Lit Bits-8/20/2014 Stephen King, Sinclair Lewis

Aleathia says:

Some of you might groan when I mention Stephen King.  Go ahead.....(collective groan)...and do it. Stephen King was very important in my childhood.  He was the gateway drug to reading in earnest.  My grandmother had stacks of his books in her table by her chair in the living room.  There were also lots of Harlequin Romance novels, but I digress.

When I was 10 I was still reading children's abridged classics that someone had bought for me for my birthday.  I blew through those rather quickly as they were under my reading level, so my grandmother handed me Pet Cemetery.  I read it with hunger.  It was thrilling and scary and I felt like I was reading grown up material.  From there I moved through many of his works in rapid succession.  In those early years, The Shining was the crowning jewel.  It changed the way I looked at character transformation and the way I looked at the effects of alcoholism and cabin fever.

Most everyone has seen Stanley Kubrick's film version of Stephen King's book.  I remember being excited to see a moving film adaptation.  I wanted to see the fears of my imagination in motion.  I was wholly disappointed.  It had nothing to do with the main ideas of the book.  The parts that were most poignant were not developed and hell is Shelley Duvall isn't the worst actress on the planet.  Jack Nicholson was great, but he wasn't the Jack from the book.  He was playing his usual wicked warped self pretending to be this character.

For weeks now Michael and I have been in discussion about Stephen King.  He usually bad mouthed him while I held fast that his work was important and moving despite how fast he seems to be able to pump novels out.  Can we bag a writer for having a process and formula that works?  Writing is like a machine.  It needs constant work and constant fine tuning.  If you don't use the machine it breaks down.  King is a man who is persistent and diligent about his craft and this allows him to be very productive.

The argument in the house was more about Kubrick's lack of vision for The Shining compared to King's creation.  I thought I was going to be hanged from the gallows for saying Kubrick's film was shit.  Michael thought I was incredulous.  Don't get me wrong, Kubrick is an amazing director and his ability to capture beauty and angles are hard to beat, but in The Shining he had it all wrong.

Michael broke down this week and picked up The Shining at the library.  He was amazed at the differences and could now understand what I was speaking of in relation to Kubrick.  I had a very large inside smile at this.  Normally, I have little to add to a conversation.  I know a little bit about a lot of things, but have never been one to consume all the information about one particular thing.  I don't have that much attention span. But in this case, I knew what the hell I was talking about.

Since the book was in the house I thought I would read it again.  It has been 30 years since I read it, but it stayed with me.  Reading it again as an adult is much different.  I have life experience behind it.  I've had my own child; I've lost people to death.  I can understand these concepts more readily.  I am less like Danny Torrance in the sense that I understand the bad things I feel.  On the horizon of the end of reading The Shining will be reading Dr. Sleep which is the follow up book.  I wanted to step to the novel with a fresh memory of The Shining.

I'm happy to say that I have created a monster.  Michael has since read Stephen King's Joyland and is now reading the insane epic Under the Dome (over 1000 pages).  What I love most about this conversion is that he understands the beauty of Stephen King.  He creates characters, develops them lovingly, like no other. His characters stay with you.  You love them and hate them.  You find pieces of them inside yourself.  That is the power of a great writer...one who can touch a wide audience in personal ways.

It feels good to read King again.  Life can't be filled with serious literature all the time.  It's good to be a kid again.


John Says:

A few years ago an old friend turned me on to an American author whom I’ve always known about, but never bothered to read.  Sinclair Lewis. 

My gateway drug was Lewis’ 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, which is a satirical look at the rise of fascism in America quick on the tails of a populist uprising.  I say satirical but the book is far more harrowing and dangerous.  I was reading It Can’t Happen Here right in the heat of the post-2010 mid-term election heyday of the Tea Party.  To say that the novel mirrored what was going on in 21^st century America at the time would be a bit of an understatement.  After that I as pretty well hooked on Sinclair Lewis.  In him I found an American voice almost some one-hundred years old, whose subject matter resonated within the times that I was living.  Reading Lewis was almost prophetic.  That, or America has always been fucked up, afraid, xenophobic, illiterate, and prone to overzealous brutality mixed in what that ever-smiling go-getter attitude.

I was a bit disheartened this past week while the wife and I were out used book shopping.  I’ve been reading a library copy of Sinclair Lewis’ Dodsworth in one of those beautiful yet burdensome Library of America editions, but I wanted the novel as a standalone in a cheap paperback edition.  No dice.  There were other Sinclair Lewis novels in the dusty used book shops and street kiosks, but I’d read most.  It was the usual: Babbitt; Main Street.  One of the book vendors cased me scanning the hell out of his selection and in lieu of taking me for a thief he asked me what I was looking for that day.  Dodsworth, I said.  I got a small smile and then a chuckle.  Sure he had a copy of Dodsworth.  He had a nice hardback copy of the book.  Only it was at home.  Sinclair Lewis doesn’t sell, he told me.

I was taken a touch aback.  How could Sinclair Lewis not sell?  Especially here in 2014 America where his themes of overt and blind capitalism and materialism, his insightful skewering views of the modern American worker, the capitalist, the industrialist stood up to the times some ninety years after he wrote them?  Had we no sense of self-reflection?  Too afraid to stare into the eyes of our own hypocracy gazing back at us from decades before?  For here was a voice we needed to be hearing and reading and ingesting right now.  Really?  Was all I said to the book vendor.  My wife and I moved on.  No Dodsworth.  I’d be sticking with that Library of America edition after all.

So for you uninitiated I offer a small biography/bibliography of one of our great semi-lost novelists, Sinclair Lewis:

Lewis was born in Minnesota in 1885.  He studied at Yale and later worked as a newspaper columnist before becoming acclaimed for his novels.  Sinclair Lewis is the author of some twenty-one novels as well as several short stories, plays, poems, and articles.  He is best known for the novels: Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), and Elmer Gantry (1927).  Lewis was the first American writer awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (1930).  He died in Rome, Italy in 1951 due to complications from alcohol.

Check him out if you haven't had the chance.  Re-read him if you can.