NYT reviews Stephen King's new epic
The review is here, and generally positive--although the reviewer does point out a couple of King's sentence-level clunkers, and makes a reasonable argument: considering the sheer mass of the guy's output, you'd think he'd be a better stylist. Here's the quote:
As for the prose, it’s not all smooth sailing. Given King’s extraordinary career-long dominance, we might expect him at this point to be stylistically complete, turning perfect sentences, as breezily at home in his idiom as P. G. Wodehouse. But he isn’t, quite. “Then it came down on her again, like unpleasant presents raining from a poison piñata: the realization that Howie was dead.” (It’s the accidental rhyme of “unpleasant” and “presents” that makes that one such a stinker.) I felt the clutch of sorrow, too, when I read this: “What you’re planning is terribly dangerous — I doubt if you need me to tell you that — but there may be no other way to save an innocent man’s life.”
The reviewer is forgiving, though--pointing out that "King has always produced at pulp speed," and that "writing flat-out keeps him close to his story, close to his source. It seems to magnetize his imagination..." Still, you'd think that a guy who has publicly expressed his frustration with the "snobbery" of the literary world would take the time to prove them wrong: it's not that hard to clean up the prose before going to press.
On edit: it's worth noting that Wodehouse published 72 novels (three posthumously), 19 short story collections, three autobiographical books, and several plays and libretti. So, no slouch himself on the output front.
As for the prose, it’s not all smooth sailing. Given King’s extraordinary career-long dominance, we might expect him at this point to be stylistically complete, turning perfect sentences, as breezily at home in his idiom as P. G. Wodehouse. But he isn’t, quite. “Then it came down on her again, like unpleasant presents raining from a poison piñata: the realization that Howie was dead.” (It’s the accidental rhyme of “unpleasant” and “presents” that makes that one such a stinker.) I felt the clutch of sorrow, too, when I read this: “What you’re planning is terribly dangerous — I doubt if you need me to tell you that — but there may be no other way to save an innocent man’s life.”
The reviewer is forgiving, though--pointing out that "King has always produced at pulp speed," and that "writing flat-out keeps him close to his story, close to his source. It seems to magnetize his imagination..." Still, you'd think that a guy who has publicly expressed his frustration with the "snobbery" of the literary world would take the time to prove them wrong: it's not that hard to clean up the prose before going to press.
On edit: it's worth noting that Wodehouse published 72 novels (three posthumously), 19 short story collections, three autobiographical books, and several plays and libretti. So, no slouch himself on the output front.
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Jon Loomis on
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What's the definition of "survived?"
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Permalink Reply by I. J. Parker on
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Still being published and sold.
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Permalink Reply by JackBludis on
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Jon Loomis asked, "What's the definition of 'survived?'"
If people are still reading a piece of fiction whether for school, pleasure, or both a hundred years from now it has "survived." Dickens and Shakespeare come to mind, although Shakespeare was a playwright.
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Permalink Reply by John McFetridge on
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School and pleasure are two seperate categories, there's isn't much overlap.
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There used to be a lot more pleasure in reading in the academy, but I think the teaching of literary theory and its weird antagonism toward writers and writing has effectively killed it.
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Blame Aristotle, the father of literary theory.
What antagonism?
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I'm thinking more of the contemporary variety, which reduces everything to author bias. Who cares?
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Oh, so is deconstructionism completely over and now we're talking about the author again and not just the "text?"
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There's a lot of textiness, still, but it's all about texts as "sites of struggle." The idea is that at the end of the day all the canonical stuff is racist/sexist propaganda and therefore contemptible and easily dismissed, and the people we should be reading are minor authors who expressed the (current) correct views on gender, race, etc. but mostly couldn't write for shit. So students come away wondering why "good" literature is so totally fucking bloodless and uninteresting, and we wonder why the number of lit majors nationally have been steadily declining for the last fifteen years. Ah, well.
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That sounds like some pretty good material....
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Deconstructionism is something that never made a bit of sense to me. I'm still somewhat stuck on New Criticism, which is certainly narrowly textual criticism, but even in those days there were idiots who insisted on tossing out everything that went before. The antagonism I've seen always extended to the other critics, especially the ones that went before and had to be proven wrong in order to make the current theory acceptable. The fact is that a literary critic should use whatever is likely to produce results for any given work, whether it's textual, historical, biographical, archetypal, or whatever.
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Yeah, it's really funny right up until the moment you shoot yourself. Did I mention I was working on an academic comedy?
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