The Back Page: Guns.

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 10:57:50 GMT

Ott, Bill (author).
FEATURE. First published October 1, 2009 (Booklist).

I’ve only touched a gun once in my life. On my tenth birthday, my grandfather gave me a .22 rifle. When he arrived on our doorstep, gun in hand, after a treacherous 60-mile drive down Interstate 5 in Oregon (he suffered from Parkinson’s and wasn’t supposed to drive), I was in the middle of a Ping-Pong game with my friend Rob and couldn’t really be bothered. Thanks, Grandpa, I muttered, handing the gun off to my father and hustling back to the game. The rifle was deposited under my parents’ bed, where it languished for a couple of years (my father wasn’t a hunter, and I was interested only in sports). Somehow, Grandpa got the message that his gun wasn’t fully appreciated and embarked on another verboten journey down the highway. This time he was all business, rescuing the maligned weapon and, later, giving it to one of my more-appreciative cousins.

I never did develop a fondness for real-life guns, but my grandfather could take solace in the fact that I’m a big Stephen Hunter fan. Hunter’s thrillers, many of which star former Vietnam sniper Bob Lee Stamper, are all about guns—the look and feel of them, the craftsmanship and the technology that go into making them, and, yes, the people who shoot them and the havoc they wreak. In Hunter’s latest, I, Sniper, the acknowledgments page lists more than 40 American writers who Hunter says have given him “education, illumination, insight, enjoyment, and delight.” Certainly, there are lots of American writers I don’t know at all, but frankly, I was taken aback to discover that I didn’t recognize a single name on Hunter’s list. A little Googling solved the mystery. Hunter’s pantheon of greats is dominated by men who write nonfiction about guns.

So how did I—the 10 year old who preferred Ping-Pong to a .22—come to be an unabashed fan of an author whose books exude gun culture the way Tommy Lasorda bleeds Dodger blue (can’t get away from those sports analogies)? I could say, of course, that Hunter is a talented writer who builds characters expertly (he does), or note that he is easily the equal of the great Lee Child when it comes to choreographing action scenes (he is), but that would miss the point, the way certain highbrow types miss the point when they say they only read crime novels that “transcend the genre.” No, one of the main reasons I like Hunter’s books is that I’m fascinated by all the gun lore.

The book that got me started on Hunter was Hot Springs (2000), a reimagining of Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest. It’s set in 1946 and concerns a World War II hero (Bob Lee Swagger’s father, Earl) who is hired to clean up Hot Springs, Arkansas, where gangster Owney Madden has created a sort of vacation wonderland for bad guys—casinos, whorehouses, and, for those so inclined, a dip in the springs themselves. This is a violent book about the allure of violence (“the hot pounding of the gun, the furious intensity of it all”). Hunter’s uncluttered prose, like Hammett’s, draws power from the no-nonsense precision with which he describes the action and the hardware that propels it.

Hooked, I quickly backtracked to all the early novels about Bob Lee Swagger and his experiences in Vietnam (Time to Hunt, 1998, and Black Light, 1996) and have eagerly devoured all the new books as they appeared. I, Sniper may be the quintessential Hunter novel. It starts with three assassinations, all of Vietnam-era protesters with obvious links to real-life figures (one a famous actress who cavorted with Vietcong in Hanoi). The suspect in the shootings, another celebrated sniper, is found dead, apparently a suicide. But Bob Lee isn’t buying it: the kill shots are too perfect for an aging warrior working without today’s computer-driven scopes. So he determines to exonerate the framed sniper, a fellow member of the “brotherhood of life-takers.” The troubling moral position here gives the narrative depth, demanding that the reader reconsider common assumptions about good and evil.

Hunter makes the most of this moral ambiguity, but the heart of the book, and why I like the Bob Lee Swagger novels so much, despite my own feelings about guns and Vietnam, isn’t limited to the way it challenges my late-sixties liberal view of the world. No, it’s Bob Lee’s skill, his technical mastery of a complicated machine, even an antisocial, deadly machine, and the way he uses that knowledge to do things society finds appalling. Perhaps my favorite nonfiction book is Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb, about how a band of nuclear physicists, led by Robert Oppenheimer, set out to understand the fabric of the physical world and, in the process, created a bomb that would reshape our lives in monstrous ways. Bob Lee does the same thing in microcosm, and like Oppenheimer, he is ever-cognizant of the horror of what he is doing. He does it because he knows he must, but he always acts with a guilty awareness of his love of the tools he uses and the terrible artistry of their construction.

You wouldn’t think Keats’ concept of negative capability—the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in your head at the same time without requiring resolution—would come into play when discussing a novel about snipers and computer-powered rifle scopes, but it does when I read Stephen Hunter. I’d still rather play Ping-Pong than handle a gun, and I won’t be joining the NRA any time soon, but Hunter makes me realize that I can hold those opinions and still appreciate Bob Lee Swagger’s guns and the scrupulously acquired technical knowledge that allows him to handle them with such finesse. Sometimes the pure how of a thing is an end in itself.

Booklist Online - The Back Page

The Back Page: Guns.