Stephen King: Doctor Sleep (Book Review)
Perhaps the oddest thing about this book is this: you can read and enjoy it on its own. And yet it's impossible to talk about without referencing another book and a film, so I shan't even try.
As you may or may not be aware, this newest Stephen King novel is a sequel to one of his earliest bestsellers (in fact his first hardcover publication - the earlier novels, like his debut Carrie, having been paperback originals), The Shining, which still is thought as one of King's best novels. Which was then later turned into a movie by Stanley Kubrick, and became one of Kubrick's most famous works. Stephen King never made a secret of loathing the film. (This is worth mentioning because there is in fact no shortage of crappy or mediocre films based on works by Stephen King; the good ones are in the minority, and King himself hasn't been vocal about many of them but is more or less neutral about most. But not about The Shining.) He hated the casting - Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance especially, since, as he put it, one look at Nicholson and you know he's going to go crazy, whereas book!Jack Torrance has a fighting chance not to, but he also thought the way Kubrick directed Shelley Duvall made a caricature ouf of Wendy; and he acknowledged but resented that Kubrick shifted the emphasis to a "domestic tragedy with only very vague supernatural overtones". There is a lot to say about The Shining, the book (and indeed The Shining, the film), and the very many ways you can interpret it; I refer you to two quite different "Rereading Stephen King" articles about The Shining, one in the Guardian, and one one at Tor. Both are written with decades of hindsight, both value the book as one of his best, but they emphasize quite different aspects and come to different conclusions.
The Guardian one does the compare and contrast to Kubrick's film: But the most glaring shift, one that colours the book entirely, is tonal. In the book, King goes to great pains to stress that Jack Torrance is a good man. He was a teacher, and he developed a problem with drink just as his father had. When he accidentally breaks Danny's arm, Jack realises he has to change his ways. He's scared of the past and who he could become. He wants to make amends, and the hotel offers security and time with his family. King wants us to feel empathy for Jack. Everybody screws up, he wants us to say; everybody deserves a second chance.
In the movie, however, Jack Torrance is Jack Nicholson. He's crazy from the start, the man you saw in Easy Rider and One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. He's got that manic grin and unkempt hair, and you don't trust him. He has a swagger and a temper, and there's a constant feeling that Wendy (Shelley Duvall) - so much more timid and subservient in the film than the novel, reduced to little more than a long face and a shrill voice - hasn't left him because she's just too weak. In the novel, she wants her husband back.
The Tor article, by contrast, goes full throat for the autobiographical subtext: Few books cut as close to the bone as The Shining: an alcoholic schoolteacher with a family to support writes his way to financial security, then turns around and writes a book about an alcoholic schoolteacher with a family to support who fails to make good on his talent and tries to murder his family. “I was the guy who had written The Shining without even realizing that I was writing about myself,” he says in On Writing. King has talked before about the rage he felt in his years of struggle, commenting that there were times when he felt real anger towards his children. It all comes pouring out in Jack Torrance, a bad dad who breaks his son’s arm while drunk (a condition King was later to admit he was in most of the time). All those years of guilt, of fearing that he couldn’t support his family, of feeling like they were a millstone around his neck, he finally shakes it off thanks to his success, and then he puts on a fiction suit and dives right back in again. He even gives Torrance his own bad habits, like chewing aspirin when hung over. (...) Jack Torrance is every writer’s nightmare. Just gifted enough to get himself into trouble, he’s sold some stories to big outlets but has never been able to live up to his own promise. Instead, he pisses away his money on booze, gets sober after almost killing a kid while drunk driving, then he loses his temper and punches one of his students, gets fired from his teaching job, and is rescued from poverty by his last remaining friend who gets him a job as the caretaker of The Overlook Hotel out in Colorado. It’s a Bizarro World version of King, who did make good on his promise, but who wasn’t sober, and moved his family out to Colorado at their richest, not their poorest. (...) Jack Torrance is King’s deepest fears given life: an alcoholic hack writer who’s one binge away from destroying his family. But the difference between King and Torrance is clear in Chapter 32, the point at which Jack finally drives past the last mile-marker in the land of the sane. It’s the chapter in which he re-reads the play he’s been working on all season and realizes that he hates his characters, he despises them, he wants to make them suffer. If the reader had any doubts that Jack’s gone insane, King seems to be saying, here’s the clearest indication possible. To King, losing sympathy for his characters is the sign of a rotten imagination. It’s King’s biggest taboo, and one he never violates: no matter how bad his characters get, he always finds a way to like them. Even Jack Torrance.
This act of finding sympathy, even for the devil, might be King’s way of reassuring himself that he’s no Jack Torrance. For all of his own self-destructive impulses, for all the hate he sometimes felt towards his family, for all the povery, and suffering, and doubt, he never stopped loving the characters he wrote about, even the bad ones. And, in The Shining, he wrote about the worst one he could possible imagine: himself.
Now, analyzing a still living writer psychologically feels a bit disturbingly voyeuristic, but in this particular case it's hard not to. And I think both rereaders are correct, actually. Book!Jack embodies the road not taken, all things gone wrong as a writer and a man that could go wrong; at the same time, book!Jack is also not a monster and potentially redeemable. Even at the very last, when he's insane and completetly taken over by The Overlook, and hunting his family down, there is still a core in him that fights against that; the book gives him a moment of grace, when he's tracked his son down, a moment when the old Jack fights back to the surface to stop himself, telling Danny that he loves him and to run. In one of the interviews promoting Doctor Sleep, King names as one of the things that made him write the current book despite being very ware that sequels almost inevitably feel like let downs the question as to what would have happened to Jack Torrance if there had been an AA group around for him to join. (This is not a question you could ask about the Jack in Kubrick's film.) And the need to believe that you're redeemable, even at your lowest, is a key element to what drives Doctor Sleep.
Not that the new novel suddenly offers an alternate ending for Jack (who is dead and remains dead). Indeed while the gist of it deals with Danny (now Dan) Torrance as an adult, the start picks up not too much after The Shining ends as a transition, which is a good thing, because when we're reintroduced to Danny as a grown up, he's at his lowest, so it's good to have a reminder of how he was as a child, and where he's coming from first. The plot of Doctor Sleep, stripped of all complexities in handy newspaper article style: grown up Dan Torrance, having, like many children of alcoholics (indeed Jack was one, too), become a drunk as well, hits rock bottom, joins AA, sobers up and works in a hospice where he's able to help the dying since now that he's sober, his psychic abilities, the "Shining" that provided the earlier novel with its title, are no longer doped. At this point he also comes into contact with Abra, a girl who is also psychic but far more powerful than Dan. Abra is the latest target of the novel's villains, a group called the TrueKnot, essentially psychic vampires who feed of the pain of psychic children (they call it "Steam") which provides them with immortality. You can see where this is going.
Two things that are especially striking about Doctor Sleep: the idea of community as ensuring redemption and ruin both. What saves Dan, as opposed to his father, is that he asks for and receives help. Indeed that's what later saves Abra, too; not just reaching out to Dan but the fact she and Dan in turn are able to draw on her family and his supportive AA friends to team up with. (If Dan is a counterpoint to his father, Abra, you could say, is a counterpoint to another early King character, too; after all his very first novel was about a psychic teenage girl of immense powers, but as opposed to Carrie White, Abra has loving, supportive parents who don't demonize her gifts even though they're understandably concerned about them, and she's not bullied at school.) But on the other end of the scale, the TrueKnot have to count among Stephen King's most remarkably fleshed out villains, and they, too, are a loving and supportive community. Your avarage King villain comes in two basic varieties; there are demonic entities who simply are evil because they're evil (It, the Overlook); the human non-demonic variation of these are hardcore crazy conservative fundamentalists. Or they start out as good and/or ambiguous and are either seduced or broken into villainy by the novel's events (step forward, Jack Torrance, Arnie, Nadine et al). The True Knot folks are actually neither because they start and end as villains; you can't stake the odds more against them than introducing them as predators on children who torture them to death so they themselves can survive in youth and health. (At a later point, one of them makes the observation that "rubes" - i.e. non-True Knot people like you and me - find nothing wrong with boiling lobsters alive before eating them, and lobsters suffer, too, which is a great villain line that makes a good point without in any way acknowledging that this doesn't justify their own actions.) But they're simultanously described as a tightly knit affectionate community who have their own set of relationships, are there for each other and grieve and mourn when one of them dies, something that gets no less screentime than the deaths of their victims do. What the True Knot are, essentially... are a group of addicts whose closeness reinforces their addiction and unwillingness to see anyone else in other terms than whether or not they're useful for the next hit. Which makes them the perfect opponents for Dan(ny) Torrance to fight.
At some point during reading the novel I wondered whether it would work if King had named his central character John Smith and avoided any reference to The Shining, simply giving him another traumatic childhood experience. The answer is: it would, but less well. The awareness of what happened to his father, and what could happen to himself if he doesn't fight it, makes for a more powerful emotional resonance if you as a reader have known about Danny's childhood in ways other than reportingly. At the same time, adult Dan isn't a repetition of Jack, only this time succesfully escaping damnation. For starters, he isn't a writer, or a father, and the one trait he's successfully avoided to repeat is dealing out physical abuse under stress; for another, helping the dying to die peacefully is something Jack never could have done, but what offers Dan, both as a psychic and someone whose first encounters with death were so utterly horrifying, both purpose and day-to-day redemption. (It's also something very much written by an older man and not a young one, since the dying in question are old people. Early in the novel, child!Danny and Dick Hollorann discuss the nature of ghosts (since, you know, the Overlook had presented Danny with a rich and horrifying variety of them), and the question as to whether there is life after death isn't really one to adult Dan since he nows there is; but becoming a monster actually isn't a sine qua non even if you do turn up as a ghost. The nature of choices: late in the novel, Abra and Dan talk about her worries that her joy of taking down her enemies could turn her into them one day; characters and narrative leave you with the impression that they think this does not have to be the case as long as you're aware it's a possibility and actively do something about that.
Weaknesses: King is obviously aware of the potential skeeviness and/or gender cliché of making a teenage girl into the helpless damsel in distress who has to be saved by a couple of mainly male characters, so he's almost painfully concerned to make Abra into an active character who fights her own battles (and simply is aware that she can't fight them alone). Since the leader of the TrueKnot is also a woman, Rose, this means the crucial blows are dealt between two female characters, btw. Unfortunately, all the effort of making Abra into the opposite of a damsel also means she's so self confident she feels a bit less real to me than King's other teenagers, either female or male, and her victory a bit too certain. I wasn't seriously afraid King would kill her off at any point. Then again, Dan's survival is less guaranteed, especially since the TrueKnot's camping ground just happens to be where the Overlook used to stand before burning down, and the suspense as to whether he will find the death he escaped from as a child there is a genuine one.
Also: there is a late point revelation that could be straight out of a Victorian novel re: Abra, and I thought it wasn't necessary, though I'm not against it, either.
Trivia: - Abra, needing an avatar in her head to fight Rose, instinctively makes said avatar look like... Danaerys from ASoIaF/Game of Thrones. This is is the kind of current pop culture reference that King does so well and it makes perfect sense for a thirteen years old girl.
- speaking of pop culture, psychic baby Abra likes the Beatles, not just the usual hits but one of their more obscure ones, Not a A Second Time. I approve.
- I do love the final scene but can't explain exactly why without spoiling the effect; let's just say that the phrases "note of grace" and the way King at his best is able to show humanity in all characters doesn't only apply to monsters but to every day unsympathetic humans as well.
- the times, they are changing; getting her first period is deeply traumatic for Carrie, while Abra can try to bring up the need for a tampoo as a villain-distracting excuse (though it doesn't work)
- the exact way Dan hits rock bottom makes me strongly suspect Stephen King watched Breaking Bad and that the second season episode Peekabo resonanted especially strong with him.
- which is probably why I suddenly envision Jesse Pinkman, trying to earn money the legal way, working in a hospice
- in case I didn't mention it, this is a fast paced book; I read it in one going, which I didn't with the last few King novels I tackled.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/925998.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
As you may or may not be aware, this newest Stephen King novel is a sequel to one of his earliest bestsellers (in fact his first hardcover publication - the earlier novels, like his debut Carrie, having been paperback originals), The Shining, which still is thought as one of King's best novels. Which was then later turned into a movie by Stanley Kubrick, and became one of Kubrick's most famous works. Stephen King never made a secret of loathing the film. (This is worth mentioning because there is in fact no shortage of crappy or mediocre films based on works by Stephen King; the good ones are in the minority, and King himself hasn't been vocal about many of them but is more or less neutral about most. But not about The Shining.) He hated the casting - Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance especially, since, as he put it, one look at Nicholson and you know he's going to go crazy, whereas book!Jack Torrance has a fighting chance not to, but he also thought the way Kubrick directed Shelley Duvall made a caricature ouf of Wendy; and he acknowledged but resented that Kubrick shifted the emphasis to a "domestic tragedy with only very vague supernatural overtones". There is a lot to say about The Shining, the book (and indeed The Shining, the film), and the very many ways you can interpret it; I refer you to two quite different "Rereading Stephen King" articles about The Shining, one in the Guardian, and one one at Tor. Both are written with decades of hindsight, both value the book as one of his best, but they emphasize quite different aspects and come to different conclusions.
The Guardian one does the compare and contrast to Kubrick's film: But the most glaring shift, one that colours the book entirely, is tonal. In the book, King goes to great pains to stress that Jack Torrance is a good man. He was a teacher, and he developed a problem with drink just as his father had. When he accidentally breaks Danny's arm, Jack realises he has to change his ways. He's scared of the past and who he could become. He wants to make amends, and the hotel offers security and time with his family. King wants us to feel empathy for Jack. Everybody screws up, he wants us to say; everybody deserves a second chance.
In the movie, however, Jack Torrance is Jack Nicholson. He's crazy from the start, the man you saw in Easy Rider and One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. He's got that manic grin and unkempt hair, and you don't trust him. He has a swagger and a temper, and there's a constant feeling that Wendy (Shelley Duvall) - so much more timid and subservient in the film than the novel, reduced to little more than a long face and a shrill voice - hasn't left him because she's just too weak. In the novel, she wants her husband back.
The Tor article, by contrast, goes full throat for the autobiographical subtext: Few books cut as close to the bone as The Shining: an alcoholic schoolteacher with a family to support writes his way to financial security, then turns around and writes a book about an alcoholic schoolteacher with a family to support who fails to make good on his talent and tries to murder his family. “I was the guy who had written The Shining without even realizing that I was writing about myself,” he says in On Writing. King has talked before about the rage he felt in his years of struggle, commenting that there were times when he felt real anger towards his children. It all comes pouring out in Jack Torrance, a bad dad who breaks his son’s arm while drunk (a condition King was later to admit he was in most of the time). All those years of guilt, of fearing that he couldn’t support his family, of feeling like they were a millstone around his neck, he finally shakes it off thanks to his success, and then he puts on a fiction suit and dives right back in again. He even gives Torrance his own bad habits, like chewing aspirin when hung over. (...) Jack Torrance is every writer’s nightmare. Just gifted enough to get himself into trouble, he’s sold some stories to big outlets but has never been able to live up to his own promise. Instead, he pisses away his money on booze, gets sober after almost killing a kid while drunk driving, then he loses his temper and punches one of his students, gets fired from his teaching job, and is rescued from poverty by his last remaining friend who gets him a job as the caretaker of The Overlook Hotel out in Colorado. It’s a Bizarro World version of King, who did make good on his promise, but who wasn’t sober, and moved his family out to Colorado at their richest, not their poorest. (...) Jack Torrance is King’s deepest fears given life: an alcoholic hack writer who’s one binge away from destroying his family. But the difference between King and Torrance is clear in Chapter 32, the point at which Jack finally drives past the last mile-marker in the land of the sane. It’s the chapter in which he re-reads the play he’s been working on all season and realizes that he hates his characters, he despises them, he wants to make them suffer. If the reader had any doubts that Jack’s gone insane, King seems to be saying, here’s the clearest indication possible. To King, losing sympathy for his characters is the sign of a rotten imagination. It’s King’s biggest taboo, and one he never violates: no matter how bad his characters get, he always finds a way to like them. Even Jack Torrance.
This act of finding sympathy, even for the devil, might be King’s way of reassuring himself that he’s no Jack Torrance. For all of his own self-destructive impulses, for all the hate he sometimes felt towards his family, for all the povery, and suffering, and doubt, he never stopped loving the characters he wrote about, even the bad ones. And, in The Shining, he wrote about the worst one he could possible imagine: himself.
Now, analyzing a still living writer psychologically feels a bit disturbingly voyeuristic, but in this particular case it's hard not to. And I think both rereaders are correct, actually. Book!Jack embodies the road not taken, all things gone wrong as a writer and a man that could go wrong; at the same time, book!Jack is also not a monster and potentially redeemable. Even at the very last, when he's insane and completetly taken over by The Overlook, and hunting his family down, there is still a core in him that fights against that; the book gives him a moment of grace, when he's tracked his son down, a moment when the old Jack fights back to the surface to stop himself, telling Danny that he loves him and to run. In one of the interviews promoting Doctor Sleep, King names as one of the things that made him write the current book despite being very ware that sequels almost inevitably feel like let downs the question as to what would have happened to Jack Torrance if there had been an AA group around for him to join. (This is not a question you could ask about the Jack in Kubrick's film.) And the need to believe that you're redeemable, even at your lowest, is a key element to what drives Doctor Sleep.
Not that the new novel suddenly offers an alternate ending for Jack (who is dead and remains dead). Indeed while the gist of it deals with Danny (now Dan) Torrance as an adult, the start picks up not too much after The Shining ends as a transition, which is a good thing, because when we're reintroduced to Danny as a grown up, he's at his lowest, so it's good to have a reminder of how he was as a child, and where he's coming from first. The plot of Doctor Sleep, stripped of all complexities in handy newspaper article style: grown up Dan Torrance, having, like many children of alcoholics (indeed Jack was one, too), become a drunk as well, hits rock bottom, joins AA, sobers up and works in a hospice where he's able to help the dying since now that he's sober, his psychic abilities, the "Shining" that provided the earlier novel with its title, are no longer doped. At this point he also comes into contact with Abra, a girl who is also psychic but far more powerful than Dan. Abra is the latest target of the novel's villains, a group called the TrueKnot, essentially psychic vampires who feed of the pain of psychic children (they call it "Steam") which provides them with immortality. You can see where this is going.
Two things that are especially striking about Doctor Sleep: the idea of community as ensuring redemption and ruin both. What saves Dan, as opposed to his father, is that he asks for and receives help. Indeed that's what later saves Abra, too; not just reaching out to Dan but the fact she and Dan in turn are able to draw on her family and his supportive AA friends to team up with. (If Dan is a counterpoint to his father, Abra, you could say, is a counterpoint to another early King character, too; after all his very first novel was about a psychic teenage girl of immense powers, but as opposed to Carrie White, Abra has loving, supportive parents who don't demonize her gifts even though they're understandably concerned about them, and she's not bullied at school.) But on the other end of the scale, the TrueKnot have to count among Stephen King's most remarkably fleshed out villains, and they, too, are a loving and supportive community. Your avarage King villain comes in two basic varieties; there are demonic entities who simply are evil because they're evil (It, the Overlook); the human non-demonic variation of these are hardcore crazy conservative fundamentalists. Or they start out as good and/or ambiguous and are either seduced or broken into villainy by the novel's events (step forward, Jack Torrance, Arnie, Nadine et al). The True Knot folks are actually neither because they start and end as villains; you can't stake the odds more against them than introducing them as predators on children who torture them to death so they themselves can survive in youth and health. (At a later point, one of them makes the observation that "rubes" - i.e. non-True Knot people like you and me - find nothing wrong with boiling lobsters alive before eating them, and lobsters suffer, too, which is a great villain line that makes a good point without in any way acknowledging that this doesn't justify their own actions.) But they're simultanously described as a tightly knit affectionate community who have their own set of relationships, are there for each other and grieve and mourn when one of them dies, something that gets no less screentime than the deaths of their victims do. What the True Knot are, essentially... are a group of addicts whose closeness reinforces their addiction and unwillingness to see anyone else in other terms than whether or not they're useful for the next hit. Which makes them the perfect opponents for Dan(ny) Torrance to fight.
At some point during reading the novel I wondered whether it would work if King had named his central character John Smith and avoided any reference to The Shining, simply giving him another traumatic childhood experience. The answer is: it would, but less well. The awareness of what happened to his father, and what could happen to himself if he doesn't fight it, makes for a more powerful emotional resonance if you as a reader have known about Danny's childhood in ways other than reportingly. At the same time, adult Dan isn't a repetition of Jack, only this time succesfully escaping damnation. For starters, he isn't a writer, or a father, and the one trait he's successfully avoided to repeat is dealing out physical abuse under stress; for another, helping the dying to die peacefully is something Jack never could have done, but what offers Dan, both as a psychic and someone whose first encounters with death were so utterly horrifying, both purpose and day-to-day redemption. (It's also something very much written by an older man and not a young one, since the dying in question are old people. Early in the novel, child!Danny and Dick Hollorann discuss the nature of ghosts (since, you know, the Overlook had presented Danny with a rich and horrifying variety of them), and the question as to whether there is life after death isn't really one to adult Dan since he nows there is; but becoming a monster actually isn't a sine qua non even if you do turn up as a ghost. The nature of choices: late in the novel, Abra and Dan talk about her worries that her joy of taking down her enemies could turn her into them one day; characters and narrative leave you with the impression that they think this does not have to be the case as long as you're aware it's a possibility and actively do something about that.
Weaknesses: King is obviously aware of the potential skeeviness and/or gender cliché of making a teenage girl into the helpless damsel in distress who has to be saved by a couple of mainly male characters, so he's almost painfully concerned to make Abra into an active character who fights her own battles (and simply is aware that she can't fight them alone). Since the leader of the TrueKnot is also a woman, Rose, this means the crucial blows are dealt between two female characters, btw. Unfortunately, all the effort of making Abra into the opposite of a damsel also means she's so self confident she feels a bit less real to me than King's other teenagers, either female or male, and her victory a bit too certain. I wasn't seriously afraid King would kill her off at any point. Then again, Dan's survival is less guaranteed, especially since the TrueKnot's camping ground just happens to be where the Overlook used to stand before burning down, and the suspense as to whether he will find the death he escaped from as a child there is a genuine one.
Also: there is a late point revelation that could be straight out of a Victorian novel re: Abra, and I thought it wasn't necessary, though I'm not against it, either.
Trivia: - Abra, needing an avatar in her head to fight Rose, instinctively makes said avatar look like... Danaerys from ASoIaF/Game of Thrones. This is is the kind of current pop culture reference that King does so well and it makes perfect sense for a thirteen years old girl.
- speaking of pop culture, psychic baby Abra likes the Beatles, not just the usual hits but one of their more obscure ones, Not a A Second Time. I approve.
- I do love the final scene but can't explain exactly why without spoiling the effect; let's just say that the phrases "note of grace" and the way King at his best is able to show humanity in all characters doesn't only apply to monsters but to every day unsympathetic humans as well.
- the times, they are changing; getting her first period is deeply traumatic for Carrie, while Abra can try to bring up the need for a tampoo as a villain-distracting excuse (though it doesn't work)
- the exact way Dan hits rock bottom makes me strongly suspect Stephen King watched Breaking Bad and that the second season episode Peekabo resonanted especially strong with him.
- which is probably why I suddenly envision Jesse Pinkman, trying to earn money the legal way, working in a hospice
- in case I didn't mention it, this is a fast paced book; I read it in one going, which I didn't with the last few King novels I tackled.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/925998.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.