the Jack Ryan thing indeed
I concur w/inthane-chan's second paragraph. For the rest, I don't hate Clancy--as I say, times past he's been a guilty pleasure (particularly in the 90s, when I did more business travel--indeed, I read most of Debt of Honor at a deserted Dulles Airport overnight, after outsmarting myself in an attempt to catch an earlier flight out). I'll even go so far as to say that in another airport I once purchased the work of an imitator whose prose made The Hunt for Red October read like Faulkner by comparison. However: at his very best, at the tippy-top of his form, Clancy's work is bloated, self-indulgent and utterly devoid of literary merit. Even as a storyteller he ranks countless fathoms beneath a man like the late Nevil Shute, a writer of limited literary gifts who could nevertheless take a yarn from beginning to middle to end like nobody's business. And as to the top of his form, Clancy hasn't been there for years: his last "President Ryan" epic, The Bear and the Dragon appears to have gone directly from Clancy's Macintosh to the typesetter without the intervention of an editor. Half a lifetime ago I resisted the notion that a writer's work necessarily told us anything about the man behind the curtain. I have since come to believe that style tells us a great deal indeed, and that Clancy's prose reveals a smug, parochial, deeply naive and breathtakingly vulgar man. Still, his works are fraught with rich, albeit entirely unintentional comedy (a recurring motif in The Bear and the Dragon: American sausage vs. Chinese stringbean--in other words, our dicks (tanks, bombers, missiles and, of course, our individual fighting MEN) are bigger than theirs. The prose conveys this with the subtlety of a Sousa march), and should be suffered to exist in our nominally free society even at the risk of a diet of his books warping the sensibilities of impressionable young people--as we have seen in Marlowe's case.
cordially,
