Dear Sarah,
Funny you should have discovered King during such a bleak time in your life. The weekend on which I started reading him came right after I got demoted out of my first job. Your vivid memories of Albany (more horrific than any spore from outer space) made me wonder if I had less patience with the pyrotechnics of Dreamcatcher than I’ve had with other Kings out of being in the midst of a bustling, bursting chapter of life whose problems are basically the headaches of abundance, such as basement contractors and dying refrigerators and children with fevers. When you’ve got a 5-year-old in the next room uttering the most dreaded sentence in the English language–“Mommy, I feel like I’m going to throw up”–it’s harder to get involved in the plight of a made-up history professor who’s doing battle with a dagger-toothed shit-weasel from outer space.
But I also do agree with you that the first 150 pages or so of this book are furiously off-putting. There’s so much focus on truly gross bodily functions (including functions not found in earthly nature): There’s something almost defiant in King’s decision to march the reader through so much scatological mayhem right off the bat. I resented him for it and think I, too, would have walked away from the book had it not been for the homework factor.
Is this a guy thing? When I think about it, the King novels I’ve liked best (with the exception of The Stand) tend to be the ones that are painted on a smaller canvas: less Grand Guignol, more human predicament. The Dead Zone, Cujo, Misery, Pet Sematary, Hearts in Atlantis, rather than It, The Tommyknockers, The Regulators. (OK, this last one is one of the ones King published as Richard Bachman, the alter ego he invented to get around his publishers’ squeamishness about how impossibly prolific he is.) As soon as I propose this distinction, though, I think of exceptions to it: I loved The Mist, a novella in which mutant creatures created by a military experiment run amok and eat up most of the residents of Maine. And Bag of Bones, like Dreamcatcher, gave full and equal time to both imperatives–in your formulation, the elegant and the gross.
I couldn’t really vote with you, though, in finding Duddits a persuasive or a moving character. (Or even concept, which comes closer to describing what he is.) I thought he was a bit of a pasteboard figure–the Special Child who through his innocence spreads light and life to all who know him: “[Y]ou heard Dudits Cavell laugh and for a little while you believed the old lies again: that life was good, that the lives of boys and men, girls and women, had some purpose. That there was light as well as darkness.” I can’t help wondering if parents who actually raise Down syndrome children wouldn’t come away from reading about Duddits’ saintly mother feeling disgruntled, even denigrated, by the simplicity of King’s picture. (Though, to his credit, that simplicity does darken at the end.)
I was more absorbed by Dreamcatcher’s interest in the question of what it means to be human. As Jonesy goes about trying to corrupt the perfect alienness of Mr. Gray–to “make him sweat little blood-beads of desire”–King is of course mulling on the whole sublime messiness of human appetite. If an alien could be persuaded to “give over his mission and simply enjoy being human,” it might go very much like this:
Now he discovered that desire in himself as his previously harmonious mind … began to fragment, to turn into a crowd of opposing voices, some wanting A, some wanting B, some wanting Q squared and divided by Z. He would have thought such babble would be horrible, the stuff of madness. Instead he found himself enjoying the wrangle.
There was bacon. There was “sex with Carla,” which Jonesy’s mind identified as a superlatively enjoyable act, involving both sensory and emotional input. There was fast driving and bumper pool in O’Leary’s Bar near Fenway Park and beer and live bands that played loud and Patty Loveless singing “Blame it on your lyin cheatin cold deadbeatin two-timin double-dealin mean mistreatin lovin heart” (whatever that meant). There was the look of the land rising from the fog on a summer morning. And murder, of course. There was that.
And on Jonesy’s side, there is the comical business of having to explain the niceties of human life to his alien occupier: “Jonesy sighed. These were the masters of the universe that the movies had taught us to fear? Merciless, star-faring conquerors who didn’t know how to take a shit or figure a tip?” King milks the possibilities of alien-as-baffled-exchange-student for all they’re worth, in both humor and poignance.
If only one didn’t have to wade through so much explosive, lovingly detailed farting to get to these lovely veins. But there it is: King has his own loony appetites, and it’s not like you get to apply your alien (female?) intelligence and sift out only the parts you want. I tend to think it’s this part of his appetite that has kept him firmly fenced into the paddock marked “popular writers,” despite his occasional efforts to bolt for the greener pastures of plain old novelists. I have a mental image of him sitting over his word processor, clacking away at a deeply felt portrait of some poor shlub getting himself into horrible, multidimensional trouble, doing his literary best when suddenly a shit-weasel creeps into his brain, his eyes light up, his typing tempo increases. … And he just can’t help himself; it’s the liveliest, most insistently pumping vein in his entire makeup. Because he writes these parts of his books with such zeal, there must be people out there who read him precisely for these parts of his books. But clearly that ain’t you and me. Do you think we’re dealing with gender here?
I can, incidentally, explain why it’s such a threat that the byrus might get poured into Boston’s water supply: The deal is that the byrus dies on contact in the extreme weather of the Maine woods and that it kills only the people who get it directly; people who catch it from other people get less severe forms that don’t usually kill them. So if it’s poured into the water, it will live longer and kill more people. I think. I skipped epidemiology in college and took romantic poetry instead.
Cheers,
Marjorie
