Roadwork

Okay, I will admit it.  I needed a SK hiatus.  It just got to be too much with the '1970s America is really screwed up and what can be done' vibe.  And when I read the blurb for Roadwork, it seemed very much to be about how screwed up 1970s America was and how there was no rational response to what was happening.  I feel like if you are going to set a novel around Nixon/fuel crisis, that kind of response is somewhat inevitable.  When this is the umpteenth SK book in a row to confront these issues, sometimes you need a hiatus.

However, it turned out that I liked Roadwork more than I thought I would.  At its core was less the disintegration of American society and more the disintegration of a man whose life starting unraveling when his son died of a brain tumor.  You may be asking, 'What is the deal with all of these brain tumors?'  I was too.  I think in part they are terrifying because in SK's world, there is nothing that can be done about them.  In fact, this novel was particularly explicit in its description of the size of the tumor (a walnut) and how it was so deeply buried in the brain that nothing could be done.  So in part they are scary because they are 'inoperable' (a word that came up a lot in SK's description)--which is to say that we are hopeless in the face of such things.  But I think that the other scary part is the fact that they alter a person's behavior in ways that cannot be controlled.  Now that is a scary thought.  Forget vampires overriding your village or clowns in your sewer or pets coming back from the dead.  Losing control of your brain, and therefore your behavior, is a terrifying notion.

Of course, there are other recurring themes.  For instance, Vegas is evil (why all the Vegas hate, SK?).  The story is set in Maine...again, SK, if you don't want people to know that you are writing under an alias, set your story in New Jersey or something!*  One of the images that stuck with me the most was the constant dreams that the main character had about his son dying.  This reminded me very much of the Dark Tower series, where Roland keeps seeing Jake die and can't save him.  Perhaps this is where the idea initially came from.  In this case, it was made even more sad by the fact that Barton (main character) simply couldn't move on from this death.  He recognized that he should and even commended his wife--in a backhanded way--for managing to do this.  But he was unable to get anywhere.

I think that what most resonated with me from this novel was the idea that here was a grown-up acting in completely non-grown up ways.  Rather than confronting problems head-on, he came up with drastic responses or drastic non-responses.  For instance, he lost his job because of something that he needed to do and didn't.  He threw a hammer and broke his TV, even though he liked the TV and there was no rational reason for this response.  He wound up in a shoot-out/explosion with local authorities because he should have moved on with his life and didn't.  I'm pretty sure that virtually all of us has felt like this sometimes.  Probably we just did what we needed to do.  Maybe sometimes we let it slide and didn't do something that we should have done.  It probably didn't turn out as drastically as this scenario.  But I felt that Barton's motivations were surprisingly realistic and down-to-earth.  Sometimes we don't want to do things, but because we are grown-ups, we have to.

Perhaps most salient in this novel is the importance of Barton's identity, which he loses piece by piece.  He loses his job, which he has had for decades, in part because of a highway extension.  He is about to lose his home.  His inaction causes him to lose his wife.  Before all of this, he has lost his role as a father.  What is his identity by the end of this novel?  I don't think that even he knows and that is why he takes the extreme action that he did.  Throughout the book, we have narrations of the voices in his head, where he refers to himself by different names (it doesn't become clear until later that they are his middle name and the middle name of his son).  This composite personality arises because he no longer has a well-defined role to play.  In his final conversation with his wife, he feels that she is acting like a paperback novel: newly-divorced woman becoming independent by returning to school.  In other words, she has an identity for him, even if it is cliche.  But as the book continues, his identity is almost entirely lost.  Even when he seeks to make amends--becoming the benefactor of a charity, for instance--he is rebuffed.  I think that this is the reason that losing the house becomes such a catastrophic event for him: it is the only trace that he has of his former identities.

*Wikipedia says it is set in the Midwest.  Bollocks.  From the chapter set on December 31, 1973: 'He wondered what Olivia was doing now.  She hadn't tried to call back, although if she had he would probably have weakened and taken the call.  Maybe she had stayed in Vegas just long enough to get the money and had then caught a bus for...where?  Maine?  Did anyone leave Las Vegas for Maine in the middle of winter?  Surely not.'  (467 in The Bachman Books).  This doesn't definitively place the story in Maine, but after reading it, that was my assumption.

The Stand, initial reaction

I finished The Stand!  It was SUPER long.  So long, in fact, that I think I will post observations for the next week or so about the book separately, otherwise I will have a blog post that is of Stand-like proportions.  The good news is that it is actually the longest of all of his books (!), so yay.  It, with only 10 fewer pages, comes awfully close, though. 

My first observation is that I think Stephen King is afraid of cornfields.  The rest of us fear the monstrous creatures that live in his imagination.  He fears cornfields.  In case you didn't get that vibe from 'Children of the Corn,' it is also prominently featured in The Stand, where Randall Flagg faffs around in Nebraskan cornfields, scaring the Good People.  Seriously, I am definitely be more afraid of killer clowns in sewers, vampires taking over my town, and haunted hotels possessing caretakers than cornfields.

I did read the New and Improved version of The Stand that was published in 1990.  I guess I could have gone back to the Old and Lousy (and shorter by oh, around 300 pages) version from 1978 then compare it to the New and Improved version, but frankly, people, I have a job and can't just spend my whole life reading Stephen King books.  While I personally didn't notice any blatant anachronisms (there are some listed on the Wikipedia page, in case this kind of thing concerns you), one did catch my attention: the fact that Trashcan Man had a lobotomy to try and 'cure' his crazy (who is Trashcan Man and why he is crazy will be discussed later.  Or maybe not.  There is a mini-series of The Stand, you know.  It shows up relatively often on ScyFy.  And it will only take 6 hours of your life as opposed to the book, which is SUPER long).  I found this fact to be almost an anachronism, but a very cool one.  In 1978, lobotomies were rare, but this was a recent development--their heyday as a 'cure' for mental illness was during the 1950s and early 1960s.  Considering that the revised version of the book is set in 1990, it would mean that Trashcan Man was older than I would guess.  I love these kinds of moments when you realize what a different world we live in from the past.  Another great example is Philip Roth's book Nemesis, which everyone should rush out and read.   You'll be happy to know that it is approximately four times shorter than The Stand.  It too is about a killer disease, except that the plot centers around polio and the fear that it could invoke in a 1944, New Jersey community.  How things have changed, and how quickly.

I was struck by the parallels between The Stand and The Dark Tower, which are far too numerous to list in one blog post.  There is something to be said for The Stand taking place in one of the alternative worlds found in the Dark Tower series; it is mentioned explicitly in Book 4, but there are more parallels than that.  I'll try not to get too into these comparisons, but it is hard.  One thing that did annoy me about the 1990 version is that every so often, there would be a phrase or word from The Dark Tower and suddenly you would wonder if that was added later; by 1990, he had published Dark Tower books 1-2 and, since 3 came out the next year, he probably had an idea of where that was going.  Or maybe not.  Maybe he wrote it in two weeks.  You never know with this guy.  I will think about the intersections between 3 and The Stand when I get there, though, now that I've noticed how close those were in time.  One that did hit me was that Mother Abigail referred to Franny's baby as 'the chap,' which is exactly what Susanna does in The Dark Tower, only that her baby is not quite so welcome.  I know, I am getting ahead of myself.

What I found most zeitgeisty about The Stand was its unambiguous division into Good People and Bad People.  Sure, there were a few on the fence (by which I mean two that were actually developed as characters: Harold Lauter and Nadine Cross), but that was about it.  This reminded me of Star Wars, which came out just a year before The Stand.  Must have been something about unambiguous depictions of Good and Evil around this time.  I was going to jokingly write, 'Let's blame Nixon, shall we?' when I realized that I think that might be part of what Stephen King had in mind here since much of The Stand involves recreating an American society after America has disappeared due to a top-secret government plot gone awry.  But that will definitely need to be saved for another day.