![[Navigation image]](http://images.salon.com/books/src/1998/booklogo2_top2.gif) | |||
 |
![[Salon: Books]](http://images.salon.com/books/src/booklogo_salon.gif)
A L S O+.T O D A Y The Salon Interview: Stephen King - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
T A B L E+T A L K
Great book. Awful cover. Weigh in on judging the book by its content, but the publisher by its cover, in the Books area of Table Talk
R E C E N T L Y
Pornography of despair Killing the father Introducing the Garner Report The mother of masochism The many voices of Ken Kalfus - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Browse the
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
T H E+G A R N E R |
 |
- - - - - - - - - BY ANDREW O'HEHIR | Stephen King's hour of reappraisal, one the world's bestselling novelist has craved for years, has come around at last. In his new book, "Bag of Bones," the protagonist is a middle-aged popular novelist, living in Maine, who is tormented by his lack of literary credibility. (This is far from the first time such themes have appeared in King's work.) Publishing insiders and general readers alike have been eagerly anticipating "Bag of Bones," which is both one of King's most ambitious novels and his first for Scribner after his much-publicized split with Viking, his longtime publisher. All the fanfare has focused the literary world's attention, gradually and groggily, on what should have been obvious all along: King is one of the most important writers of our age. Come on, you know it's true. If you want to say that King is not as good a writer as all sorts of people who sell fewer books and end up on more course syllabuses, I won't argue. I will, however, point out that such judgments depend on your idea of what "good" literature is, and what it's good for. And that no one I know has ever stayed up until 4 a.m., knuckles white and breath coming in shallow gulps, because they had to finish "Gravity's Rainbow." King's great talent is to keep you reading. His books will suck you out of your regular life and dangle you over the darkest unexplored abysses of your mind, while your flesh crawls around your skeleton as if trying to escape; they're nobody's idea of glittering literary style. I've been a fan since I read "The Shining" as a teenager, and yet there are things in every one of his books that make me wince. His sense of humor is crude at best and frequently runs to juvenile scatology. His minor characters are often clumsily rendered "colorful" types who speak in a mixture of hackneyed folk witticisms and implausibly detailed expository passages (when crucial plot points are to be divulged). And as nobly and mightily as King has wrestled with his greatest weakness -- his difficulty in creating convincing female characters -- he has never, to my taste, quite conquered it. (Though the predominantly female book-buying public, it should be noted, hasn't seemed to mind.) Comparing King to, say, Henry James is a bit like comparing a potato to a chrysanthemum. One of them is undeniably more beautiful, but which one do you want by the fire on a cold winter night? As King would be eager to point out, there is a kinship of sorts between James and himself -- they inhabit different wings in the great, rambling mansion of the Gothic tradition. But King's real literary grandfather is not Henry James but Charles Dickens, another shameless yarn spinner who captured the middlebrow popular imagination, who shares King's sentimentality, didacticism and love of the grotesque, and against whom all the criticisms of the previous paragraph (save perhaps the scatology) could be leveled. It's impossible to know whether King's work will ever acquire the aura of respectability that Dickens' has. While Dickens was probably just as big a celebrity, in 19th century terms, as King is today, he was never stigmatized as a back-of-the-store genre novelist in quite the same way (nor was the disjunction between popular and elite taste quite so exaggerated). One thing we can be sure of is that the enormous audience for horror literature that King has helped to create and solidify ensures that his books will be read for a long time to come. He has taken the moldering tradition of supernatural literature -- the tradition of Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft -- and brought it into the late 20th century as a vibrant, polemic social chronicle. Playing shamelessly on our fear of death, and on our half-delighted suspicion that all the rational Enlightenment thinking of the last 300 years has utterly failed to comprehend the true chaos and disorder of the universe, King argues, perversely enough, for a politics of love. Although the monsters, ghosts and madnesses that lurk beneath the bucolic landscape of King's territory in central and western Maine -- an imaginative terrain as vivid to his readers as Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County or William Kennedy's Albany are to theirs -- may be diabolical or extraterrestrial in origin, King's central themes are strikingly contemporary, and all too human. His greatest concern, stated in its most positive light, is with the survival, vindication and ultimate triumph of the weak and vulnerable. The tangible results of the evil in King's universe include bullying, racism, wife-beating, rape and, above all else, the abuse and murder of children. Few authors in any genre have ever captured the unique fragility and terror of childhood with such precision, and King's instinctive sympathy for the plight of the nerd, the fat kid, the scapegoat, the queer, is a great source of his appeal. But King is after all a horror novelist, and thus there is a darker side to his obsession with childhood. Again and again he suggests that every adult -- or, to be specific, every man -- is a potential vector for evil, that with the wrong stars overhead and the wrong demons clawing at his ankles, he will channel a primordial bloodlust and become a wife-killer, a child-killer, a monster. Whatever this may or may not say about the psychology of Stephen King (who has been married to the same woman for 27 years and has three grown children), the truly frightening thing is just how difficult -- on the evidence of the society around us -- this proposition is to disprove. Selecting five of King's 32 novels (including the ones he has written as Richard Bachman) to serve as an introductory reading list is a necessarily arbitrary exercise. I have chosen books that I think illustrate his central themes most clearly, books I think are his most terrifying and two books ("Carrie" and "The Green Mile") that even those readers who can't abide the roller-coaster torment of the horror novel should be able to appreciate. King fans may be outraged by my omission of "The Stand," the immense apocalyptic saga that may be his most popular book. All I can say is that new readers have a right to know what they're in for before undertaking that journey (which has inflated to more than 1,100 pages in King's 1990 revised edition). I have also steered clear of King's obsessive meditations on the relationship of the popular novelist to his public (although both "Misery" and "The Dark Half" are excellent thrillers), and his earnest fables of abused women questing for redemption ("Gerald's Game," "Dolores Claiborne" and "Rose Madder"). As the master himself would say in one of his self-consciously Dickensian prologues: Constant Reader, I beg your forgiveness. Now come with me into the dark.
N E X T+P A G E+| Five essential King books - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
|
![[Salon Bookcase]](http://images.salon.com/books/src/1998/bookcase.gif){kind=small}
