DARK ART - From the New York Times Sunday book reviews:When Stephen King accepted the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2003, he drew attention to the cultural divide “between the so-called popular fiction and the so-called literary fiction.” The award of the medal “to a guy like me” inspired the hope that “in the future things don’t have to be the way they’ve always been. Bridges can be built.”
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elated'Duma Key,' by Stephen King: Darkness in the Land of Steady Sunshine (January 21, 2008)
Times Topics: Stephen King
If Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley count as authors of so-called literary fiction, then King has been engaged in building bridges since that evening. The plot of “Duma Key,” ghastly in itself but certain to bring horrified pleasure to King’s enormous readership, could have been sketched on the reverse side of Wilde’s “Picture of Dorian Gray,” a grisly examination of the magic of art. Sinister sounds, possibly vampiric, are audible beneath the foundations of the house around which the story is set, while the narrator blunders into generating malevolent forces beyond his control.
Edgar Freemantle is a former construction boss who has moved to Florida after losing his right arm in an on-site accident. He takes a psychologist’s advice and does “a geographical,” relocating to a solitary strip amid the “charm-bracelet of keys lying off the west coast of Florida,” where he begins to paint. There he settles into a house he refers to as Big Pink, establishes a friendship with his neighbors and beholds a natural splendor that cannot fail to inspire a recuperating patient with a new hobby. To Edgar’s surprise, everyone is knocked out by the pictures he produces. The local art critic pronounces him “a true American primitive.” The gallery owner assures him that it’s a compliment.
As in much of his recent work, including “Dreamcatcher” and “From a Buick 8,” King draws in elements of the road accident he suffered in Maine in 1999, when an inattentive truck driver shattered his hip, ribs, spine and much else besides (in both his own and Freemantle’s story, a Dodge truck was involved). The first section of “Duma Key” concerns Edgar’s frustrating pain and memory loss, his dealings with therapists, the storm that comes over his domestic life. When he becomes violent, his wife seeks a divorce, leaving only an anger-management doll for company. Even she is apt to get it in her “stupid yielding body” when Edgar is stricken by a memory blackout. A steady scatological flow runs through “Duma Key”; even in better moments Edgar is given to remarks like “you can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think.”
The psychic theme kicks in early, with the artist’s realization that he has put a photographic likeness of his daughter’s fiancé into a painting, without ever having seen him. Later, conscious of his aesthetic powers, he uses them to heal his friend and neighbor on the Key, Wireman, another man with a damaged past. Wireman looks after the elderly Elizabeth Eastlake, the owner of Big Pink. Only she knows the truth behind the mysterious murmurings from below and the ghostly apparitions on the horizon.
As in much of his recent work, including “Dreamcatcher” and “From a Buick 8,” King draws in elements of the road accident he suffered in Maine in 1999, when an inattentive truck driver shattered his hip, ribs, spine and much else besides (in both his own and Freemantle’s story, a Dodge truck was involved). The first section of “Duma Key” concerns Edgar’s frustrating pain and memory loss, his dealings with therapists, the storm that comes over his domestic life. When he becomes violent, his wife seeks a divorce, leaving only an anger-management doll for company. Even she is apt to get it in her “stupid yielding body” when Edgar is stricken by a memory blackout. A steady scatological flow runs through “Duma Key”; even in better moments Edgar is given to remarks like “you can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think.”
The psychic theme kicks in early, with the artist’s realization that he has put a photographic likeness of his daughter’s fiancé into a painting, without ever having seen him. Later, conscious of his aesthetic powers, he uses them to heal his friend and neighbor on the Key, Wireman, another man with a damaged past. Wireman looks after the elderly Elizabeth Eastlake, the owner of Big Pink. Only she knows the truth behind the mysterious murmurings from below and the ghostly apparitions on the horizon.
Readers who will happily suspend disbelief when entering the supernatural realm might find it harder to do the same when faced with the reception of Edgar’s paintings, once he is persuaded to exhibit at the Scoto Gallery. He is definitely a “so-called popular” painter: even passers-by are deeply affected. For those who can afford it, “Step 1 is you tell me how much you want for that one. ... Step 2 is I write the check.” For others, like the faithful gofer and driver Jack, the response is simpler: “Dude, these are awesome!” The difficulty of evoking the wonder of graphic art that cannot be viewed has confounded many writers before King. Fending off the acclaim that greets him, Edgar dismisses his paintings as “reheated Dalí,” but it’s hard to square that comparison with the descriptions of four recent works, “the ones I’d come to think of as my sunset-composites. To one I’d added a nautilus shell, to one a compact disc with the word Memorex printed across it (and the sun shining redly through the hole), to the third a dead seagull I’d found on the beach, only blown up to pterodactyl size. The last was of the shell-bed beneath Big Pink, done from a digital photograph.”
The plotting of “Duma Key” is labyrinthine, if overextended, with psychically connected deaths and the appearance of zombies in the living room, but the characterization is flimsy. Edgar does not present himself as likable, and Wireman is as annoying as anyone else who dots his conversation with Spanish phrases and catchy lines from rock ’n’ roll songs, and who refers to himself in the third person. A great amount of emotional energy on his part, and eventually on that of Edgar and Jack, goes into the care of Elizabeth Eastlake, but the charm of this “Personage” for the reader remains obscure. After she dies at the beginning of Edgar’s fateful exhibition, leaving Wireman $80 million in assets, the latter makes a proposal: “Then what do you say? Let us marry our fortunes together.” Edgar cleverly wriggles out of it by replying: “Simon and Garfunkel, 1969. ... I can’t decide now.”
In his Book Foundation acceptance speech, King chided those who “make a point of pride” of choosing not to read John Grisham, Clive Barker or Mary Higgins Clark: “What do you think? You get social or academic brownie points for deliberately staying out of touch with your own culture?” Leaving aside the discourtesy of suggesting that his listeners’ reading habits were directed by snobbery rather than taste, the remark posits a view of a culture based not on the best that is thought and said, but on the highest returns at the cash register. If the term “literary fiction” has any meaning, it surely refers to a writer’s attempt to reflect something of the complexity of our lives in the interaction of characters. Little of the macabre events in Edgar’s story, the initial accident apart, bears any relation to most people’s lived experience. A sizable portion is devoted to unscrambling Miss Eastlake’s cryptic messages, then tracking down and stifling the ghouls to which they point. Candlesticks and silver harpoons are found to be more effective than wooden stakes, and Edgar goes about his business in the vile pit with the commendable attitude that no zombie can expect to kill his daughter and get away with it. “Duma Key” is a buddy Western pitched as a horror story — which is not to hazard a judgment on its literary merit. To adapt Oscar Wilde’s remark in the preface to “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” there is no such thing as popular or literary fiction. “Books are well written or badly written. That is all.”
James Campbell’s books include a biography of James Baldwin and a forthcoming collection of essays, “Syncopations: Beats, New Yorkers, and Writers in the Dark.”
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