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On the
afternoon of New Year’s Eve, I spent half an hour or
so discussing Stephen King with my colleague David
Lazarus on Patt Morrison’s radio show. The news peg,
such as it was, involved the decision by the New York
Times to include King’s new novel, “11/22/63,” on
its list of the 10 best books of 2011. But the bigger
question had to do with King’s merit as a writer,
which, almost 40 years after he began to publish,
remains a source of conversation, if no longer quite
debate.
For the
record, I didn’t think much of “11/22/63”; I found
it meandering and unfocused — not to mention far too
long. And yet, I also believe that, like many a genre
writer, King has gotten a bad rap for much of his
career, written off because he appeals to a popular
audience when in fact his work exposes, with real
acuity, a lot about who we are.
Think
about it: Beyond the mechanics (of plot, of horror),
what King offers are domestic interactions, slices of
family and civic life. He uncovers our anxieties, our
worries, our obsessions — the inner darkness we all
know. That’s why, for me, some of his most moving
works are the most naturalistic: “The Body,”
“Misery” or the recent novella “A Good
Marriage,” which anchors his 2010 collection “Full
Dark, No Stars.” There, King traces a particularly
human bleakness, the bleakness of an empty soul.
This is
the key to his writing, that when he’s on, no one is
better at prying open the ordinary reality of evil, the
way our nightmares emerge from our daily experience,
from our fears and our frustrations, our envy and our
rage. It’s true even when he’s writing about the
supernatural; as he observed when I profiled him for the
Los Angeles Times in 1998: “Every monster, every
horrific situation, every supernatural situation can be
taken in a metaphoric way, if you have an interest in
normal human life. Or even abnormal human life.”
Such a
comment suggests both King’s empathy and his
engagement, as well as his ambition to push beyond the
conventions of form. His 1996 novel “Desperation”
(one of my favorites) is nothing less than a lament for
the pitiless nature of God — “Do you know how cruel
your God can be? ... How fantastically cruel?” one
character asks another in the closing pages.
“Sometimes he makes us live” — while 1977’s
“The Shining” was initially imagined as “a
Shakespearean tragedy, a kind of inside-out ‘King
Lear,’ where Lear is this young guy who has a son
instead of daughters,” with a first draft broken down
into acts and scenes.
Lazarus
and I discussed the genesis of “The Shining” as
evidence of King’s intentionality — or, perhaps more
accurately, his range. And in the days since, I’ve
continued to think about this, even pulling my old
paperback copy of the novel off the bookshelf with the
idea of re-reading it through that Shakespearean lens.
But I
haven’t, and I’m not going to, because here’s the
other thing about “The Shining”: It’s just too
scary for me to read again. And that’s the thing about
King, too, right there in a nutshell, that tension
between the brains and the blood.
“What
kind of story is it?” he has asked of his own work.
“And what kind of writer are you?” These are
questions that come up in reading him, although, in the
end, they just compel me all the more.
What
makes writing literature, after all, but the extent to
which it expresses our complicated humanity? And what is
the essence of humanity if not conflict, the ongoing
struggle between the sublime and the base? That’s what
King keeps examining, and it’s both why we read him
and why we sometimes have to turn away.
In part,
it’s the Grand Guignol aspect of “The Shining”
that I don’t want to revisit, all that blood and
terror. But even more, it’s the novel’s tale of
dissolution, the notion of watching a soul get laid to
waste. This is not a failure of the book, but a mark of
its success, and the essence of how King, at his best,
affects us: by revealing the deepest — and yes, the
darkest — aspects of ourselves.
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