This Is Not a Review of Stephen King's "Bag of Bones"
Meet my spiritual director, Sister Mary Sue
Creatures, sometime between 2003 and 2011 I wrote a bad short story called, appropriately, “Failure.”
“Failure” was set in a world of people with those double-initial names beloved by Marvel and DC Comics: Scott Summers, Matt Murdock, Peter Parker, Lois Lane. It was coy, in some way I don’t now recall, about whether these people did in fact have *~*powers*~*. In 10 - 20 rambling pages, it told the story of a squalid hookup between an alcoholic, Catholic possible-superhero and… some rando, I remember absolutely nothing about the guy she got with, he was truly a macguffin of self-loathing. “Failure” was just a fractal of insufficiency: plotless, depressive, inchoate, unwilling to state its mysteries clearly enough for them to suggest sublimity; also a blatant Alias ripoff, as some of you will already have noticed. But there is one important word in this paragraph. One thing I was trying to tell myself: alcoholic.
Well, you know, in the immortal words of Elvis Costello, “I talk to myself, but I don’t listen.”
During those years I wrote other stories, some fairly good, most not so good. The other one I should mention in this context came toward the end of that long stretch, and I may even have been working on it when I finally met with a spiritual director and said, “Actually, I’m here because I need to stop drinking.” It was the draft of a novel called The Zombie Guide to Life and it was about a(n alcoholic) horror-film director whose movies, whether they’re about zombies or clones or vampires or the plant-based apocalypse, are all acts of unacknowledged mourning for her first girlfriend—and also, more and more clearly as the novel went on, unacknowledged suicide notes.
Also a bad novel! Even David Foster Wallace struggled to make writing about boredom something other than boring. I did not manage to make fiction about trapped, repetitive, compulsive and depleting actions feel anything other than repetitive and depleting. Melodramatic, etc etc. When I was terrified of the prospect of not drinking (I didn’t know anything about the possibility of sobriety), I thought that I needed to drink in order to write well, but like, I was drinking and not writing well. And then I reached a point where I decided, “Even if quitting means I can never write again the way I want to, I still have to do it,” and I got sober God rescued me, and of course in my first sober year I wrote two books, but that painful little mercy isn’t what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about the bad writing, in which I kept trying to tell myself something.
You know who can write a novel where he’s trying to tell himself something, and absolutely refuse to hear what he’s being told, and the novel is about how that refusal is disastrous, and yet the book is still a masterpiece? Stephen King, that’s who. That’s just The Shining, a paper wasps’ nest under glass where all the wasps are starting to stir.
The Shining, Misery (iirc King has said that Annie Wilkes is, among many other things, a representation of how he felt about his addictions—notice how she makes him write!), maybe Pet Sematary if you’re willing to take grief as a kind of alcohol… Cujo, maybe, the story of a good dog who doesn’t want to hurt his people, but might. The Dark Half, the book King wrote when he was really in the throes of getting sober, lol it’s right there in the name. If you want to see recovery writing by somebody who knows what he’s doing, King can do that for you nowadays too: the vertiginous moment in Doctor Sleep where the recovering alcoholic recognizes himself in both a helpless child and a ravenous vampire, and that (as DFW would say) Identification is part of how the magic works; or Duma Key, whose protagonist gets the humiliations of recovery without the bad fun that usually precedes it. And then there’s Bag of Bones. Not a good novel, but a novel with a real blunt-force image of what I’m talking about here: writing fiction to tell yourself the facts you can’t accept.
Bag of Bones came out in 1998, in the middle of a run of books I’ve avoided. I dropped Gerald’s Game (1992) less than a hundred pages in and have no desire to return, and between that and Duma Key (2008), nothing’s really sounded good—except The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, which was absolutely worth it.
Bag of Bones isn’t. It starts with two intertwining, equally great premises. A writer’s wife dies, and he learns that she was pregnant, after long years of infertility—and she hadn’t told him. And when, in his grief, confusion, and the accompanying writer’s block, Mike Noonan heads to their summer place, a large home on the shores of Dark Score Lake with the Biblically-resonant name of Sara Laughs, he discovers something in the house that won’t let secrets lie still.
Bag is too long, its prose rarely ringing, but for my money there are really three problems: flat characterization, a lack of interest in infertility in spite of its huge symbolic and literal presence in the novel, and a major misunderstanding of what the climax needed to satisfy both narratively and spiritually. Flat characters are usually not a King problem—usually he can give you three lines of a gas-station owner and you immediately have known this man forever. But here everybody does what people like them do. They play baseball because in American small towns, people play baseball. The cute kid is never weird the way real kids are (and she gives King plenty of chances to use the cutesy little made-up words he insists on cramming into every book, I always hate this, you get one “crossmock” for crosswalk but you cannot have the cute kid making cute mistakes in every single line). She has a doll picnic because little girls have doll picnics, don’t they? Even the house is not as well-characterized as it should be: Sara Laughs, despite its amazing name, is a less-distinctive version of the house on Duma Key where the shells talk underneath the floorboards at high tide.
The plot turns out to center on a Black blues band, and this, I think, is where King stretches, where the book’s insufficiencies are most interesting: this is a subtle and harrowing portrayal of small-town racism, more consistent than in IT and a million times more forthright than in 11/22/63. Like no, of course he shouldn’t have indulged his addiction to dialect, I never want that and I specifically don’t want Stephen King’s “blaccent,” but Sara has a depth and fire and strangeness that most of the other characters here don’t attain; and King gives “whiteness calls people together to do crimes and bury the evidence” the truth of nightmares, not something propagandistic or programmatic or even, really, intentional. Which makes the climax—the thing with the lye, if you’ve read it—such a massive and viscerally upsetting betrayal. You know that’s wrong! It’s a conspirator’s action, presented as the action of a hero. The setup here is so grimly intriguing and then the payoff is a total failure of imagination, basic respect for storytelling conventions, willingness to think about American history… it all sucks!
At Sara Laughs, our hero’s writer’s block finally breaks. He’s writing a suspense novel, and this novel also seems flatly-characterized: MARY HIGGINS CLARK STYLE STUFF TK TK TK. It turns out there is a reason for that. The novel draft is Mike Noonan’s way of telling himself something. It’s kind of a funny image, when he figures it out—not a nightmare mystery, but a puzzle, a clue like something from an escape room. But that image of the manuscript, sitting silent on the desk trying to tell you something, growing bigger every day but you still don’t notice… that’s stuck with me. If I wanted to be generous I might even ask, What is the total failure of the climax trying to tell Stephen King?
Last night, I eased my path into sleep by building a carnival haunted house in my mind. I’ve been building it for a couple weeks now; last night I considered the possibilities of the clown, the funhouse, the Suspiria room, a waltzing room full of Anne Rice vampires. I started in on the haunted house or “dark ride” because I no longer seemed able to get into the stories I’d been telling myself to fall asleep since I was a little girl. All my life I’ve had some running narrative, where I’m a reporter or a figure skater or an ex-mobster or whatever, Mary Sue’s adventures. In the last year, these stories have trickled to a stop.
I don’t know if I know why. But one possibility is: a few years ago I noticed that all these stories had begun to involve finding a home. Mary Sue became a resident penitent among Franciscans, or lived with a weird family of skaters, or—and this one came up more and more over time—entered a covenant friendship. At the time, I wasn’t looking for that myself; I’ve never “looked for” it, actually. I did try to hear what I was telling myself: I stopped considering solo living, instead looking for housemates and then living with my family. And I met my partner.
And as our relationship deepens, and we move toward making our covenant… the stories have stopped. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s just the passage of time. Maybe they’ll start up again!
But maybe I finally was able to hear what I’d been telling myself in the dark.
icymi
I was on a podcast, yapping about the cultural and spiritual role of friendship.
Now Playing
Pet Shop Boys, “Home and Dry”
Photo of part of the Sedlec Ossuary by “jeffr_travel,” via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license.