Towers of Glass

As I told you earlier, go read the Harold Bloom article.

A few of you probably know this already, but I'm a bookseller by trade. I work in a bookstore, I sell books. It's what I do when not writing, studying, or doing a picture perfect pirouette when no one's looking, which given cost of living when not a student is a fair amount of time. From a purely financial standpoint, Stephen King is what we'd usually call a "sure seller". He's guaranteed money in my pocket. I mean, aside from his latest, From a Buick 8, which at my store couldn't be given away, week of release usually sees at least fifteen hardcover sales. (We're a relatively small store) I'll not go into the details of how much we really see, -- my percentages are probably proprietary information I shouldn't be sharing with you anyway --, but just think of those as going at forty bucks a pop Canadian. When the book hits the bestseller charts in a week or two, those numbers will increase, and usually by the end of the first month, fifty plus copies have found a new home and I get to keep my job. He's a nice reliable automobile, and when you have something like the fifth book of the Dark Tower coming out in November (pre-order yours today!) as a hardcover -- the first time Dark Tower has done so, aside from the Donald Grant editions, the other books were always trade paperback originals -- for $52 Canadian. This means two things: first, it's going to be a freaking thick tome, and second, I'm going to be able to keep my job for Christmas. I mean, I've already sold a few copies myself and it hasn't been released.

I'm telling you this, partially for the interest of full disclosure, and to give you a reason to slam me for "bias", even though the above doesn't influence my reaction to Bloom.

In addition to being a bookseller, I was an English and Philosophy major. --- er, you can stop laughing now, thanks. -- I've been through academia, so I know many of the hang-ups and hang-ons through critical theory and the learned men and women of letters. I know many people's conceit that the genre is something dirty, something to be shoved away to the side. I know that academia has grudgingly -- abso-fucking-lutely grudgingly -- accepted that there may be some, might be some tiny, inkling of literary merit to Tolkien or Herbert, but it's a mere trifle in comparison to reading Dickens. Or Shakespeare. Or Joyce. Or Byron. Or Keats.

I don't mean to take away from anything that the giants of literature have contributed, nor do I mean to attack Bloom. I respect the man, I respect his ideas, and, personally, were it not for his book Inventing the Human, I may not have had certain insights into the nature of certain Shakespearean plays and garnered as high grades, but tearing down Stephen King is not the way to go. It's been done to death, and I'm sick of it. It's like it has been grandfathered into the accepted memes of academia, that no matter what "Stephen King is shit." To this I say, bullshit.

There is an apparent dumbing down of society. I say apparent with a certain amount of scepticism and uncertainty, since I believe that that "intelligence" is coming about in different forms -- hand-eye coordination and visual acuity have improved by leaps and bounds as are the adaptions to new language (if you don't believe me, try asking a fifteen year old if they know CSS or HTML, and you'll find that at the least half of them do. Imagine if you tried their parents' generation if they could honestly admit to knowing numerous languages, using something like French or Spanish as an analogue. Just because CSS or HTML looks like English on the surface, doesn't mean it is English. Basic semiotics.) -- although you'd get me to partially agree to a dumbing down when it comes to traditional "book smarts". People are reading literature, history, political science, et al. and alarmingly dropping rates. I know, I've seen my bottom line drop year after year. ...but it's not from reading Stephen King.

What Bloom fails to realise, as he goes off on a tangent slamming JK Rowling instead of positing evidence for why King is undeserved, is the amazing body of work, of short stories, that King has amassed. Short stories, which, moreso than many of his novels, show a joy of language, a joy of form, a joy of genre, and a revelation of the human spirit. Ever wonder what it's like to be in a paranoiacs head? Read Paranoid: A Chant and I defy you not to feel it. Ever think about the trepidation of what's around the next corner, the fears of childhood, the scars and marks of abuse, the dangers of alcoholism, King uses all of these with gusto. Just because they're wrapped in a horror or dark fantasy trope doesn't make them any less valid than the ponderings of Salman Rushdie or Jorge Luis Borges -- two authors who I'd say King shares a tradition.

I will admit that King's prose can be flat. His early works can be plodding and redundant, some middle works like The Stand overlong and preachy, and things like Gerald's Game and Dolores Claiborne read like they were written by his wife, but a few weak novels do not outweigh the positive contributions to the medium. Even then, technical aspects be damned, he -- and Rowling too, although I would agree with Bloom's assessment of her, and more damning to her on other fronts -- fills the reader with a sense of wonder. A sense of astonishment. He inspires imagination, certainly moreso than the sordid affairs of Danielle Steel or many of a romance paperback, while subtly working in other themes and ideas that seem to go clear over the head of the esteemed Mr. Bloom due to the fact that he perceives King as a writer of "penny dreadfuls."

Read "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redeption" and tell me that again with a straight face.

I know that Bloom qualifies it with an "I know of", but what really gets me, is that apparently there's only four American authors currently working, who deserve our praise: Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, and Don DeLillo. I'm not going to dispute that any of them deserve anything less than our praise, although they too falter here and there. Personally, I think Roth has become sloppy over time and his latest The Dying Animal makes me think that he's taken the sexual obsession from earlier works and simply become a fully blown dirty old man, but that may just be me identifying the author too much with his "protagonist". Nothing humorous or ironic about the book, I found some "excursions" into indecent interactions between professor and student downright crude. It's a far cry from the wit shown in his twisting of Kafka's Metamorphosis in The Breast or his previous exploration of sexual nature in Portnoy's Complaint.

...but, I ask, what about Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, Lost, and the forthcoming Mirror Mirror? He can turn a phrase like Lewis Carroll and has all the wit and joy of the works he's "embellishing" upon The Wizard of Oz, Cinderella, A Christmas Carol, and Snow White respectively. He's giving us our fairy tales in a different light, from a different perspective, while going through the grey areas of "evil" while he's at it. It's engaging fantasy, literary feints, and social commentary. How can you not praise that? Doesn't Pynchon get praised for the very same thing?

Not to mention the ignorance over Canadian authors as well.