THE MILLENNIUM TRILOGY - Stieg Larsson - Fiction

The MILLENNIUM trilogy has been a publishing sensation--and, with an unfinished manuscript for a fourth book on the late Stieg Larsson's laptop, could continue to be--but it has also been a welcomed opportunity for literary critics to hail the arrival of a new, "feminist" crime fiction. Larsson's work has a powerful, ass-kicking heroine, strong female characters, and focuses on the injustices women face at the hands of men and societal forces. Crimes against women are the centerpieces of each of the three books, and the men who perpetrate these crimes are made to pay.

The retribution story is nothing new; we've seen it in films like KILL BILL, HARD CANDY, and ANTICHRIST, and in novels from WONDER WHEN YOU'LL MISS ME to more sordid "legal thrillers" like RETRIBUTION. As has been pointed out before, much of the difficulty, from a feminist perspective, is that these stories are fantasies of a woman's revenge on her rapist written by men. In effect, the characters are acting out what men believe they would do in a woman's position: they fight back with great physical strength and confidence. I think it's worth noting that both Lisbeth Salander and Monica Figuerola (Blomkvist's new love interest) are intensely athletic women who deal with dangerous men by physically overpowering and humiliating them. Monica is described as a former bodybuilder and world-class gymnast; Salander, as we know, is a boxing prodigy, a martial artist, and capable of some very gymnastic feats herself (you'll remember my disbelief, from my review of the first book, that Salander is able to dive and roll under a parked car, emerging on the other side of it, in seconds.)

Erika Berger is less physically imposing, and is sidelined in this installment, seemingly punished for placing her career ambitions over the health of Blomkvist's magazine. From the minute she starts her job as editor in chief of one of Sweden's major daily newspapers, she is plagued with harassment, and stalked by a colleague. She finds the pace grueling and unsustainable, and returns to Millennium at the trilogy's end.

In this week's New Yorker, Nora Ephron pens a parody of a "lost Stieg Larsson short story" following the news that Larsson's early work, mostly stories from when he was as young as 17, have been rediscovered by Swedish publishers. Ephron's piece pokes primarily at the predictable emotions of Larsson's characters, as well as his extraneous detail and brand placement (everyone's phone and computer is referred to by its exact brand name and model; in a time when most authors are struggling with how to deftly interweave the realities of modern life and internet communication into their stories, Stieg does a cannonball into the middle of our email-laden discourse.) Ephron doesn't particularly pick at Larsson's feminism, or lack thereof, unless one can take the fact that Nora Ephron was the author picked to write this piece as a commentary in and of itself.

It's tempting to compare Lisbeth Salander unfavorably to more nuanced heroines of crime fiction, like Clarice Starling. Lisbeth's defining traits are apathy and anger, and when stuck in the hospital, as she is for the majority of the third book, her anger has no useful outlets. She has conflicting opinions about family; she despises her father, is completely nonplussed by the existence of her half-brother or the current whereabouts of her twin sister, and yet adores and mourns her mother. Emotions seem to settle over her like shadows, and she moves in and out of them, and of relationships, as easily as the comparison implies. Salander is an utterly confusing cipher of a heroine, which would seem to be a drawback for a feminist crime thriller--until we realize that Salander isn't the heroine at all; Mikael Blomkvist is. He calls the shots, finds the scoops, rescues the girl, and puts the bad guys in jail--a pretty traditionalist crime-fiction hero, if you ask me.