Thursday, May 22, 2008
King of the Plot Wheel
If all you ever read of Shakespeare was the plays they teach in high school, you would never have any trouble accepting the assertion that he was an unparalleled genius of the English language.
On the other hand, if you ever took a notion (as I did one summer as a teen) to sit down with one of those thick black Complete Works of Shakespeare collections, you could easily be excused if you were tempted to think that maybe the Bard was just a moderately talented hack who fluked his way into a handful of masterpieces.
Stephen King is no Shakespeare, but he is underrated. His mastery of language and his evocative, sympathetic descriptions of the best aspects of our flawed human nature puts him several notches above some of those other, forgettable novel-writing machines like Grisham or Crichton. Still, literary critics have always sneered long sneers at King, in part because he works in a rather déclassé genre but probably mostly because he is popular. I'm sure, when King's name comes up at hoighty-toighty literary parties, the word "plebian" gets tossed around quite a bit, accompanied no doubt by much snickering laughter.
This is all rather unfair but I think history will sort it all out. There are a few - not many, but a few - of King's works that I think will live on as, shall we say, middle-level classics. I can easily imagine The Stand, for example, sitting alongside Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird in high school English curricula in the not-too-distant future.
And yet, for all that, King is still a hack, just like Shakespeare was.
King himself has talked in interviews about the legends of plot wheels. Reading Duma Key, I really wondered if King used such a device himself. [spoiler warning - although most of the info below is on the cover jacket].
"Main character is a (spin character wheel) construction contractor who (spin event wheel) is in an accident so he moves to (spin location wheel) Florida where he starts to (spin character development wheel) paint and discovers he can (spin plot complication wheel) see the future and he encounters (spin improbable monster wheel) a giant frog. Giant frog? Oh, what the hell. Let's just see where it goes."
A few more character-wheel spins to get the supporting cast and, baboom, ready-made novel, just fill in the blanks.
As I got deeper into the book, I found myself almost unconsciously cataloging all the gimmicks King was reusing. Plot elements from The Dead Zone; concepts from It; imagery from The Shining. Just like that Falstaff / Belch character who keeps popping up in Shakespeare, it seems as though King has a few arrows in his quiver he likes to use over and over again.
Overall, I really wish King would just get out of the horror business. I found that I really enjoyed the underlying story in Duma Key - a previously practical man who uses art to rebuild his life after a terrible accident. I would have been happy to read a story just about that without the psychic powers, giant frogs, mythical monsters, vampires, zombies and all the rest of the gee-gaws he throws into this book.
Maybe he doesn't know how to do it. Maybe King doesn't know how to end a story without throwing in some sort of weird or fantastical element. I hope that's not the case because I think he's capable of more.
posted by Mentok @ 12:46 p.m.,
2 Comments:
-
At 4:15 p.m.,
Grumps said...
-
Sometimes there's only so far you can go as a writer. King has done so much, I think he can be forgiven for producing a few inferior novels in his fading days.
I much prefer Dean Koontz. His writing keeps getting better and better. -
At 7:23 a.m.,
adam said...
-
I think it's interesting reading stories like 'The Body' and 'Rita Hayworth...' because you're generically primed for the supernatural and when it doesn't arrive... that's still the genre contract at work, using our expectations against us. I haven't read much King but when I do I love the whole idea of smalltown life, or detail, that you get - Bradburyesque, maybe?
