20150903.0601

The book I read for the freelance project I am currently completing is the new David Lagercrantz novel, The Girl in the Spider's Web (ISBN 9780385354295, $13.99 as a NOOK® Book). It is a continuation of Stieg Larsson's Millennium series, which I recall being wildly popular both before and after it was optioned into movie form. I suppose that I see the appeal, although I do not feel it, myself. (I will reserve a number of criticisms of the text for the write-up I will be completing today in its 5,800 words of glory. Those I treat here will not be those I treat there, although some comments may correspond.) I find it an utterly conventional action-thriller text, almost formulaic in its structure, and I am disappointed to not find something else in it, some novelty that would make for surprise. As it is, I have not read the preceding texts, and I found nothing in the work that I did not expect to see.

The strange thing is that I like getting what I expect, and much the same kind of thing that The Girl in the Spider's Web offers--in other media. I watch movies largely for escapist reasons; I am capable of applying critical faculties to film to some extent, to be sure (I am not trained in film studies per se, but the kinds of conventions that are often deployed in them are similar or identical to those deployed in narrative text, so I can make the same kinds of arguments), but I tend not to do so. I use film to go away from the burden of thought as much as for any other reason, and adherence to convention and the expected does much to that purpose. So I cannot say that I oppose conventionalism in the text simply because it is conventional, not without opening myself to allegations of hypocrisy with which I am not comfortable (as opposed to those with which I am).

But there is still something in reading conventionalism that annoys. Perhaps it is because I am habituated to reading in the ways that I am, ways that make reading an active thing that engages my faculties more powerfully because I must act upon the words rather than only being acted upon by them, that Lagercrantz's text sits oddly. Reading is not passive for me; I do not turn pages--electronic or physical--to have something before my eyes, but to have something with which to occupy my mind. (Or, as it happens, to make money, so I must be temperate in some complaints; it is not as if I am not being compensated for my efforts.) The Girl in the Spider's Web seems to me to be constructed to reward passivity, to work better for readers who read in the same way that I watch movies--and there are more of them than there are of readers who read as I do. (Again, I profit from this, so I must temper my complaints, but I still find it annoying.)