Don't 'Kill Your Heroes,' Rather, 'Gently Admonish Those For Whom You Have Deep But Measured Appreciation'
I’ve never been big on heroes. There are probably a series of boring, psychological, childhood-rooted reasons for this, but we’re not about to go down that rohd. This is not to pretend that I don’t get all weepy about the heroic actions, big and small, of fictional characters in books and movies, but that I’ve never really assigned those mythic qualities to, you know, actual people. I don’t really get worship or adoration or reverence—expressions of such always strike me as unexamined in an important way. Even if acts of devotion and veneration have been properly vetted by the devotee, they reliably read as axiomatic to the outside observer—or to me they do, anyway—and I do not like even the perception of unquestioning. The distance between unconditional love and despotism closes quickly in the right (wrong) circumstances.
All of which is to say that when I’m dumping on Stephen King, it’s not one of those “kill your heroes” things. I don’t have heroes, because I think having heroes is bad, and so Stephen King isn’t one of them. Reading criticism of writers or artists by people who once held them in pedestalic esteem always feels awkward and intrusive, like listening to somebody enumerate the flaws of their parent’s naked body. There’s something self-aggrandizing about a certain flavor of hero-killing, too—look how I’ve grown, the critic is saying, I’ve come so far, to leave the naive influences of my earlier days behind. The student has become the master, et cetera, et cetera—ahh, shove it!
Stephen King has been one of my favorite writers for almost as long as I’ve been a reader, but I’ve never been blind to his flaws. Mostly, I’ve found his flaws charming and humanizing and, more often than not, an asset to his character and world building, rather than a hindrance. King is a creaky and leaky storyteller—his major characters often stand-ins for himself, hard to distinguish from novel to novel, and the minor ones, who don’t stick around for more than a page or two, built on as little as a single observation King has of the world. He fills his characters minds and mouths with himself, so that their humanity is his, so that to enjoy the company (or not) of these creations is to appreciate (or not) King himself. As I’ve said elsewhere, I don't know how you can be a Stephen King fan without appreciating all the ways he leaks.
I read the three books of King’s Bill Hodges Trilogy in the last few months and, man, he sure does leak a lot more these days than he used to. I liked the first two plenty, and cruised through the finale, End of Watch, just as quickly and enjoyably, though the plot of the third stretched credulity in ways that the first two didn’t, introducing supernatural elements to the story for the first time and dabbling in techno-speak that might as well be a foreign language to King.
Mr. Mercedes is about psychopathic serial killer Brady Hartsfield, who isn’t satisfied by his first successful massacre. He starts taunting recently retired detective Bill Hodges, who failed to track him down in the initial investigation after that first mass murder. Hartsfield is a disturbed and bright little weirdo with some unfortunately hormonal feelings for his mother, among a handful of other familiar serial killer characteristics. Hodges teams up with a couple of his own misfit pals—a spectrum-y 40-something coming out of her shell and an over-smart teenager named Jerome—to try to prevent Hartsfield’s next big attack.
The second book, Finders Keepers, leaves Hartsfield behind (in a vegetative state) and introduces a new villain for Hodges and pals to contend with—a violently angry fan of great literature who takes vengeance on his favorite writer (itself something of a King standard, at this point) and takes the toxic entitlement of shitty fan culture to all sorts of murderous ends. This was probably my favorite of the three books.
The finale is End of Watch, and as I mentioned above, it takes the series out of the crime fiction/mystery genres and out into more familiar supernatural King territory, though not necessarily to its benefit. Brady Hartsfield is back, slowly coming out of his coma to discover that he has powers of telekinesis and mind control and the ability to psychically leave his body to take over others. Also, he programs a tablet video game demo to hypnotize people so he can jump into their minds from afar, while staring at his own tablet. It’s…pretty silly.
The book also colloquially describes technology in ways that make the reader feel a little embarrassed on King’s behalf, like listening to grandpa try to sound with it by insisting that he knows all about the YouTubes. There are minor slip-ups, like a reference to now-defunct video-sharing service Vine, which allowed users to share short, six-second-max video clips, spoken in the voice of a teenaged girl character who very clearly could never actually exist.
“Vine only showed six-second videos on a loop, GRANDPA! You’ve taken me right out of the narrative.” The photo of my Kindle I took to show the excerpt, on the other hand, is a perfect illustration of my own advanced tech savvy.
Later in the same conversation, things get a bit more glaring, with a teen girl referencing Google+ as though it’s a thing that the kids know all about and use regularly.
“Tell me about the website first.”
“There was a tweet, okay? Someone at school told me about it. It got picked up on lots of social media sites. Facebook…Pinterest…Google Plus…you know the ones I’m talking about.”
Hodges doesn’t, but nods.
“I can’t remember the tweet exactly, but pretty close. Because they can only be a hundred and forty characters long. You know that, right?”
It was here that I gouged my eyes out, rather than endure more from “Dinah” talking about her fellow teenaged friends “Barb, Hilda, and Betsy,” because King still gets all his character names from his 1955 second grade class roster.
Anyway, despite all that and some other unforgivable nonsense that the team of editors and researchers that facilitate Stephen King’s ongoing Stephen King career should have been able to clean up, the last book is a satisfying-enough conclusion to the Hodges story.
Like most everything else he’s written, the trilogy is good and propulsive and gets the job done, assuming that the job is a bunch of hours of entertainment provided by a trusted and familiar friendly voice. It’s not going to change your world, but I maintain that this sort of reading is more worthy of your time than whatever nonsense you’re otherwise planning on bingeing next. There’s too much goddamn television, and whatever you do manage to watch, there will always be more to catch up on. There was an opinion piece in the Times last weekend by novelist Ben Dolnick that argued that, uhh, you should read more, because reading is good.
Before my storm-induced Rendell marathon, I’d been reading the wrong way. John Gardner, the literary critic, wrote that the job of the novelist is to create a “vivid and continuous dream” for the reader, but I’d somehow developed a case of readerly sleep apnea. I’d gotten into the habit of consuming novels so fitfully that I was all but sealed off from their pleasures. It was as if I’d been watching movies in a special buffering-only mode, or listening to music through the world’s balkiest Bluetooth headphones.
This style of reading had, I realized, shunted me into a vicious circle. I was reading less because I was enjoying it less, which made reading even less enjoyable, which inclined me to read even less.
(…)
There is no team of brilliant and vaguely sinister engineers, cooking up ways to get you binge reading. There is no auto-play technology frictionlessly delivering you from one chapter of the novel you’re reading to the next. There is only you, alone in the silence of your room with a chapter break before you and your phone cooing at you from the dresser.
(…)
But in book after book, if you do push on through one chapter break, and then on through the chapter break after that, something amazing happens. Subplots that would once have been murky to the point of incomprehensibility (what was the deal with that dead sea captain again?) step into the light. Little jokes and echoes, separated by dozens or even hundreds of pages, come rustling out of the text forest. A writer’s voice — Grace Paley at her slangy best, Nicholson Baker at his hypomanic craziest — starts to seep into and color the voice of your innermost thoughts.
You will, in other words, find yourself propelled through a book that would once have been a multiseason dead weight in your tote bag. And this will not be the creepy propulsion of the countdown that draws you guiltily into a “White Collar” marathon, but the intimate, happy propulsion that keeps you talking well into the night with a visiting friend.
So read some books! They’re great fun, even when they’re not quite great.
