Really, Steve? Really?

Oh, for Pete's sake.

Wesley Smith buys an Amazon Kindle to keep his mind off his recent nasty breakup, but he finds that his version is no ordinary e-reading device. Smith's Kindle has a special Ur option, which reveals the future and all the works his favorite authors have written in parallel dimensions. However, when the Ur delivers news of terrible events on the way, Smith must decide if he should interfere in fate. While King can certainly spin a good story, the Amazon Kindle focus (the story was written exclusively for and can only be read on an Amazon Kindle) keeps this one feeling like an advertising gimmick.

Let's see--why, do you think?  Maybe because...it is one?  I mean, I like the Kindle and all, but this is really a step beyond that U2-branded iPod.


The funny thing is, my Kindle also has an Ur option, which enables me to predict exactly what kind of book Stephen King is going to write next.  It's going to be about an educated guy in a creative profession, who nevertheless possesses considerable working-class street cred, and who discovers some kind of evil lurking in a small town, and must confront his own fears to defeat it.


Ah, I should leave the poor guy alone--he probably needed the dough.

Three weird new books

Well! We are all back at the grindstone after multiple Thanksgivings and various nefarious activities, so I thought we'd offer up a triple-header of brief book reviews. Since my semester is drawing to a close, and I have been teaching the undergraduate edition of my Weird Stories class (which ends with a reading of perhaps my favorite weird book ever), today's theme will be New Weird Novels.

First up, Padgett Powell's new novel, The Interrogative Mood. We've been fans of Powell's for many years, particularly the short story "Mr. Irony Renounces Irony," which for the better part of a decade we walked around the apartment/house quoting at random. This new novel isn't quite a comeback, as Powell never stopped writing, but it does represent a new public interest in the man, which Rhian commented upon in an earlier post. Powell deserves it; the book is great fun--very smart, unexpected, bizarre, and just long enough. It consists entirely of questions, much like William Walsh's recent book Questionstruck, which I also liked, and in fact blurbed. Powell's book is different--much breezier, less rigorously po-mo, and about more stuff than pretty much all the other novels this year combined. The only reasonable response to it is to answer, at random, a page of questions. And so, my answers to page 64: 1) Any old paper is fine. 2) I have no idea. 3) Halberd yes, halyard no. 4) Yes. 5) Sometimes, I suppose. 6) I doubt it. 7) Probably not. 8) Yes, I certainly can.

Up next, Margaret Atwood's new one, The Year of the Flood, which is a sequel to her wonderful Oryx and Crake--indeed, the new paperback editions of that earlier novel now declare it "Book one of the MaddAdam trilogy," which suggests that the inventor of the LongPen is not through with this particular post-apocalypse. Personally I'm glad of it. I love Atwood in her sci-fi mode, and this book is every bit as good as the first, if perhaps a bit too dependent upon it in its formal approach. It consists of two parallel narratives, one in first person, one in third, from two narrators, onetime members of an environmental religious cult, and now two of the only surviving people in the world, in the wake of the events of the first book. The narratives here consist of a brief frame story in the ruined present, with generous helpings of flashback, just like Snowman's narrative in O&C, and we get to see some of the same characters again, this time from a new perspective, and with new contextual weight. Atwood is doing a marvelous job creating this world, and she sketches out the religious cult ("God's Gardeners") with something resembling breathless glee.

Finally, and I'll keep this short, is Stephen King's new one, Under the Dome. For several years I enjoyed nothing more than obsessing over my obsession with King, but all of a sudden I don't feel like talking much about it. I gave up about a third of the way through this one, and I think I have given up on King for good. There's a reference in the note in the back of UTD to some kind of heavy editing that supposedly took place, but I see no evidence of it here, as the plot, delightful as it is (inexplicable force field surrounds small Maine town), plods along dreadfully, with the exact same kind of gloomy events (rapes, beatings, murders) repeating themselves over and over every 25 pages or so. (King's embarrassing loathing of academia, by the way, is on display here as well, with probably the most pathetic portrayal of an English professor I've ever read. In what world are people really like this? And does he think professors don't ever read him? Hell, some of us even teach him.) It ought to be light, quick, and fun, and ends up being ponderous and depressing. I dunno, maybe it's me that's changed. But 35 bucks is a lot to pay for a book, and I think I've just dropped my final wad of scratch on the Master of Horror, alas. Great cover, though--lurid, glossy, and over the top. Tell you what--just grab this cover image, print it out, stick it to your fridge, and call it a day.

Thrillers and class

Can we talk for a moment about the world of mysteries and thrillers and its bizarre obsession with class? This week I went to the library and took out my usual stack of crime fiction, hoping one or two of the half dozen would work out all right, and this blurb caught my eye. It's on the back of the Peter Abrahams novel Deception, and is taken from a review by Michele Ross, published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, of Abrahams' last book, Nerve Damage:

I swear, if one more literary person says in that oh-so-condescendng tone, 'Oh, I don't read ... mysteries,' I'm going to take a novel by Peter Abrahams and smack him on his smug little head.

Where do I start? Good god. I suppose the obvious place is to ask who on earth these "literary people" are who hesitate, repulsed, before uttering the word "mysteries." As a literary person who spends almost all of my time with literary people, I have never met one. Indeed, some of the best recommendations for mysteries that I get come from the English department at Cornell, where I enjoy the benefit of an informal mystery-trading ring with, among others, a wunderkind Shakespeare scholar, one of the world's premier poststructuralists, and a department secretary. In other words, just about everyone enjoys mysteries, and there's really nobody who needs to be smacked on the head.

Of course I'm not going to blame Abrahams for his reviewer's comments. This is my third try at Abrahams, and I made it farther than ever before. But now I give up. He's not bad, but the book is so packed with "good writing" that I can't see the plot for all the fog; "good writing" in this case refers to the florid metaphoric overdescription of mundane detail that writers fill their books with when they're out of their depth. Meanwhile, the protagonist of Delusion is a sexy airhead who can't put two and two together. A pass, for me.

Next on the pile is The Silver Bear, the debut novel, about a contract killer, from screenwriter Derek Haas. It's appealingly slim and gives good flap, but the ponderous first-person narrative lost me within sentences. This is from the first paragraph:

If you saw me on the street, you might think, "what a nice, clean-cut young man. I'll bet he works in advertising or perhaps a nice accounting firm. I'll bet he's married and is just starting a family. I'll bet his parents raised him well." But you would be wrong. I am old in a thousand ways.

Uh huh. Of all the things this narrator can open his story with, he feels the need to tell us, right up front, that he IS NOT MIDDLE CLASS, OKAY?!? What professional murderer would care to ever say any such thing? This isn't the character speaking, here, it's the writer speaking to the audience, assuring them that they will be soon enjoy the frisson of empathizing with somebody outside their immediate value system. This reminds me of why I rarely like any first-person killer novels; I just never believe that this person would be talking at all. Even my favorite thrillerist, Lee Child, occasionally indulges in first-person narratives from his hero, Jack Reacher; these are terrific books, but when you read them, you have to block from your mind the absolute knowledge that Reacher would never in a million years say so many words at once.

Okay, scratch Derek Haas. Bring on the new Stephen King, Just After Sunset, which, let me say from the start, is in places really good. A few stories in here--"N.", "Harvey's Dream", "The New York Times At Special Bargain Rates"--are some of the best things King has written, so hooray for that. "Harvey's Dream" is particularly creepy.

But as regular readers of this blog already know, I consider King to be the king of class paranoia, and he doesn't disappoint. Here we have Henry, the soon-to-be-divorced husband of the protagonist of "The Gingerbread Girl," reacting to the news that she'll soon be visiting his working-class father's beach house:

"The conch shack." She could almost hear him sniff. Like Ho Hos and Twinkies, houses with only three rooms and no garage were not a part of Henry's belief system.

This is classic King--in a world of ghosts, monsters, and murderers, pretension is the ultimate enemy. Of course, Stephen King is very smart, and loves all kinds of literature, and can't resist referring, in his books, to all the great writers, musicians, and artists he has enjoyed in his life. And there is nothing wrong with that. But when he puts this knowledge into the minds of his characters, we get passages like this, from "The Things They Left Behind":

I even remember something one of those South American novelists said--you know, the ones they call the Magic Realists? Not the guy's name, that's not important, but this quote: [long quote from "the guy"]. Borges? Yes, it might have been Borges. Or it might have been Marquez.

Right. One of those guys--it's not like I care. I mean, I don't sit around, like, reading all the time, man. Mostly I repair my car and watch sports, but you know how it is, Mac, the way those Magic Realist quotes stick in your head. To be honest, it really fuckin' bugs me.

This post could go on for pages, as you probably know, if you read mysteries and thrillers. The question, of course, is why? Why is class paranoia the default mode for the thrillerist? You would think that the entire genre was made up of people whose greatest fear is that somewhere out there, some elbow-patched lit prof is thinking he's superior to them. Of course the genre was born in the pulps, which didn't used to get any respect; but of course now they do, they're taught in college classes, and oceans of ink about them have been spilled over the dissertations of the world. King especially is now widely lauded as an inspiration for all manner of literary fiction; he's certainly a powerful force behind my new novel.

Crime and thriller writers need to evolve. It's time for them to assume the habits of self-confidence and literary ambition that people like Stephen King have earned for them, and stop trying to have it both ways.

Just to clarify

From Charles Taylor, in this week's NYTBR:

Part of what I respect about Stephen King — and I suspect it’s part of what drives some of his fellow writers and some critics crazy — is the honesty of that [sic] admission, in this book’s introduction, that he churned out stories for money.

Horseshit. He might have asked an actual writer or two. I have never met a single one who thinks that it is in any way wrong to accept money for writing, or even to write specifically for that purpose.

The thing that actually drives me crazy about Stephen King, as I've written here many times before, is that he's smarter than most of his books--that, if he wrote half as many, they would all be twice as good. And I should know--I've read 'em all. But only a fool would begrudge a popular writer the money that he has earned.

As for Taylor, he'd obviously rather declare writers elitists and snobs, based on an opinion he just made up for them on the spot, than actually find out what they think, and risk disproving a cherished stereotype. Unexamined fantasy nonsense.

Twilight

August is, despite its brightness, the 3 am of the year. Most everyone is in some kind of sleep, occupational sleep, summer sleep, cultural sleep. I'm teaching a summer class on the short story to high school students, but mostly they just want to talk about Stephanie Meyer's Twilight books. They no longer want to talk about Harry Potter, although they're all experts and scholars on the subject--they're like old academics who could, if forced to, lecture for months about deconstruction or structuralism, but have moved on. No, they want to talk about Twilight, and do so with a weird gleam in their eyes and giddy catches in their voices.

Meanwhile I place these short stories before them, and they turn out to have read many of them before, though when asked about them, they get key details wrong, or switched around. It doesn't bother them. Bartelby the Scrivener is suddenly down for whatever, and Sonny in Sonny's Blues is now a guitar player who meets the devil at the crossroads.

But if a student gets a detail of Twilight wrong, or even right, an enormous quarrel begins and won't end until someone is sullen.

Me, I hate a vampire story. And I'm tired of superhero movies.

"And I confess I find it hard/ speaking to people/ who are fond of outer space," wrote the poet Stephen Dunn in "Turning Forty."

But who am I to complain. In high school I read mostly Stephen King and Ayn Rand because nobody was around to suggest anything different, and my own taste was too slow in developing to warn me away.

Where does that turn happen, away from crap to works of real value?

Duma Key

Well, I did it--I bought the new Stephen King. I've posted semi-copiously here about my rocky relationship with the guy (click the tag below), and wasn't sure what to expect this time around. I'm pleased to say the book is actually pretty good, one of his best in a really long time.

Now, if you don't like King, all the things you don't like about him are on display here: his florid elaborations upon completely obvious things, using as many words as possible; his gratuitous text formatting!!; copious quotations from pop songs; pointless literary references; and lots of random name-dropping of places he likes going and people he knows. But if you like King, you've learned to tolerate these habits--they're like grandpa's potbelly and scratchy beard. And here, he seems to have them under control.

Mostly. This book is an example of the subgenre King excels in--a man, transformed either by tragedy or personal weakness, retreats to a creepy house in the middle of nowhere to try to make art. Mayhem ensues. This time, it's a building contractor from the midwest who loses an arm and some of his mind in a crane accident; the subsequent changes to his personality precipitate a divorce. He holes up on the Florida Gulf Coast (right down the road from my grandma's condo, actually, so I know all the places he's talking about) and starts painting pictures, which turn out to be, um, channeling an evil spirit.

The last fifth is pretty much skippable--it involves the compulsory mano-a-mano battle against the baddies, and you've already read it--but the rest is actually quite wonderful. The protagonist is distinctive, the supporting cast hugely memorable (even if they all talk in pithy vulgarisms at all times), and there is plenty to enjoy before the expository-dialogue-packed denoument. King is terrific on the act of artistic creation; it's his favorite thing in the world to write about, and he is great at ferreting out its darker aspects.

King got a lot of loving attention for his recent attempt to write a literary novel; personally, I couldn't get through Lisey's Story, and I don't understand why he wrote it. His careful attempt to introduce restraint into his writing only made his essential unrestrainability all the more obvious, and I feared that he was going to continue on this campaign of trying to please the very people he's been calling snobs his entire life. (See my steam-puffing-out-of-ears post about his Best American anthology.)

Happily, those fears were unfounded. Duma Key is a hugely entertaining and intelligent piece of work, with a dumb ending. Glad to have ol' grandpa back, scratchy beard and all.

Stephen King, Get Over It Already

Oh, for Pete's sake.

Many of you have probably read this morning's editorial in the Times Book Review by Stephen King. It's pretty much a ripoff of his own introduction to the new Best American Short Stories, and is about his favorite topic: how Ivy League intellectual snobs have ruined literature.

You'd think that, in the wake of his complete acceptance by the "literary establishment" that he for so long was convinced disdained him, King would no longer feel it necessary to write pretentious little screeds like this; but if you think that, you don't know King. This is the most outrageously class-obsessed writer in the world, the guy who trots out his working class cred at every available opportunity, and there was no way something like winning the actual admiration of powerful people would put a stop to it.

The essay in question is structured as an imaginary big-box store visit, where King discovers that the literary magazines are expensive, and you have to bend over to read them. He uses these observations to assert that the audience for serious fiction has dwindled. And then he says that this audience

happens to consist of other writers and would-be writers who are reading the various literary magazines (and the New Yorker, of course...) not to be entertained but to get an idea of what sells there. And this kind of reading isn't real reading, the kind where you just can't wait to find out what happens next... It's more like copping-a-feel reading. There's something yucky about it.

Got that? If you're a young writer, and you're reading that New Yorker story, and think you find it entertaining, sorry, you're mistaken. Actually, you're a pervert. And a calculating snob/loser/poseur. And if you claim that you are able to enjoy a story that operates by means other than event-driven narrative linearity, you are lying.

What a bunch of fucking bullshit. King is certainly right about the limited audience for literary fiction. He's right that most fiction sucks, too. But most fiction has always sucked. You can't name the shitty writers of 1923, not because they didn't exist, but because they didn't last. Bad fiction is usually bad in ways that reveal the vanities of its era, and I won't argue that the vanities of this era don't indeed include intellectual pretension, MFA-fueled obfuscatory mediocrity, and emotional detachment.

But dude: get over it. King seems to need, very badly, to believe that everyone in the world is a fake but him. One story in the new B.A.S.S. anthology so perfectly encapsulates the King paranoia that he might have written it himself. In it, a good ol' honest-to-god salt-of-the-earth auto parts salesman tells the story of his brother, a famous "intellectual" writer who mistreats women, humiliates his family, looks down on everyone, and dies miserable. It's a piece of such breathtaking reverse snobbery, classist wish fulfillment, and emotional fakery that I could barely believe my eyes. Like King's essay today, it brims, embarrassingly, with bitterness and jealousy.

I've read pretty much everything King has written, and like a lot of literary writers of my generation, I count him as an influence, in spite of his flaws. But wow, there is no pleasing the guy. The best-selling, wealthiest, most prolific, most loved writer of his generation, enjoyed by readers from all socioeconomic strata and education levels, and he still thinks the phonies are out to get him.

Well, fuck you, man. We literary whipper-snappers are not reading magazines to advance our careers, we're reading them because we like them. Just like you pretend to. You begged and begged to be admitted into the elite, highly selective, and completely imaginary company of the literati, and finally they gave in. And as soon as you strolled through the nonexistent door into their illusory super special secret smart people's club you told 'em they were heartless lame-o's. "I certainly don't want some fraidy-cat's writing school imitation of Faulkner, or some stream-of-consciousness about what Bob Dylan once called 'the true meaning of a pear'."

Guess what, Steve--neither do the rest of us. And enough quoting of Dylan and Springsteen, as part of your endless effort to prove once and for all how very down to earth and populist you are. If there's a hell for snobs, you will reside there for eternity, reading over and over the collected works of Barthes, Derrida, and Baudrillard.

And I'm still going to read your next book.

Thinking about Stephen King

There's been a lot of attention paid, lately, to Stephen King, what with the completion of his Dark Tower series, his 2003 “Distinguished Contribution” award from the National Book Foundation, and the recent publication of a new, quasi-literary book. A lot of people with serious establishment cred have been piping up to say how much King has influenced them, and on balance I think this is a good thing. I like Stephen King, and at times I've really, really liked him. And like a lot of people my age (men especially), I must indeed cite him as an influence.

But there's something a little irksome about this latest spate of attention. The world of capital-L Literature had used to ignore him entirely, which wasn't right; and now it seems to be lauding him as an underappreciated literary master, and that isn't right either. King is an often extremely entertaining, sometimes very smart, and always deeply flawed writer, and I think most thinking people who have read him have come to this conclusion pretty quickly. You can eat his stuff up and have a fine time doing it, but you can't help but notice his class paranoia, his tendency to illuminate every metaphor in neon to make sure you got it, his repetitiveness, his rib-elbowing in-jokes, his embarrassingly self-conscious literary references. You can't help but wish he'd written half as many books and taken twice as long to write them.

But there is a lot to like. I reviewed Dreamcatcher (verdict: pretty good) a few years ago in the now-defunct quarterly Bookpress, and said this:

King has good ideas. He can’t always distinguish them from his bad ideas, and his is not prose you’ll want to return to again and again, but there is something to him that is hard to ignore. He has access to, and control of, a powerful iconography that really does get at the heart of America’s fear and shame. He’s our sin-eater, the guy who shoulders the burden of our nastiest thoughts, who poisons the wellspring of our vanity, and for this service we have made him one of the wealthiest people in the state of Maine. And more power to him.

When you get down to it, King is a very likeable guy on the page, and he's even more likeable in an interview he gave recently to Christopher Lehmann-Haupt and Nathaniel Rich of The Paris Review (issue 178, Fall 2006): another example of this new wave of establishment attention and respect. And there is no doubt that King does deserve attention and respect. But the thing is, he is still flawed, and not as good as you suspect he could be, and I don't understand why hardly anyone ever seems to point this out. Thirty years of dismissing the guy followed by a new era of lauding him as a genius is silly and, more to the point, inaccurate.

The best thing you could say about Stephen King—and it is excellent praise indeed—is that he is absolutely distinctive and always has been. The “Richard Bachman” ruse was ridiculous: the moment, in Thinner, when “Bachman” knowingly referred to a previous Stephen King novel was the moment anyone who'd read King before must have known conclusively that Bachman was him. Pretending to be someone else referring to Stephen King is the defining act of Stephen-Kinginess.

But even when he's not pretending, it only takes a paragraph to know it's him. The italics, the exclamation points, the one-sentence paragraphs, the smartass working-class heroes who happen to have read Ulysses—he's as distinctive as Alice Munro, or Philip Roth, or George Saunders, or Lydia Davis, even if he doesn't match their brilliance, or even bother trying to. And that's what we ought to have been pointing out all along.