Dear Marjorie,
I’ve been pondering your crucial question about the lovingly rendered scatological details in this book: Is it a guy thing? I have to think it must be. It must appeal to someone, or King would not be the richest author in the United States. But you have to ask, is this what men like to read? Is this what they actually talk about when they’re alone in the woods together–a kind of pornography of the bowels? I know that men are more obsessed with their digestive systems than we are–I always assumed it was because their reproductive systems were so simple, compared to ours–but would the average adult male enjoy the following paragraph (this comes early in the book, where one of the first sufferers from the byrus meets Pete, one of the friends whose relationship forms the core of the book):
No answer and then she let loose with another of those long buzz-saw farts, her face wrinkling up as she let go, as if it hurt her … and probably it did, something that sounded like that just about had to hurt. And even though Pete had been careful to get upwind, some of the smell came to him–hot and rank but somehow not human. Nor did it smell like cow-farts. He had worked for Lionel Sylvester as a kid, he’d milked more than his share of cows, and sometimes they blew gas at you while you were on the stool, sure–a green heavy smell, a marshy smell. This wasn’t like that, not a bit.
Once wouldn’t be bad, really. But after several dozen descriptions of burps, and farts, and the various smells, and the blood ripping out of people’s guts (not in an orderly way, through the stomach, like in Alien but right out the other end), I just thought, yuck, yuck, yuck.
(I know we agree on this. But I just wanted to give a small example, to prove that you and I aren’t just a pair of sissies in white gloves and long dresses sitting on the front porch, looking faint at the mention of a cuss word or two.)
But enough of that. I want to put in a good word for Duddits, the Down syndrome boy who first comes into the book in a flashback, when the four heroes are rescuing him from some school bullies who are trying to get him to eat dog shit. He has a Scooby-Doo lunchbox, and the four boys befriend him and take him home and become his companion and his champion–even though he goes to a school everyone calls the Retard Academy–throughout their school years, forming a special bond with him, not least because he represents for them the best and bravest thing they ever did in their lives.
First, the way the Duddits story unfolds is vintage King: There are intriguing flashbacks, and then the story itself, and then, much later, a revisiting of the Duddits theme, and of Duddits himself, now dying of leukemia but essential to the story in that his job is to save the world. You are absolutely right that he is a stock Simple Child With Great Powers, and maybe that was annoying to you, but I found it incredibly moving. Here’s why. My reasons are purely emotional.
The story of Duddits and the bullies with the dog shit reminded me of nothing less than the terrible story of James Bulger, the 2-year-old who was abducted from a British shopping center by two older boys in the early 1990s, and then beaten to death, his battered body left on a train track and ripped apart by a train (remember those CCTV shots of the boy holding the younger boy by the hand at the mall, leading him away from his mother?). And this is an even lamer reason–Duddits talks just like my 2-year-old daughter, Isobel, who refers to herself as I-obel and spends her whole time doing things like pointing at me and saying, “My mummy, that one” (OK, she’s English, she says “mummy,” and there’s nothing I can do about it). In my addled maternal state, I just thought of Duddits as being 2 the whole time, and incredibly sweet and grateful and enthusiastic and naive and utterly lovable in the way that 2-year-olds are, and I couldn’t get past it. I wanted to play with him and his Scooby-Doo lunchbox, too.
That’s one of the things about King. He is a complete sponge for popular culture, and his books are chock-a-block with references both inadvertent and explicit to books, movies, songs, current events, television, social trends; you name it. The heroes’ long last trek to try to prevent Mr. Gray from infecting the reservoir with the byrus reminded me of the end of The Lord of the Rings. There are references to Rolling Stones songs, that old movie about Buckaroo Bonzai; the Doublemint gum commercial tune; Dolph Lundgren–too many to keep count. Lots of King’s asides, or little details woven into the fabric of the story, are just funny. Toward the end, one of the characters, a general-store owner, refers to the unnamed, newly elected president as “Mr. Okeefenokee, on account of the fucked-up way he’d been elected–couldn’t anyone down there fucking count?” (King must have inserted that little tidbit late in the game, since it’s dated last spring.) There are hundreds of great little funny scenes (funny amid the gore and carnage, of course). I’ll just refer to one, when a whole bunch of weekend hunters who have been quarantined in the woods and are in a barn that Kurtz, the crazy commando guy, intends to burn down, make a break for it:
“Never in any of his contingency plans had he so much as considered this scenario: two or three hundred overweight November warriors mounting a no-guts-no-glory banzai charge. He had never expected them to do anything but stay put, clamoring for due process right up to the point where they were barbecued.” And then: “More shooting from Gosselin’s office … screams of pain … then triumphant howls. The computer-savvy, Evian-drinking, salad-eating Goths had taken their objective.”
This book was clearly too long, as you mentioned in your first posting. What’s up with that, do you think? How do we get brilliant writers like Stephen King to–as Strunk and White put it so nicely–omit needless words?
All best to you,
Sarah
