Full disclosure: Stephen King's latest novel Lisey's Story (Scribner, $28) is the first Stephen King novel I've ever read. See, I'm one of those literary types, an elitist, a snob, a scrooge, a Johnny No Friends. Strutting through the Ks in my local Barnes & Noble, willfully bypassing the Stephen King annex, the only spines I see are those of Kafka, Klima, Kundera, while the King biblio-opolis casts shadows over The Trial, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Love and Garbage. One of those kinds of readers, who takes his Pound over pleasure any day of the week. However, this might qualify me as the essential critic for Lisey's Story: Not a die-hard fan (not any kind of fan) with the baggage of idol worship and inevitable idol disappointment, and only prejudiced by my own stuffiness borne through the dusty halls of academia and au currant philology, I have nothing to gain, nothing to lose by trying just once.
And if this is the way Stephen King writes his novels, the author I've sniffed my nose at throughout his entire career as a writer and mine as a reader, then I'll be around for a second-go. To put it bluntly, it is damned fine novel. At least the first half. The second devolves into the kind of novel I'd imagine an author like Stephen King would write. But that first half is unputdownable. It is the novel for the prickliest of aesthetic sensibilities; not just a shock of his authorial competence (I believe this is his 8,000th novel, so he's at least decent pushing the pages through the meat grinder), but actual greatness. In the critical yawp to come at the novel's reception, the one buzzword will be "ambitious." As in, "Stephen King has never been more ambitious." But this will be the wrong word; in this case, essentially a reductive, pejorative term (ambitious like the boy with hooks for hands, who year after year attends the annual football try-outs for quarterback). No, King isn't ambitious. King is awesome. In that first half.
"Lying in the bed that had once held two, Lisey thought alone never felt more lonely than when you woke up and discovered you still had the house to yourself."
"Lying in the bed that had once held two, Lisey thought alone never felt more lonely than when you woke up and discovered you still had the house to yourself."
Two years after her National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning husband Scott Landon has died, Lisey Landon is still grieving. She hasn't even begun to sort through his study, with his unpublished short stories, letters, journals, and perhaps even a fully-fleshed novel. Pressure from the zealous Professor Woodbody, instructor of the course "Scott Landon and the American Myth," to release Scott's posthumous papers to his university's library, only reinforces her decision to delay the longhaul clean-up. There's also her sisters to deal with, namely Amanda. Amanda the fragile, Amanda the cutter: "Because the Amandas of the world…. You kept expecting them to fall down and thinking it was a miracle they didn't, and finally the miracle got tired of happening and fell over and took a seizure and died." Amanda does cut and she does bleed and she is admitted. That's where the troubles begin.
Or do they begin there? Were the troubles there all along, with Lisey's twenty-five year marriage to the wildly talented, wildly manic Scott Landon, with his childhood secrets of paternal punches, fatherly whippings, daddy bloodlettings? (So many times during the reading of Lisey's Story, another great New England novel of male violence begetting male violence came to mind, Russell Banks' emotionally and physically gruesome Affliction). "Each marriage has two hearts, one light and one dark. This is the dark heart of theirs, the one mad true secret." The joy in King's novel, the joy in reading a natural storyteller knowing more than the audience, is our piecemeal discovery of that dark, mad secret.
