The man just can't stop writing

God help me, I picked up Executive Orders again.

It's not that his novels are passion plays. It's that they're thirteen hundred pages of tiny, formulaic passion-vignettes strung together.

Every character in this bookbrick falls neatly into one of two categories: good and evil. Good characters are honest, likable, smart, diligent, self-sacrificing, and patriotic. Evil characters are lying, mean, stupid, lazy, self-serving traitors. And within a paragraph of meeting one, you know which they are.

The story, such as it is, is told through a long series of basically unconnected scenes where good or evil people do good or evil things, and vastly greater consequences result.

Allow me to emulate his style for a moment, as an example:

Melvin Simperson¹ had a simple but vital job at the CIA²: he looked at all the pictures, or "frames"³ brought in by the heroic agents that day, and cross-referenced them with the CIA's amazing computer system that knows what you're thinking right now⁴. However, that day, he was tired from staying up all night drinking vodka and reading Mao's Little Red Book⁵. So, he decided that the last roll of film was unimportant, and he would knock off early.

¹Evil sounding name, that's not good.
²Government employee, though, maybe he's good after all?
³Superfluous jargon adds verisimilitude!
⁴Has it really been two pages since we last mentioned how cool the CIA's toys are?
⁵Uh-oh.

Well, Melvin missed the Tiny Insignificant Detail that would have prevented a crisis that would take Jack Ryan ten whole minutes to fix! Thank god he was American; in a foreign character that could spell the destruction of his whole country.

Let's take a look at a good character:

Frank McHonestly supported his wife and two beautiful children whom he loved very much with a simple but vital job at the CIA: he looked at all the pictures that his heroes, agents Clark and Chavez, brought in that day and cross-referenced them in the Agency's amazing incredible computer network. Today he was working extra-hard (to earn a bonus, which he would donate to a children's hospital), and noticed something funny in one of the photos: it was a detail that reminded him of something his friend had told him over lunch three hundred pages ago, when he was first introduced and you didn't know why. This detail led him on a whole string of logical leaps that you, the reader, have known about for chapters now, but the important thing is that Frank can now write a report which will allow President Self-Insert to save the day in the next twenty pages, because I'm almost out of paper.

I wonder what Clancy would think of the phrase "feet of clay"? He's obviously never heard it.

Other tipoffs:

• If a character lives alone, they're probably evil. Good guys have families.
• Does he work for a foreign government who we don't like? Evil. And probably incompetent.
• Did he go to a religious school, like a Catholic high school? Good. Any sort of law-enforcement? Good.
• Thank the lord we have Tom Clancy to tell us how evil the US State Department is.
• Is their job administrative, or do they work in the field? Field personnel good, administrators are all evil, corrupt bureaucrats.

I was getting a little tired reading the Baroque cycle, because you really have to pay attention there. This is like book candy. You can nod off for a few pages and not really lose any plot at all.