The feel-bad novel in every Hudson News
Looking back on Stieg Larsson’s "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"
This is the eleventh chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. If you care, big spoilers below. CW: Adult content.
This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.
In the mid-2000s, one 645-page book could be seen at every airport and subway in the world. It was not Harry Potter, or a Grisham, or anything else. It was an edgy Swedish mystery. Adding to the allure of the Millennium Trilogy was the author’s death in 2004 and the posthumous year-by-year release of each book, fully completed before his death. The odd publication history made these books a big deal; the Swedish film adaptations and the lone David Fincher movie also built up the book’s presence in the cultural zeitgeist. And just like that, the Swedish crime phenomenon vanished, immediately replaced on the bestseller list by Gone Girl (but not without giving us the hilariously bad The Snowman Jo Nesbø adaptation.) I mean, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (TGWTDT) probably came and went so quickly because Larsson died, and he couldn’t write any more books, though ghostwriters of sequels (including film sequels) have tried, and tried.
When I told my MFA thesis advisor Chris Coake I was reading this book, he told me that, “isn’t TGWTDT delightfully bad?” But that’s the thing. I missed the Larsson train when it went by, only watching the Fincher movie, but had never engaged with the source material. So coming to this now, I was irritated by the book’s length, its baffling portrayal of Lisbeth Salander’s title character (who is alternately helpless or a super-genius), and the bizarre pacing of the book, which is glacial for hundreds of paces, speeds up as Mikael Blomkvist finally starts solving the mystery, and then solves it too easily, as the bad guy is caught and killed in quick succession, leading to a petering-out ending that stretches for hundreds of more pages. Overall, the experience was not the best, but the book is still decent, I think? In this essay, I’m going to discuss the inconsistent portrayal of Salander and then the pacing and structure of the book. Notably, David Fincher’s movie tried to adapt the book’s structure in a faithful but more efficient approach, which I find a strange but endearing way to apologize for the book’s structural shortcomings.
The most gratuitous section of the novel is obviously the part where Salander is sexually abused by her social worker, Nils Bjurman, and she takes revenge. There are probably better ways to show your main character is a badass than have her suffer through this stuff. But I couldn’t help but cringe terribly with sentences from Salander’s POV, such as: “Bjurman was on his way to being a Major Problem” (Larsson 220). I’m supposed to believe Salander is a hacker genius but also that she thinks in weird, simple sentences? Adding to the trashiness of this section is how Larsson dives into Bjurman’s POV, like after he forces her to have oral sex with him:
“Hard-nosed bitch. She really is fucking retarded. He handed her the cheque he had written when she was in the bathroom. This is better than a whore. She gets paid with her own money” (Larsson 244)
I already understood that Bjurman was a monster, and didn’t need any of this to understand his corruption and grotesque worldview.
Though Salander’s portrayal feels problematic, it’s worth saying that Larsson’s intent was probably in the right place? Portraying a spectrum-y character and their struggles with the abuse of social services seems important to his authorial intent (as the Swedish title of the novel is Men Who Hate Women). But still, a leaner TGWDT probably would have dropped this whole section and had her hired to become Blomkvist’s research assistant wayyy earlier. She joins the main plot of the book on page 357, at around the midpoint. This is very, very slow, especially for a mystery.
Which brings us back to the glaring problem of the book’s pacing. Larsson was a reporter, and the detective-journalist-protagonist Blomkvist seems consciously modeled on the life Larsson seems to have wished he had. This probably also might explain the strange narrative structure of TGWTDT; throughout his writing life Larsson thus somehow avoided being indoctrinated in three-act structure.
Michael Tucker from the “Lessons from the Screenplay” YouTube channel explains some of these problems in a video essay by discussing how David Fincher approached adapting the book. In Tucker’s account, the Fincher adaptation (screenplay written by Steven Zaillian) has five acts. The first act sees Blomkvist lose his libel lawsuit against corrupt magnate-oligarch Wennerström and accept Henrik Vanger’s proposal to solve the murder of his grandniece. The second act chronicles Salander’s battles with Bjurman as Blomkvist begins his investigation. In the third act, Salander and Blomkvist finally team up (and become romantically involved), and in act four, Martin Vanger is revealed as the killer and is quickly defeated (by a random car accident).
But then there’s act five, what Tucker calls “the weirdest act,” which sees Salander take down Wennerström and her subsequent romantic rejection from Blomkvist. While the fifth act solves the initial plot problem of Wennerström, it feels superfluous because the sub-plot has extended far beyond the parameters of the A-plot. Admittedly, the film offers a cleaned-up version of this plot, which feels much messier in the novel. Tucker defends this narrative decision by explaining that each act does have a mini-plot arc on its own, so that the movie doesn’t lose its way. He develops his defense of the film’s structure based on Fincher’s wish to make a film that was “thoughtful, adult, interesting, complex and challenging.”
I’ve thought a lot about this idea of an unconventional plot structure in my own work. Various versions had more acts and an attempt to address “fractal theory” as espoused by John Yorke in his craft book Into the Woods (cited in the Tucker video)—the idea that “every act will contain all the essential elements of story: protagonist, antagonist, inciting incident, journey, crisis, climax and—occasionally—resolution” (qtd. in Tucker).
While one can make a good movie from a sloppy book, a sloppy book is not elevated by a good movie. The Larsson novel’s awkward pacing might have been solved by structural revisions that Larsson never got the chance to make, given his premature death. And yet, it seemed that few readers had much trouble with these structural decisions, considering that the book was such a blockbuster hit, which adds to the baffling enigma of the whole trilogy’s success. By the time Salander says to herself, “What a pathetic fool you are, Salander,” and tosses her prospective gift of an Elvis sign to Blomkvist into a dumpster, we can’t wait for the novel to end (Larsson 643).
However, at its heart, the core of the story (regarding the mystery of the girl who disappeared on an island which was completely walled off) is a particularly arresting locked-room mystery in the tradition of Agatha Christie. However, because it takes so long to get there, and so long to wrap up the novel after that plot is solved, TGWTDT will always occupy a strange entry in the “literary” mystery-thriller genre, as an intentionally poorly structured mystery. Somehow, the narrative captured lightning in a bottle with its themes about the abuse of women, hacking, neo-Nazis, and Scandinavian noir, and at least three of these topics are relevant in 2021. One still wishes that the novel lived up better to its hype.
Works Cited
Larsson, Stieg. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Knopf: New York, 2008).
Tucker, Michael. “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” uploaded by Lessons from the Screenplay, January 30, 2018.