on the planet," and I guess this is true, at least until the next hot thing comes along.
Curious, I bought one of the books. It happened to be the second one in the series, The Girl Who Played with Fire, because this was the one available at my local drugstore. Having read about 100 pages of the 700-page book, I have some ideas about why the "girl" of the title, Lisbeth Salander, has become a breakout character.
But before I proceed, I should warn you that what follows contains some spoilers, not only about the second book, but about the first book also. That's because Played with Fire incorporates some of Dragon Tattoo's plot developments into its background story. So if you plan to read these books and you want to come to them fresh, read no further.
Okay, so why is Salander (she is always identified by her last name) such a runaway success with readers?
First, here is a list of Salander's traits as we know them after 100 pages of The Girl Who Played with Fire.
She is a genius with a photographic memory, who is currently trying to solve Fermat's Last Theorem. (A mathematician did solve it a few years ago, but she refuses to look at his work because she wants to solve it herself.)
She is only 4'11", weighs 90 pounds, has a childlike face, and has many tattoos and some piercings.
Her childhood was spent in foster homes. At one point she was repeatedly raped by her guardian. She took her revenge by immobilizing him and tattooing "I am a sex pervert" (or words to that effect) on his groin. She has been shadowing this guy ever since and making his life hell.
She is an expert hacker and used her skills to drain the accounts of a corrupt financier, acquiring 3 billion kronor ($300 million US) for herself.
Now independently wealthy, she has spent a year traveling to various exotic locales.
She is a martial arts expert who can knock down an opponent twice her size.
She has no close friends and is emotionally underdeveloped.
She was also physically underdeveloped in the chest area until she used some of her newfound wealth to get breast implants.
She helps people who are in trouble.
She has an active but rather impersonal sex life and runs away from commitments.
There may be other things, but those are the highlights.
Now the obvious thing to say is that Salander is an over-the-top character, having many far-out traits. She's not just smart, she's a genius. She's not just well off, she's worth hundreds of millions. She's not just petite, she's positively diminutive.
Moreover, many of her traits are wish-fulfillment exercises. At one time or another, most of us have fantasized about being insanely wealthy, having unlimited leisure time, having kick-ass computer skills, taking revenge on someone who has wronged us, being strong enough to take down any opponent in a fight, or being so super-smart that we can handle the most complex intellectual problems with ease.
So one thing Larsson evidently did was make a list of things he wished he could do or be, and then give Salander many of these qualities.
But these over-the-top assets are balanced by equally dramatic liabilities. Salander didn't just have a bad childhood; she had a nightmarish childhood. She doesn't merely have few friends, she has no friends. She's very very short, very very thin, and (prior to surgical enhancement) very very flat-chested. She doesn't just have one tattoo, she has many. There's something creepy about her. She's sort of like Morticia of the Addams Family, in a way - a strange female with minimal affect and a bizarre appearance. Normal people are uncomfortable around her, the way they are around Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory.
So she's not a exercise in pure wish-fulfillment fantasy like, say, James Bond. All things considered, I don't think most readers would want to be Salander, any more than TV viewers want to be Sheldon or Morticia.
What, then, are we left with? In the old days, by which I mean ten years ago, it was enough to have a "strong female character" - think of Kay Scarpetta in Patricia Cornwell's books. These days, however, strong female characters are a dime a dozen. So now the strong female character has to be almost impossibly skilled in certain areas - not just smart but Albert Einstein-smart; not just self-reliant but capable of kayoing an NFL linebacker. But since this would make her too good to be true, she has to have balancing defects that are just as implausible. She's a kickass math genius ... emotionally scarred by the worst upbringing of all time. She's a nymphomaniac sex bomb ... who's tiny, anorexic, and flat-chested. She's a fabulously wealthy world traveler ... who has no friends.
Everything is dialed up to 11. Both the strengths and the weaknesses are magnified, creating a new kind of balance that seems somehow believable because it's all equally exaggerated. If only the strengths were highlighted, she would be too perfect for our cynical age. If only the weaknesses were highlighted, she would be such a mess that reading about her would be an exercise in despair.
You can see this approach in other popular characters. Take Jeffery Deaver's Lincoln Rhyme. Upside: He's not just a clever cop, he's a brilliant thinker with Sherlock Holmes levels of insight. Downside: he's handicapped, and not just with a bum leg or a scarred hand; he's a quadriplegic unable to move anything but his head and one finger. Outsized asset balanced by outsized liability.
Or take TV's Dr. House. Not just a good doctor - a great doctor, performing medical miracles every week. And not just a grouchy guy - an antisocial misfit who alienates everyone around him (and is partly crippled and addicted to pain meds). Outsized assets, outsized liabilities.
I think these characters work because they allow people to indulge in wish fulfillment ("wouldn't it be cool to be a lifesaving doc like House?") while also allowing people to stand back and feel superior ("wow, that House is one messed-up dude"). On the one hand, they give us the opportunity to fantasize about having nearly superhuman abilities, while on the other hand they allow us to feel better about who we actually are. Plus, the roughly balanced positive and negative traits somehow create an impression of "realism," even though these characters are not the least bit realistic.
As a fiction writer myself (albeit one whose career is in abeyance these days), would I want to write this kind of character? Probably not. I wouldn't know how to do it and probably wouldn't believe in it if I tried.
But this does seem to be the trend. And if Stieg Larsson had lived to see his books in print, he would have been a very wealthy man.
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