Why The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo misses its mark

Didja think it was strange that Harrriet's body had never turned up? Didja think it might have been a clue that someone was sending pressed flowers every year to Henrik, and the latest was an Australian specimen? Maybe, unlike Blomkvist, you didn't exactly choke on your coffee when you learned that Harriet was alive? Okay, enough said about the structural and conceptual weaknesses of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo." I finished. After a denouement that stumbles on for a hundred pages after the true climax of the, after another interminable conversation in the plot just pours out like pages from a printer - told, rather than shown - I finished. I'm sure this book will be filmed, but the screenwriters face a big challenge, as this book, for all its events, has very few actual scenes. And yet, and yet - I honestly do feel that Stieg Larsson was probably a great guy, and I feel like a heel criticizing him so bluntly (take heart, the world of readers have spoken and I'm in a minority), but I wonder whether the book he's written actually belies his noble intentions. He apparently wanted to write a book of social justice, revealing through fiction the violence so many women endure in secret. Yet what he's done, I think, is to make it seem that the "men who hate women" (the title in the original Swedish) are totally deranged lunatic crackpots - neoNazis, incest-crazed, keepers of torture chambers and intimate diaries and photo journals, horrible predators against the weak and helpless. It's too easy to say that those are the aberrants so far out on the scale. In fact most of the violence is date violence, violence in couples, drinking-drug related, far more common, garden-variety. Dragon Tattoo, by making the violence so gothic and extreme, actually diminishes the scope of the issue. Serial killers, face it, are rare - and usually caught. I'm totally with the eponymous Salander on this one, by the way: Martin is a total shit for his lifetime of violence, and the fact that is was sexually abused is no excuse for him and no reason to feel sorry; Harriet, the lost child who returns to save the family fortunes, is also a shit for remaining silent for 38 years while the violence (she supposedly didn't know about it?!) continued. For all my critiques, Salander's could be a pretty interesting character, an unconventional detective (as in Motherless Brooklyn), and I suspect she plays a bigger role in the final two books in the series.