Finished "The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon"
Mar. 31st, 2009 03:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mokie_shifuThis is, by leaps and bounds, one of King's best, and part of what makes it stand out is that it doesn't read like Stephen King.
Plot, just because: during a hike on the Appalachian Trail, a parental attempted at forced bonding, Trisha steps off the path for a moment to escape the incessant arguing between her mother and brother. City girl that she is, she thinks she can just cut across the woods to catch up, but she quickly loses her way in the wilderness. As she tries to find the path, any path, she clings to her Walkman and her daydreams about her favorite ballplayer, Tom Gordon, and fights her self-destructive fears. Oh, yeah, and there might be something in the woods stalking her.
There is none of King's author-as-protagonist here, nor his nostalgic-author-as-youth-as-protagonist. Our heroine is purely contemporary (well, in 1998), a nine-year-old girl with a moody older brother and recently divorced parents. Trisha acts like a child of divorced parents, trying too hard to play peacemaker and pretend that everything's okay, despite her father's increasing drinking and her brother's constant criticism. It falls perfectly into place with her as a nine-year-old girl, straddling that narrowing line between playing make-believe with her dolls and swooning over boys. In both roles, she is at times both too young and too old for her age. The occasional strand of adult thought slinks through, hinting at the nearness of adolescence, when that strand becomes a tripwire and parents suddenly wonder when their happy-go-lucky mudpie-eating monster became a sarcastic black-clad vegetarian.
The novel isn't really about her impending adolescence, or the divorced family; that's backstory. Though the novel is a coming of age tale (well, that's very King, true), this is no bittersweet trip to see a dead body and grow the fuck up already. This rite of passage is a trial by ordeal, the heroine is forced to dig down deep, not to confront her widdle feelings but to face the very real probability that she will die.
I appreciated how little we saw of the family. Back at the family, a few Kingisms briefly slipped in--near-psychic foreshadowing and sexual reaction as substitute emotion, mainly--and had they been in more of the book, it would have become some big thing about a family that's lost its daughter, rather than a girl lost in the woods, and the latter is the better story.
I hate those two particular Kingisms, incidentally: the disclaimer and the erection.
There are, thankfully, no descriptions of hard nipples or erections masquerading as emotions in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. Had Trisha been Travis, he'd have popped wood over the taste of berries, the sound of a breaking branch, and the sight of hills, and maybe reminisced about his first time jerking off. Had Trisha been an adult, her nipples would have tingled at the first scary bit and she'd have remembered an old lover at some point. The body reacts to emotion in many ways, yes, but slapping a hard-on on a character to show us that they're afraid or excited does not get the job done, and more often it stinks of shock value antics served up in lieu of showing the readers fear or excitement. As a nine-year-old girl, Trisha's heart races, her stomach clenches, her mouth tastes of copper and the light gets too bright, all of that and a dozen more real, palpable physical reactions to fear happen without King ever once telling us about her nipples.
"Let me tell you now that this character dies, and it's tragic. Now back to seventy-three more pages of following him around and knowing that he's going to kick it. Let's pretend it's foreshadowing or a cloud of doom or something!" That's not a cloud of doom, that's cheating to get a sense of foreboding. You don't kill a character before you kill them, because then his death, when it actually happens, will have less impact on the reader. Trisha's fate is in doubt all the way through, and it kept me tearing through pages.
Another Kingism touched on but ultimately averted is the Visible Monster. King occasionally writes straight out of the era of rubber masks and atomic aliens, and describes the monster right down to the zipper the audience shouldn't see. Here he plays with the other side of that, the lurking fear just out of sight, the monster that might just be a turn of the shadows, that might all be in a little girl's head as she tries to sleep out in the dark woods. What really impressed me was that the two times we do see the monster, one time in broad daylight, even then the doubt remains--was it real? Our heroine's senses are no longer trustworthy, and so neither are ours. Even at the end, we wonder, if it was just a bear all along.
Although I didn't like that King seemed to skip the better part of a week in the story with a simple write-off about fevers and Trisha being out of it, I appreciate why he took that route, and why it was necessary to the story. I think, had it been written differently, sounded less dismissive, I'd not have blinked at it. That said, I wonder if it means someone besides King edited this book. It's a short book, incredibly short by King's standards (you could kill a man with a copy of The Stand, and I'm not talking about the hardcover either), and that's a very good thing. Short, tight stories make for better reads than long, masturbatory "I don't need no stinkin' editor!" rambles.
Evidence: this too-long review!
All in all, this novel deserves far, far more attention than it has gotten. Our classic little girl growing up stories revolve so much around fantasy, with Alice dreaming herself lost down a rabbit hole, and Coraline seeking out the world behind the walls on a boring day. Even our more pratical heroines, Tiffany traipsing through Elf-land with her horde of demonic smurfs, and Jane touching the old religion in the form of the powerful, wild and lonely Greenwitch, had an adult at the length of their safety harness, some hand or spirit to intervene if her passage to adulthood took a too-treacherous turn. Trisha drops into little girl lost literature darkly, by herself, with only herself, and the only adult hand or spirits reaching out to her are probably in her own head: gods who may or may not be there, or real, and her fantasy of a baseball player whose only real answer is that she's got to do it herself.
Plot, just because: during a hike on the Appalachian Trail, a parental attempted at forced bonding, Trisha steps off the path for a moment to escape the incessant arguing between her mother and brother. City girl that she is, she thinks she can just cut across the woods to catch up, but she quickly loses her way in the wilderness. As she tries to find the path, any path, she clings to her Walkman and her daydreams about her favorite ballplayer, Tom Gordon, and fights her self-destructive fears. Oh, yeah, and there might be something in the woods stalking her.
There is none of King's author-as-protagonist here, nor his nostalgic-author-as-youth-as-protagonist. Our heroine is purely contemporary (well, in 1998), a nine-year-old girl with a moody older brother and recently divorced parents. Trisha acts like a child of divorced parents, trying too hard to play peacemaker and pretend that everything's okay, despite her father's increasing drinking and her brother's constant criticism. It falls perfectly into place with her as a nine-year-old girl, straddling that narrowing line between playing make-believe with her dolls and swooning over boys. In both roles, she is at times both too young and too old for her age. The occasional strand of adult thought slinks through, hinting at the nearness of adolescence, when that strand becomes a tripwire and parents suddenly wonder when their happy-go-lucky mudpie-eating monster became a sarcastic black-clad vegetarian.
The novel isn't really about her impending adolescence, or the divorced family; that's backstory. Though the novel is a coming of age tale (well, that's very King, true), this is no bittersweet trip to see a dead body and grow the fuck up already. This rite of passage is a trial by ordeal, the heroine is forced to dig down deep, not to confront her widdle feelings but to face the very real probability that she will die.
I appreciated how little we saw of the family. Back at the family, a few Kingisms briefly slipped in--near-psychic foreshadowing and sexual reaction as substitute emotion, mainly--and had they been in more of the book, it would have become some big thing about a family that's lost its daughter, rather than a girl lost in the woods, and the latter is the better story.
I hate those two particular Kingisms, incidentally: the disclaimer and the erection.
There are, thankfully, no descriptions of hard nipples or erections masquerading as emotions in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. Had Trisha been Travis, he'd have popped wood over the taste of berries, the sound of a breaking branch, and the sight of hills, and maybe reminisced about his first time jerking off. Had Trisha been an adult, her nipples would have tingled at the first scary bit and she'd have remembered an old lover at some point. The body reacts to emotion in many ways, yes, but slapping a hard-on on a character to show us that they're afraid or excited does not get the job done, and more often it stinks of shock value antics served up in lieu of showing the readers fear or excitement. As a nine-year-old girl, Trisha's heart races, her stomach clenches, her mouth tastes of copper and the light gets too bright, all of that and a dozen more real, palpable physical reactions to fear happen without King ever once telling us about her nipples.
"Let me tell you now that this character dies, and it's tragic. Now back to seventy-three more pages of following him around and knowing that he's going to kick it. Let's pretend it's foreshadowing or a cloud of doom or something!" That's not a cloud of doom, that's cheating to get a sense of foreboding. You don't kill a character before you kill them, because then his death, when it actually happens, will have less impact on the reader. Trisha's fate is in doubt all the way through, and it kept me tearing through pages.
Another Kingism touched on but ultimately averted is the Visible Monster. King occasionally writes straight out of the era of rubber masks and atomic aliens, and describes the monster right down to the zipper the audience shouldn't see. Here he plays with the other side of that, the lurking fear just out of sight, the monster that might just be a turn of the shadows, that might all be in a little girl's head as she tries to sleep out in the dark woods. What really impressed me was that the two times we do see the monster, one time in broad daylight, even then the doubt remains--was it real? Our heroine's senses are no longer trustworthy, and so neither are ours. Even at the end, we wonder, if it was just a bear all along.
Although I didn't like that King seemed to skip the better part of a week in the story with a simple write-off about fevers and Trisha being out of it, I appreciate why he took that route, and why it was necessary to the story. I think, had it been written differently, sounded less dismissive, I'd not have blinked at it. That said, I wonder if it means someone besides King edited this book. It's a short book, incredibly short by King's standards (you could kill a man with a copy of The Stand, and I'm not talking about the hardcover either), and that's a very good thing. Short, tight stories make for better reads than long, masturbatory "I don't need no stinkin' editor!" rambles.
Evidence: this too-long review!
All in all, this novel deserves far, far more attention than it has gotten. Our classic little girl growing up stories revolve so much around fantasy, with Alice dreaming herself lost down a rabbit hole, and Coraline seeking out the world behind the walls on a boring day. Even our more pratical heroines, Tiffany traipsing through Elf-land with her horde of demonic smurfs, and Jane touching the old religion in the form of the powerful, wild and lonely Greenwitch, had an adult at the length of their safety harness, some hand or spirit to intervene if her passage to adulthood took a too-treacherous turn. Trisha drops into little girl lost literature darkly, by herself, with only herself, and the only adult hand or spirits reaching out to her are probably in her own head: gods who may or may not be there, or real, and her fantasy of a baseball player whose only real answer is that she's got to do it herself.
