Eric Simpson's Blog: Marginal Accretion - Posts Tagged "stephen-king"

The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


As one might notice by the date, I read this book more than thirty years ago when I was fourteen years old. I have no plans to re-read it, so offer a brief review now with the caveat that your reviewer is likely untrustworthy.

In short, the book claims to be the true story of a house possessed, which overtakes the personalities of its inhabitants. I recall Stephen King crediting the popularity of the book to "economic unease," postulating at some point that it is a commentary on struggling families, purchasing a house they could not really afford, and the destructive nature of capitalist society. Well, okay. I am sure I did not get any of that from it when I read it.

In fact, I vaguely recall that it scared me. But to my memory it is not a great work of horror, but rather vulgar and exploitative. I have so many books to read before I die, I can't imagine taking the time to read this one again. So if you choose to go there, have at it and take anything I say, due to faulty memory and general prejudices with a grain of salt.



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Hearts in Atlantis by Stephen King

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Caveat: What follows is the review of a book that I originally read and reviewed in June, 2000. My thoughts and review of the book today, I think, would not be the same as they were 16 years ago. However, since I have no intention of re-reading the book to provide an updated review, the following will have to suffice.

In recent years my thoughts have leapt back to an analogy often supplied by Stephen King in various interviews, that of the role of the horror writer who pleasantly lures you with seemingly innocuous words into a dark alley in order to turn and scare you witless. He has half of that right, I think.

King certainly possesses the verbal power and literary stamina to capture one's attention, writing in his trademark conversational style, which is filled with references and allusions culled from the collective media consciousness. However, in some of his 90s fiction I'd felt more like he was luring the reader into a dark alley merely to turn, make funny faces, and maybe expose himself; there is an implied gratuitousness that sometimes arises from the conversational style he employs, a gushing forth of words and ideas that approaches lazy sentimental reverie.


First, the bad news...

King's aforementioned streams of excess are often distracting and annoying growths on the text. First, this can be found in his hammering a point to death, rather than subtly making it clear. King has shown himself capable of both kinds of writing, but when the point has to do with the inward thoughts of his characters, and one doesn't necessarily identify with the character, the relentlessness of his making the point begins to create distance, rather than empathy or identification, between reader and character. For instance, we are told pretty straightforwardly that Bobby Garfield in the first section of Hearts in Atlantis, a long story titled Low Men in Yellow Coats, like the novel, Lord of the Flies. We don't gather from his response to it that he likes it and it has made an impact on him, but we are told in no uncertain terms, repeatedly, how much he loves it. King spells it out for us. Over and over again.

Secondly, due perhaps to his phenomenal success, there is a level of subtext in his fiction which includes a kind of editorializing. For instance, again in the first section, he opines, pretty much straight from the narrator (rather than as a theme surfacing from the characters and plot), on his view of what makes good literature. This is just short of a straightforward comment to the narattee, spiced with perhaps King’s own bitter biases. (On that note: Why are some of the characters surnamed after famous literary writers, such as Brautigan and Auster? Is this intentional, I wonder?)

Thirdly, again in Low Men..., King turns the story suddenly into a fantasy, confusingly correlating with his Dark Tower series, which is a little disappointing as it reaches its climactic pique. His devoted fans of the series will no doubt delight in this, but it broaches the unity of the story itself in a disturbing way. There is nothing wrong with fantasy, of course, but here it seemed to smack a bit of the deus ex machina, the god who appears from the sky to save the day at the very last minute (though, admittedly, not all is saved), unnecessarily punting to an entire field of story that lay beyond the margins of the present text.


Characters in Conflict

I'm ambivalent about King's conversational style when it comes to describing his characters. He imbues them with a level of thought that is too obvious, it seems, as those who would be moved by dramatic-film-school motivations, less complex than real people and more like projections of what one might view a stranger’s thoughts to be like. In other words, King's characters often see themselves simplistically and sentimentally, even if they are in despair, and he brings us within such close range to their thoughts and feelings, that each character or persona tends to be defined as seen through the gauze of their own sentimental self-perception. We can observe the fallacy more clearly when King and the reader all realize that his foolish characters, his “bad guys,” are trapped in self-justifications, imprisoned by their desires; but when his "good guys" are portrayed with a like kind of protective zeal, separating the wheat from the chaff becomes more difficult: is this character really like this, or is this just what he thinks he is like?

Reading King, I often feel as though I'm sitting with an older relative, listening as he tells me stories from his idealized past, and the people he describes are idealized too.

Yet, King still presents us with believable characters, middle-class Americans stuffed full of popular culture who know nothing else, a cadre of parochial denizens whose desires for love or for communion or to just be happy are the true virtues, and anything more abstract or difficult is condemned as high-brow arrogance.

And for this reason, because it stimulates an old concept of the past dwelling in my own suburban childhood, I am able to understand the conflicts and desires of the Bobby Garfields and the Carol Gerbers who populate King's slightly altered universe.


Will this close the chapter...?

Hearts in Atlantis is partly both a magnification and a commentary on our culture's most recent media-darling of history, the 60s, and all the familiar themes rise up like steam from the heat: drugs, music, bell-bottoms, Vietnam, protest, talk of peace and talk of love and their representative symbols.

I admit I felt a bit distraught to discover that King had chosen to revel in and glorify a period of time already overly-exploited by the media for the last fifteen to twenty years! This sort of historical self-infatuation of a culture has successfully created a mythos of symbols and values which King further takes advantage of in order to submerge us into the scenery and rhetoric of "Atlantis," e.g. the unit of time and experience many people in the generation preceding mine claim to have "come from," as if it were a place, and not connected by a sequence of minutes and hours and weeks to the place where we are now.

Now for the good news...

Yet, despite the obviousness of King's willingness to push the cultural buttons that appeal not only to aging baby-boomers, but to many of their ideological children as well, King doesn't linger too often in the nostalgia, but creates a dramatic tension through simple conflicts in plot which beautifully symbolize the worn-out cliches in a fresh way.

The second story in the book, Hearts in Atlantis, not only connects thematically to the first story, but illustrates the rhetoric of "values" without denigrating into propaganda. Perhaps the best story in these tightly interwoven episodes, Hearts... totally lacks any appeal to the supernatural or the fantastic. It is a straightforward, moving, true and powerful piece of writing, and I'm sure will make a great film.

Where Low Men... grips the reader, returning us to King's brilliant ability to convey the nuances of childhood, the title story dwells on the struggles of young adulthood, discipline and identity. Moving, though here and there sentimental, King deftly leaves the ground, his pen takes flight from his usual conversational ramble, and in the succeeding three stories, he hovers just above the level of plain talking, sometimes swooning again to his previous gait, but at other times, rocketing in a flurry of inspired verbal ecstasy. There are moments when King, who can write, is just hot, you can feel it. The words and sentences burn through you, yet are delicate and easy on the tongue.

I knew that King must have written some of these paragraphs in a fever when I read a nonsense allusion to one of his old stories, laying oddly on the page for no apparent reason (yet appropriate to the flow): "sometimes they come back." Sometimes the flow comes back, apparently, for King, the groove returns, we are through talking and its time to make love.

These are the moments of good, perhaps even great, writing, but they are fewer, stylistically, than the old gimmicks, i.e., relying on the tension of standard plot conflicts and the element of fantasy/horror to hook you.


Conclusion

Overall, this is one of King's most passionate novels, and it is really about the theme he always returns to...growing up: growing up in the fifties and sixties in affluent, middle-class America with the kinds of values that have no undergirding, the provincial and self-absolutized conventions of his parents...replaced with the self-absolutized values of his generation. Growing up in an evil and decadent world of abuse and violence and loss, whitewashed on t.v., but growing up, and reflecting on what is lost and what is past. For King, the Atlantis that sinks beneath the surface is not only a cultural time of apparent chaos, but Atlantis is also childhood and youth.

That makes this a universally appealing, somewhat flawed, but highly entertaining novel, often moving, which I'd recommend to a friend not willing to read more difficult work.



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