Meaning in Tom Clancy

As Clancy tells it, rogue elements of Japan's military-industrial complex, still bitter about the the last war and irritated by trade problems today, launch a surprise attack on selected U.S. sites. For good measure, they also take down the U.S. financial system through electronic sabotage and threaten America with secretly acquired Japanese nukes. Clancy's usual protagonist, Jack Ryan, steps in to cope with the crisis and ends up being thankful that liberal defense-cutters have left America with a few planes and warships to use when it counts.

Anyone who remembers the last big best-seller about problems with Japan, Michael Crichton's Rising Sun, will immediately sense the similarities. Each book contrasts a rosy American view of mutually profitable world trade with a grim Japanese ethic of "export or die." Each book stresses the corrupting role of influence peddlers in Washington -- Clancy's features a Japanese-paid mole within the U.S. State Department. And each book dramatizes the national tension through the explosive metaphor of a blonde Western woman who is used and finally murdered by a Japanese man -- with the difference that Crichton describes his women as if he means it, while Clancy reserves a lustful tone for the F-15.

But the real difference between the books is that Crichton's was widely denounced in the press two years ago as racist, xenophobic, a threat to international harmony, while Clancy's book has received respectful or at worst bemused reviews.

Perhaps the explanation for this outrage gap is that Crichton, a Harvard-trained medical doctor, was seen as a fallen peer by the literary-critic crowd that has never taken Clancy seriously. But the difference may also be that we're now two years farther away from the military standoff of the Cold War, and that much closer to considering other elements of national security.

Tom Clancy of course started as a cold warrior, but in Clear and Present Danger he presented the drug trade as a security problem, and now, in his distinctive way, he's adding economic vulnerability to the national security list. It's a weirdly pacifist message that his book conveys, since it implies that the U.S. should shore up its economy precisely to avoid tensions leading to war. Or perhaps there's some other meaning here. It's enough for me that, in the age of Oprah's Diet Tips, a leading best-seller means anything at all.

• Go to Fallows NPR Commentary: September 28, 1994
• Go to Fallows NPR Commentary: September 16, 1994
• Go to Fallows Index