"Duma Key" to King Success? Book Review

Hard to believe that I've been reading Stephen King for twenty-five years, but there it is. I started with "Pet Sematary" and have read 90% of what he's written since. Does that make me a King "expert"? A dubious distinction . . .
Characterization is King's strong suit. Horror or fantasy or straight fiction -- it doesn't matter. His characters stick with you. King's ability to make us identify with his stock every-day-sort-of-guy main character represents his greatest strength as a writer. You'll like Freemantle and Wireman. You could have a beer with them. (You'll recognize Freemantle from Mike Noonan in "Bag of bones." Twins separated at birth, maybe?)

You'll also recognize King's typical build-up. Normal guy in unusual circumstances finds himself confronted with ambiguous monster out to get him (and his family) for unknown reasons. The foreplay is always more exciting that the actual act. Just like in "Dreamcatcher", King has trouble in this book moving from the heavily foreshadowed bogeyman to the real-life campaign to kill it. (Where do his monsters ever come from anyway? Do they ever have a history?) The exposition is quality, like something out of "The Stand" or "Hearts in Atlantis", but the ending melts into cheesiness, like a chapter from "Salem's Lot."

As an English teacher, I have a running row with my colleagues about whether King writes literature or trash. My argument has always been that he writes both. Most people don't realize that he's behind "The Shawshank Redemption" or "Stand by Me", or that his story "The Man in Black" won 1st place a few years back in "The Best American Short Story." (Ok, maybe that was a marketing ploy. But any guy who churns out a book a year, at least, is using the "win sometimes lose sometimes" strategy.) In this book he wins and loses. Great characterization and build up, unsatisfying hackneyed ending.

P.S., Mr. King. Enough with the ad placement. While reading this book, I found my mouth watering for a Pepsi, and I had an unconscious desire to buy a Ram truck. My guess is that you're already rich. Do you need to belittle your work with constant references to consumer items?

Ramblings on Schooliness and Forrest Gump

Ah, so many thoughts came to mind when I read Clay's article over his own high school experience . . . I thought about all the things that I learned from all the stuff associated with those years besides the classes – the track meets, chasing girls, trying to decide which hairstyle was best (something I still haven't figured out), the musicals, the parties, the breakups, the hundreds of fantasy and sci-fi works that I devoured at home (I'm sure that I learned more about life and honor and suffering from Thomas Covenant, Belgarion, and Frodo than all my other experiences put together).

But what did I actually learn from high school? Well, I'm sure that there was something. Actually, I know that there was. The truth is that I always felt pretty smart. There was a click around my sophomore year when I saw that doing well in classes was really pretty easy. I could wedge good grades between my outside reading and all the other stuff that I mentioned before. By the time I reached my junior year, I was getting A's in almost everything. I wrote the game Pente for the computer (in Basic, no less), I balanced equations and computed sin and cosine like I was born to it, I wrote essays and research papers, I conjugated verbs in French, and Voila! I became the model, well-rounded high school student. I guess that I could list the specific skills and content that stuck with me, but what would be the point? Will I be tested over it? Aren't we all just products of the stuff that is thrown at us over the years? Isn't high school just a chaos where everything is stirred together to mix and stew and react and where we hope that there will be that cosmic “click” when students will become, so to speak, “self-aware” about there own educations?

The kernel that I find in all of these arguments about “schooliness” versus self-directed education lies in application and identity. In my mind, a better word for “application” is “gumption.” And by “identity” I mean that moment when a person decides who he is, independent of what society or others want him to be. Yes, Forrest “Gump” is the perfect example. (e.g. “Gump.” I like to tell my literature students that nothing in literature is accidental – “Author's purpose! Author's purpose!”, the IB teacher's mantra . . .) Mr. “Gump” succeeded in life because he defined himself early, albeit in the most simple terms (like Siddhartha's final incarnation staring into the river) and based on that solidity of identity acted, acted I say, without too much thought or hesitation. He applied his knowledge, his identity, to life and became, voila!, great.

I would have liked to have jogged alongside Mr. Gump on his way back and forth across the country (staying busy is, after all, the best way to overcome grief) or danced with him and Elvis (why is dancing so meaningless and powerful at the same time?) or gone shrimping with him and Sgt. Dan (hope and persistence pay off, don't they?)

But while Forrest was acting, I was “learning.” And there's the rub. That's the key component missing from education today and the point at which my ideas converge with Clay's. “Schooliness” undermines application. It serves as a distraction from gumption and identity. The reason that so many of us become self-aware only after high school is that only then are we asked to put those skills, skills, skills to work to actually do something. Maybe that's why those extra-curricular activities are the ones that stick with us . . . We put on a musical, we compete against others in track or basketball, or science projects, we produce a newspaper or yearbook, we climb the social ladder based on what we “do”; in short, our actions become manifest and are hailed or heckled by those around us.

So the real question is how to change those passive classrooms into productive studios where students are asked to do something rather than just learn how to do it. We should focus on helping them make themselves into journalists, or computer-programmers, or marketers, rather than trying to teach them the skills to be future journalists, or future computer-programmers, or future marketers. Forrest Gump never took a running class. I'm pretty sure that Benjamin Franklin never formally studied journalism or physics and that Mohatma Ghandi never sat for a class on political relations.

So did I learn a lot in high school? Definitely. Did I do a lot in high school? Not much. Do I see a need for reflection concerning curriculum and a move away from skills-based, high-stakes testing? Well, stupid is as stupid does.

See Clay Burell's open thread, "On the value of your own high school learning"