Hard Boiled Sentiment

I received Blaze in the mail last week–I belong to the Stephen King library, which means the latest books are mailed automatically. Technically, I guess, it is not a Stephen Kng novel, since it is published under King’s dead pseudonym, Richard Bachman, though the foreword is by King. In this foreword, King describes rediscovering the old “trunk novel” buried in his papers at the University of Maine archives at which point he thinks about finally publishing it. Upon re-reading it, he decides it is horrible so he shelves the idea for a while, then decides to look again. This time, he thinks he can clean it up, so he undertakes a rewrite.

In the foreword Different Seasons, King talks about being typed as a horror writer and the problems that this caused. After Carrie, he thought about publishing a novel written in the tradition of the Naturalists–Dreiser and Norris, for example–and the hard boiled pulp writers–Cain and MacDonald. Instead, he sent Second Coming to his agent, which was published as ‘Salem’s Lot. From that point on, he was a horror writer, whatever that means.

Blaze is the hard-boiled naturalist novel that he set aside, and, the name on the cover notwithstanding, it is really a King novel. Bachman tends to be more brutal, less human, than King, but this book displays a deeply sympathetic picture of a criminal and, though bleak, is ultimately a humane novel. The protagonist is Clayton Blaisdell, Jr., a mountain of a man with the intellect of a mouse. When he was a boy, his alcoholic father tossed him down the stairs a few times, so Blaze–as his friends call him–is left with a huge dent in his forehead and a brain that just won’t work right. After his father is locked up for the horrific abuse, Blaze grows up in the tender loving care of the State of Maine, where he encounters a variety of embryonic criminals. He eventually meets a hustler named George–an obvious reference to Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men–who trains him in the finer points of fraud, theft, and other petty crimes.

The main plot follows Blaze as he attempts to pull of the final major crime, the thing that will set him up for life: the kidnapping of the scion of the wealthiest family in the state. He does this on his own, though the voice of George, who was killed in a fight some months before the main action begins, haunts him, heckles him, and urges him on.

Though he writes “plot-driven” novels (whatever that means), King has always been interested in characters and what makes them tick. Some of my favorite moments in The Stand are when he illustrates the effects of the plague by showing a series of vignettes around the country. In one, a young woman tries to kill a potential attacker but the gun misfires. In another, the father of a large family and the sole survivor, runs and runs until he drops dead of a heart attack. In yet another a young mother accidentally locks herself in a walk-in freezer. Each of these episodes are transitional filler–the literary equivalent of a film montage–used to establish the tone of the post-apocalyptic world. But King fills in tiny details, gives us a glimpse of backstory to make us understand the characters as if they were fully realize and fully real. The young woman who gets locked in the freezer, for example, got pregnant at 16 and is now locked in a joyless, desperate marriage and the death of her husband and baby at first make her happy. The implied death in the freezer seems a fitting, O Henry sort of end to her.

Blaze is the triumph of the backstory. King alternates chapters: first we watch Blaze clumsily prepare to kidnap the baby, then we see his father’s alcoholic rages. Then, more preparations before jumping back to the orphanage. In this way, we see not a blank, moronic monster but a human who came this close to slipping past the demons that pull him to his horrible end. In one flashback, Blaze and some of the other residents of Hetton House (the orphanage) are hired out over the summer to a blueberry farmer. The farmer takes a shine to Blaze, teaches him how to drive, and decides that he would like to keep the big lug on the farm. Mere hours after the farmer makes the offer to Blaze, he drops dead of a heart attack. This is a Dickensian world, a universe imagined by Zola, Norris, and Dreiser, and white-trash, brain-damaged orphans are not allowed to rise.

Although King reworked the novel, there are some clunky parts. The clearly foreshadowed death of the farmer comes far too quickly and thus melodramatically, and a few of the other characters feel like mere plot contrivances. The Bible-quoting FBI agent is too single-dimensional to be at all interesting, and George himself remains a cypher. However, King’s real strengths are on display. He can craft a narrative that keeps the pages turning, and he makes his readers feel for his characters.

This last point is worth considering further. Although the novel is clearly a descendant of McTeague, Sister Carrie, and The Postman Always Rings Twice, sentimental elements contribute a great deal to the novel’s power. The classic sentimental narrative arc–the young person is separated from a loving family–is here, but, instead of redemption, the novel ends with the naturalistic descent into hell. Imagine Susan Warner and Frank Norris collaborating on a novel and you get the idea. Finally, this is perhaps one of the reasons why King’s novels draw such heavy fire from academic critics. He is an author of the nerve-endings, and he always runs for the emotional buttons. The sentimental authors were criticized because their tear-stained narratives were “unhygienic” (as Fred Lewis Pattee characterized Warner’s novel). Intellect is easy to appreciate if you are an academic critic, while emotion is sloppy, messy, and difficult to quantify.