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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
I suppose you could say, and critics inevitably will, that "From a Buick 8" reflects a post-Sept. 11 Stephen King, not to mention a post-near-death-experience Stephen King. Indeed, the fall of the twin towers, although only mentioned once, forms part of the story's background and context, and the accident that kills Curt Wilcox bears a striking resemblance to the one that almost killed King in 1999. (In the author's note, King insists that he had already completed a first draft of the novel by that time and changed nothing substantive about the story afterward.)
This book is indisputably about fate and coincidence and our sometimes desperate efforts to link the two, and in that sense it feels highly contemporary. Although "From a Buick 8" will surely keep you turning the pages (I read it in one sitting), it isn't the most propulsive of King's novels; its profound skepticism about the nature of storytelling itself runs through the entire book like a flawed thread through a family quilt.
Ned Wilcox wants to hear "a story, one that has a beginning and a middle and an end where everything is explained," much as his father tried to find a formula or equation that could explain the Buick and its apparitions. Sandy wants that too, just as we all do, but he's trying to adjust himself to the reality that all we ever get are links in a chain whose beginning and end we can't see.
Despite this new and not altogether stable level of meta-awareness in King's writing, the shift in his work is, I would say, more a matter of tone and coloration than of anything fundamental. It's not as if previous King books have offered much in the way of cosmological explanations, after all: What's actually wrong with the Overlook Hotel in "The Shining"? Where did the subterranean evil that haunts Derry, Maine, in "It" come from? Why is it such a bad idea to bury your dead kid behind the "Pet Sematary"? Is John Coffey in "The Green Mile" really the Second Coming or just a cosmic fluke?
"From a Buick 8" (whose title, by the way, refers to the 1965 Bob Dylan song "From a Buick 6") is at heart a classic King fable of a dirty municipal secret, dirty because it's tainted by guilt and shame. (I foresee Tom Hanks and Mel Gibson vying for the central role of Sandy; allow me to suggest Nicolas Cage as the obsessive, doomed Curt, Jake Gyllenhaal of "Donnie Darko" as Ned and Steve Buscemi as the local drunk who links much of the tale together.) The men (and lone woman) of Troop D are good cops -- this novel features only one brief appearance by a bigoted, wife-beating villain in the customary King mold and he's a civilian -- but even the best people have done things they aren't proud of. And while most of us don't have a haunted alien car in the backyard, hey, monsters and death and heinous injustice tend to turn up anyway, and there's always somebody or something to blame besides ourselves. As Sandy tells Ned toward the end of the story, "There are Buicks everywhere."
Deft and complicated as "From a Buick 8" is on the philosophical and existential fronts, it isn't quite as successful as a horror story. I shouldn't get too specific about this, but King is, to some degree, trying simultaneously to invade and to subvert the terrain of original New England horror-meister H.P. Lovecraft, the most lurid of his predecessors in the American Gothic tradition.
His effort to situate a portal into a Lovecraftian realm of eldritch, gibbering terrors in the trunk of a fake car sitting in a shed somewhere outside Pittsburgh plays brilliantly as black comedy and as fable. It never, however, feels hair-raisingly real; you won't spend sleepless nights jumping at shadows on account of reading this book, the way you might with King's scarier volumes, from "The Shining" through "Bag of Bones." Still, for any King fans disappointed by the unfocused maundering of "Hearts in Atlantis" and "Dreamcatcher," "From a Buick 8" is almost all good news. Whether this novel's quasi-postmodern current of ambiguity and skepticism signals a new direction in King's work remains to be seen, but the greatest pop writer of them all is back behind the wheel.
