If you're an avid fan of smart, thought-provoking mystery-thrillers with an unlikely setting, there's a good chance that, like me, you're already partway through The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest, the climactic book in the Millennium trilogy by the late Stieg Larsson.
There are a lot of reasons to mourn Larsson, whose books have sold more than 27 million copies in 40 countries, all after he suffered a fatal heart attack in 2004. Before he became a posthumous literary celebrity, Larsson spent most of his writing career as an investigative journalist. The nerve that he showed in exposing neo-Nazis and racist groups in his native Sweden made him the target of continual death threats. (He and his longtime companion and literary collaborator, Eve Gabrielsson, reportedly chose not to marry because it would have required them to disclose their address, making them vulnerable to assassins.)
The remarkable Millennium books are even more impressive when you consider that Larsson wrote them as a hobby, something to do in the evening at home because it wasn't safe for him to go out.
If I had to come up with a single reason why Larsson's novels are so popular, it would have to be Lisbeth Salander, the "girl" of the title, who may well be the strangest co-protagonist ever to grace the pages of a crime novel. Lisbeth is a diminutive, tattooed, twentysomething misanthrope who strikes me as having at least a mild case of Asperger's syndrome, that puzzling autistic spectrum disorder that can cause an extremely intelligent person to have great difficulty relating to others or fitting into society. She is a survivor of myriad horrors--an abusive criminal father, forced confinement in a mental institution, sexual assault and, finally, being buried alive and then shot in the head at close range. She's also an avenging angel, a computer hacker and, despite her size, a ferocious hand-to-hand combatant. In a sense, she's the cathartic embodiment of the author's outrage about violence against women. (In an interview with the UK's Daily Mail, Gabrielsson revealed that Larsson was haunted by the adolescent memory of trying and failing to stop a girl from being gang-raped by classmates.)
I admit to being fascinated with Lisbeth--I've always had a thing for tough, clever women, dating back to my pre-teen crush on Emma Peel. But as a boomer, I identify more with her oft-overlooked co-protagonist and Larsson's fictional alter-ego, journalist Mikael "Kalle" Blomkvist. Conveniently, in the first book in the series, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Lisbeth--at the time an investigator for a detective agency--compiles a biography of Mikael. Thus, we know that he's a Generation Jones member (born in 1960 to a working-class family), played bass in a rock band for a while, bummed around as a backpacker in other countries after college and never quite fit into the world of corporate wage-earners. Like other similarly minded boomers, he eventually broke free and started his own business, Millennium magazine, from which he's made a decent, if unspectacular, living.
Gradually, plot digressions fill out the rest of the picture. We learn that for all of Mikael's righteous zeal about exposing wrongdoing by the rich and powerful, he's got plenty of faults. He screwed up his marriage by having an affair and in midlife finds himself a divorced dad with an intermittent, awkward relationship with his only daughter. He wears jeans with his sports coats, a boomer affectation that always risks looking a little too deliberately nonconformist. He drinks coffee pretty much nonstop, could use more vegetables and fruit in his diet and goes out for an occasional run, but seems so preoccupied with work that he doesn't stick with it. At the beginning of Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, we find him in the midst of a horrible midlife crisis, predicated by a humiliating public screwup on his part that not only threatens to ruin his career and his fortunes, but also briefly lands him behind bars.
He has to bounce back from all that and somehow he does. One of the things I love about Mikael is his stubborn resilience. He's Rocky Balboa with an iBook (Larsson wrote the books before the MacBook succeeded it) and more consonants in his last name. Like the fictional boxer, he summons up the humility and moxie to pick himself up and start over.
Though it's not a detail that Larsson invented, I'm going to take the liberty of guessing that Mikael, intellectual that he is, at some point read psychotherapist and existentialist philosopher Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. Frankl, a Nazi death camp survivor, taught that there are only two types of people--amoral ones and principled, responsible ones--and that in order to withstand whatever life throws at us, we have to find a purpose that fits our principles. In The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Mikael finds that purpose by taking on a seemingly futile job--the belated last-chance re-investigation of a long-vanished teenaged girl's disappearance.
The other thing I really like about Mikael is his effort to maintain his erratic, uncomfortable-at-best relationship with Lisbeth, who is half his age but has twice as many demons. Larsson has them briefly become lovers, which to me was an ill-advised and unnecessary way to add tension. They have enough other differences, most notably the clash between Mikael's boomer idealism and his Gen-Y friend's nihilistic conviction that the world already has been hopelessly messed up by people of his generation. Nevertheless, Mikael manages to coexist and even cooperate with Lisbeth because he's empathetic and open-minded enough to understand the very different world in which she dwells, rather than trying to force her to fit his generation's rules. In that sense, he's an example that we boomers could learn from.