Stephen King's Cell

Stephen King's new thriller, Cell, reminds me of how compelling King can be, in a way that leaves me feeling manipulated and used. He shows a deep-rooted "damned mass" view of human nature, even while he displays authorial hate for characters within the story who share a view that's perhaps not as extreme as his. And in an effort to raise his book from a beach read to something Socially Significant, he ends up spouting tin-hat political slogans that will be pathetically out of date after the 2008 elections (by which time, of course, he'll have earned more royalties on this book than I will in my entire life, just in case anyone thinks I don't know the "If you're so smart, how come you're not published" response).

My view of King's writings has swung between disdain at the goriness of it and at his gimmick of taking the friendly and familiar -- a car, a dog, a cat, a rambling lodge in the mountains -- and making something horrifying out of it -- and respect for real talents of storytelling and observation of human nature. His coming of age novel, The Body, surprised and delighted me with its look at the relationships among a group of schoolboys, and the 12-year-old storyteller character gave me a grounding in the adult author's boyish reveling in the "Oh gross!" After running across The Body, I counted myself a fan.

Cell brings me back to my weariness with the Kinginess of King. He goes back to his attacks on the familiar with the cell phone trick -- cell phones are ubiquitous, and a lot of people love them, and a vocal minority hate them, and King with his $80 kajillion in the bank proudly notes on the cover copy that he doesn't own one, thus showing how morally superior he is. (I know. There are people who are unmannerly about their cell phones. They are also frequently unmannerly about radios, loud conversation and chewing gum. Will King go after these menace also? Justin wondering.)

Even though I couldn't put the book down, at the end, I felt that I had -- in a literary sense -- wasted my time and attention. All the same, for a writer, there's much here to learn.

A certain element of the "page-turner" quality is important in a book. If a reader isn't curious about what happens next, he may very well put a bookmark in the page and look at the book six months later, thinking, "Maybe I'll get back to it sometime." At the other extreme, if the book is just a page turner, when I'm done, I feel as if I've just gone through a chocolate frenzy -- disoriented, guilty over the loss of time and nauseated.

But how does King pull off the page-turner quality that he does so well? Sharp detail and a lot of foreshadowing. He keeps revealing what will happen later, in terms that leave the outcome open to speculation but that, when fulfilled, leave the reader thinking, "Of course." King also imagines the situation so vividly that the reader never gets around to thinking, "Now just a gol-darned minute . . . ." For instance, what happens to the cell-phone users is that there's some kind of signal sent by satellite that fries their brains. So the hero uses a landline to call long distance. Well, aren't all long-distance calls sent by satellite? And all these people use their cell phones and get their brains wiped, so there's no alternative source of information? And nobody in the book has heard of the Internet. But he papers over these plotholes with breakneck pacing and one dire circumstance after another.

Dire circumstances bring me back to what I used to hate about King, before I became a fan. It's a weird thing about movies and literature that an author can commit all kinds of mayhem against people and readers nod and turn the page. When the villain kills a dog or a cat, readers write angry letters to the publisher. I don't understand it, but I feel it myself, and King shows a man in a business suit, under the influence of the pulse, bite the ear off a dog. King's POV character says he doesn't know anything about dogs, with an intimation that he doesn't care very much, and I wonder if that's the attitude of the author. Reading it, it comes across as "he doesn't stop at anything." Looking back, it seems more like a cheap trick.

The novel I finished before Cell was Notes from Underground. Dostoyevsky is an author who really doesn't turn back from anything. The speaker tells about a conversation with a prostitute, and the outcome of that conversation is as wrenching in its way -- in the destruction of the innocent -- as cruelty to an animal. The difference is that Dostoyevsky is saying something deep and heart-breaking about the state of a man's soul. With Cell, King is exposing readers to the torture of a dog just for effect.

Or maybe for King, it's slightly more than an effect. His characters later arrive at the conclusion that the cell wiped out people's minds, leaving the murder that lies at the base of the human mind (soul?). Well, I've heard that King was an Evangelical Christian (still don't know whether to believe it), but this would suggest that he's at least a one-point (total depravity) Calvinist. He expresses characters' hatred and author's hatred (by his one-sided, all ugly, bad, and unfashionable description) for a pushy end-times fundy creep -- whose kind apparently demonstrated at abortion clinics in one character's past -- but he never deals with the similarity between said creep, who assumes that the two men have taken the girl for immoral purposes, and the author's apparent view that if you strip away our self-knowledge and socialization, there's nothing left but the savagery of a rabid animal.

I tell myself it's a beach read, and I'm asking too much to expect him to deal with any bedrock issues. But if that's the case, why the political frippery? What does it add to the story to make a snarky comment about Bush's "inadequate plan" in Iraq (whether any given reader favors the war or not)? If I were reading a beach book from 1944, would it add to the effect or take away from it that the writer thinks Roosevelt's plan for the Pacific Theatre was crazy? Or from 1965 and Johnson's plan for Vietnam? Again, it's a pose of relevance that has nothing to do with the story and everything to do with an illusion that something Important is happening here.

If you're a writer, it's worth a read for King's techniques of detail and foreshadowing. If you're a reader, a Batman comic would be a more profound investment of time.

Repeat after me: 'It's only a novel'

Apparently, Stephen King's Cell got to Afghanistan, says the Scotsman:

WORRIED Afghans switched off their mobile phones yesterday as rumours spread that a deadly virus could be contracted by answering calls from "strange numbers".

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What about me?

Enough about hurricanes, Supreme Court, the War on Terror, and UN scandals, how about me?

I thought you were wondering.

A few weeks ago, a friend I don't see often asked if I was writing. I told him I blog everyday if you consider that writing, and I did. But a day or so later, I realized that I hadn't blogged in a few days and didn't know when I would.

It was around the time Katrina hit, and I was rendered speechless. There have been many fine and many stupid things written about New Orleans, the Mississippi Gulf Coast, the Corps of Engineers, the devastation, the corruption, the sadness and the hope. The Walter Inglis Anderson Museum in Ocean Springs, Miss., survived, and the Cafe du Monde in the French Quarter survived. I still don't have anything to add to the fine things, and I'd rather not add to the stupid things, so for a week or so there was silence.

And then, well, sometimes you just get into a riff -- even if it's a riff of silence -- and ride it.

But last weekend I became a novelist again. I went to an Oregon Writers Colony workshop in Rockaway, on the Oregon Coast. The workshop was given by Larry Brooks, who teaches novel-writing from the bones outward, or to use his metaphor, by building the house foundation first, followed by plumbing and electricity, walls, then roof and paint. Seem obvious? When you put it that way it is. But some writers sit down in front of a blank piece of paper and write, "Chapter 1. It was a dark and stormy night. . . . The end."

I've tried it that way, and I testify to you that every time I've wandered into a swamp somewhere in the second act and got lost. To get out of the swamp, you either need a map ore you need to go back and start over enough times that you create a path through it. Stephen King may be able to keep enough of a map in his head to get through the swamp, but I can't.

With Larry's four-corners approach, you start with concept (the "what if . . . ?" of the story), theme (the issue or message of the story), characters, and structure, building up first one and then another as each decision about one corner makes the other corners stronger and taller and clearer. When it's done -- characters thought out, theme expressed, concept intensified through conflict, important plot points laid in and scenes fully planned -- then you write. If you do the structural work with enough care, you won't need multiple drafts, and you don't get lost in the second-act swamp.

He's a great teacher, thorough and encouraging, and he's careful to point out how the techniques work for both action-oriented plots and the quieter character-driven plots. I came home energized and hopeful, with the tools to fix this thing I've been working on longer than I care to say. I will finish it, make an honest effort to sell it, and if I don't, I'll post it on this blog under a creative commons license. If I don't have a sense that somebody out there is at the other end of this effort, then there's no point. But if there are even twenty people, even one person, who read it because they want to and not because they feel obligated to, then that's reason enough.

In the meantime, this blog will not be updated daily anymore. I'll be back. There'll be news items I can't pass up and maybe even writing discoveries to record. But if you wonder what I'm up to, I'm taking fictional characters on long neighborhood walks as I quiz them about why they are the way they are and why they do what they do.

I'll keep you posted about visible progress.

And if you're interested in writing fiction and Larry Brooks gives a workshop in your area, don't miss it.

Fellowship of St. Caedmon

Andrew Stephen Damick tells why I became Orthodox in "Notes towards a Definition of Orthodox Christian English Literature," for the Fellowship of St. Caedmon.

It sounds weird, maybe heretical, even to me, converting on the basis of a literary theory--a literary theory I have never heard so well summarized till now.

Damick captures the literary side of Alexander Schmemann's For the Life of the World, that there's no division between "the spiritual life" and "real life," that divisions along the lines of "spiritual" vs. "material," "sacred" vs. "profane," and "supernatural" vs. "natural" are based on asking the wrong questions.

Damick writes:

Christ’s incarnation made real the possibility of our salvation, and . . . He even took part in a religious and cultural life. Our Lord’s time on this Earth did not solely include prayer and meditation on the truth of God. Rather, it was a time of active engagement in and with culture . . . . It is this incarnational approach to faith that . . . is at the heart of our desire to do literary work as Orthodox Christians. Let us therefore fill every moment with a culture transfigured by the Gospel, whether it be in icons, chant and Holy Mystery or in literature, cooking and child-rearing.

The idea that every human pursuit can be made holy and life-giving is the rebuttal to the internal Taleban, which demands that every action have some measurable impact for the Kingdom. Nobody ever fulfills those demands (probably not even of the physical Taleban, backed up with lashings and beheadings), but its unrealistic requirements lead to self-deception and hypocrisy more often than they lead to a disciplined and productive life.

Schmemann says, "The world is a fallen world because it has fallen away from the awareness that God is all in all. . . . And even the religion of this fallen world cannot heal or redeem it, for it has accepted the reduction of God to an area called 'sacred' . . . -- as opposed to the world as 'profane.'"

It makes sense, then, that in the search for an Orthodox aesthetic, we don't make "Orthodox" literature yet another small ghetto separated from the wide "profane" world:

With all this in mind, I would suggest that we as Orthodox Christian students of literature avoid two things. First, we should avoid the creation of an Orthodox niche for the market to take into its commercial grasp. . . .

We do not have to try to "make" our work Orthodox. It should flow out of and be informed by the mind of the Church, to be sure, but we should not try to make it distinctly Orthodox by making sure that we include enough Easternisms other such things to distinguish it from other Christian art or even from art in general.

Literature will flow out of and be informed by the mind of the Church to the extent that it is true and to the extent that the artist is informed by the mind of the Church--that is in the meaning and mode of the writing. In the meaning, because non-Orthodox, non-Christians, non-believers frequently observer big truths about "life, the universe and everything."

It's why in the ancient world pre-Christian philosophers were sometimes painted in the narthex--or entryway--of the churches, because, in pointing to realities beyond what they had been taught, they led people to the Kingdom.

Last Sunday, a friend and I were talking about portrayals of Christ in the movies: she knew someone who had been led toward faith by The Last Temptation of Christ, and I recalled that Jesus Christ, Superstar had the same effect on me. I wouldn't take a middle-school religion class to see either movie, but sometimes these seeds of Truth travel in surprising carriers.

Faith will inform the mode of the work to the extent that the artist has structured his internal life around the seasons and Liturgy of the Church. Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ is a good example of that, as he structures his action-adventure Passion Play on the Via Dolorosa. But as Damick says, an "Orthodox" structure has to fit the work like a skeleton in a body, or it will be hybrid monster. It may take time for the artist to acquire the inner conversion, and the artist's works may show this structure without the artist's being aware of it.

The second thing for avoidance . . . is ideological theories of literature. . . . The last thing we as Orthodox Christians need is yet another rationalistic theory of literature, and even more dangerous for us is the formation of ideology. . . . Our life in Christ is not a systematized series of rational models and dialectics machined to logical perfection. Down that way lies our enemy of totalitarianism.

Yes, because it eliminates the possibility of either the human or the Holy Spirit's involvement in the artistic process--with all the messiness and surprise those partnerships entail.

Since we're not codifying "Orthodox" literature according to an ideology, Damick says, "Therefore, from Chaucer to Sidney to Shakespeare to Herbert to Coleridge to Keats to Whitman to Eliot to Lewis to Tolkien, let us revel in the beauty and truth which are available throughout all times in English literature."

I would make a parallel list: Chaucer, Mallory, Shakespeare, Fielding, Austen, Shelley (Mary), Mark Twain, Faulkner, Vikram Seth. We're on parallel lanes of the same highway, because where poetry puts its main emphasis on image at the level of phrase and line, ficton builds image at the level of myth and character interaction. Each has its own superiorities, but the remarkable artists are the ones on both lists.

Another essential element of our incarnational faith is that its working out proceeds from and within community. . . . It is also manifestly the case that language itself assumes a relationship. . . . Language has inherent to it the quality of creating connection and communion between persons.

One of the marks of our individualistic culture is how often people forget this simple truth, especially young writers who have been trained that writing is "self-expression," as if without community there is any "self" to "express." These errors get a natural correction, though, as readers adopt the time-honored response of throwing the book against a wall.

The Church’s sanctification of culture does not proceed from a sensibility of replacement, eradicating previous culture and supplanting it. Rather, the Church saturates a culture, transfiguring it and baptizing all things within it, purifying and sanctifying the whole of it. . . . We are all called to be the priests of God’s creation, taking that which He gives us and offering it back up to God as a sacrifice. He sanctifies it and returns it to us, filled with Himself. Our work as writers and readers is nothing less than this common priestly vocation. We therefore seek to participate in God’s sanctification of the English language, bringing it to Him for His blessing and then with it openly proclaiming the Incarnation to all.

A frequent prayer in the Orthodox Church is one to the Holy Spirit: O Heavenly King, the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth: You are everywhere present, filling all things . . . ." Recognizing that reality can make a grocery list luminous.

The Fellowship of St. Caedmon is a new group, still laying its groundwork. It has 18 members by my count, including some names I've seen on bookshelves and in the blogosphere. When I think about the number of people interested in literary topics even in our small local Orthodox community (Oregon tends to be a fairly literary state), it seems that there's a lot of room for the fellowship to grow, and being on the 'Net, it's already international. The organizers are giving us the opportunity to see what unique perspectives Orthodoxy can bring to the literary pursuits.