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Executive Times |
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2007 Book Reviews |
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Lisey’s
Story by Stephen King |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Grief Stephen King’s
latest novel, Lisey’s
Story, is about the love of a long marriage, the grief that follows the
death of a spouse, and the power that comes from unexpected places. While
there are typical King strange world aspects to this novel, fans of his
classic novels are likely to be disappointed, and readers who have pigeon
holed King as a one trick pony will come away from this book with renewed
respect for the author’s skills. Here’s an excerpt, from the beginning of
part 3 of Section II, “Lisey and the Madam,” pp. 27-30: She keeps thinking about the glass, that smucking broken
glass. When, that is, she’s not thinking of how much she’d like to get out of
this heat. Lisey
stands behind and slightly to Scott’s right with her hands clasped demurely
before her, watching him balance on one foot, the other on the shoulder of the silly little shovel half-buried
in loose earth that has clearly been brought in for the occasion. The day is
maddeningly
hot, maddeningly humid, maddeningly muggy, and the considerable crowd that
has gathered only makes it worse. Unlike the dignitaries, the lookieloos
aren’t dressed in anything approaching their best, and while their jeans and
shorts and pedal-pushers may not exactly make them comfortable in the
wet-blanket air, Lisey envies them just the same as she stands here at the
crowd’s forefront, basting in the suck-oven heat of the Tennessee afternoon.
Just standing pat, dressed up in her hot-weather best, is stressful, worrying
that she’ll soon be sweating dark circles in the light brown linen top she’s
wearing over the blue rayon shell beneath. She’s got on a great bra for hot
weather, and still it’s biting into the undersides of her boobs like nobody’s
business. Happy days, babyluv. Scott,
meanwhile, continues balancing on one foot while his hair, too long in
back—he needs it cut badly, she knows he looks in the mirror and sees a rock
star but she looks at him and sees a smucking hobo out of a Woody Guthrie
song—blows in the occasional puff of hot breeze. He’s being a good sport
while the photographer circles. Damn good
sport. He’s flanked on the left by a guy named Tony Eddington, who’s going to
write up all this happy crappy for some campus outlet or another, and on the
right by their stand-in host, an English Department stalwart named Roger
Dashmiel. Dashmiel is one of those men who seem older than they are not only
because they have lost so much hair and gained so much belly but because they
insist upon drawing an almost stifling gravitas around themselves. Even their
witticisms felt to Lisey like oral readings of insurance policy clauses.
Making matters worse is the fact that Dashmiel doesn’t like her husband.
Lisey has sensed this at once (it’s easy, because most men do like him), and it has given her
something upon which to focus her unease. For she is uneasy, profoundly so. She has tried to tell herself that it’s
no more than the humidity and the gathering clouds in the west presaging
strong afternoon thunderstorms or maybe even tornadoes: a low-barometer kind
of thing. But the barometer wasn’t low in Maine when she got out of bed this
morning at quarter to seven; it had been a beautiful summer morning already,
with the newly risen sun sparkling on a trillion points of dew in the grass
between the house and Scott’s study. Not a cloud in the sky, what old Dandy
Dave Debusher would have called “a real ham-n-egger of a day.” Yet the
instant her feet touched the oak boards of the bedroom floor and her thoughts
turned to the trip to Nashville—leave for the Portland Jetport at eight, fly
out on Delta at nine-forty—her heart dipped with dread and her morning-empty
stomach, usually sweet, foamed with unmotivated fear. She had greeted these
sensations with surprised dismay, because she ordinarily liked to travel, especially with
Scott: the two of them sitting companionably side by side, he with his book
open, she with hers. Sometimes he’d read her a bit of his and sometimes she’d
vice him a little versa. Sometimes she’d feel him and look up and find his
eyes. His solemn regard. As though she were a mystery to him still. Yes, and sometimes there would be turbulence, and she liked that, too.
It was
like the rides at the Topsham Fair when she
and her sisters had been young, the Krazy Kups and the Wild Mouse. Scott
never minded the turbulent interludes, either. She remembered one
particularly mad approach into Denver—strong
winds, thunderheads, little prop-job commuter plane from Death’s Head
Airlines all over the smucking sky—and how she’d seen him actually pogo-ing in his seat like a little kid who
needs to go to the bathroom, this crazy grin on his face. No, the rides that
scared Scott were the
smooth downbound ones he sometimes took in the middle of the night. Once in a
while he talked—lucidly; smiling, even—about the things you could see in the
screen of a dead TV set. Or a shot-glass, if you
held it
tilted just the right way. It scared her badly to
hear him talk like that. Because it was crazy,
and because she sort of knew what he meant, even if she didn’t want to. So it
isn’t low barometer that’s bothering her and it certainly hadn’t been the prospect
of getting on one more airplane. But in the bathroom, reaching for the light
over the sink, something she had done without incident or accident day in and
day out for the entire eight years they’d lived on
Sugar Top Hill—which came to approximately three thousand days, less time spent
on the road—the back of her hand whacked the waterglass with their
toothbrushes in it and sent it tumbling to
the tiles where it
shattered into approximately three thousand stupid pieces. “Shit
fire, save the smuckin matches!” she
cried, frightened and irritated to find herself
so. . . for she did
not believe in omens, not Lisey Landon the writer’s wife, not little Lisey
Debusher from the Sabbatus Road in Lisbon Falls, either. Omens were for the
shanty Irish. Scott, who had just come back into the bedroom with two cups
of coffee
and a plate of buttered toast, stopped dead. “Whadja break, babyluv?” “Nothing that came out of the dog’s ass,” Lisey said savagely, and was
then sort of astonished. That was one of Granny Debusher’s sayings, and
Granny D certainly had believed in
omens, but that old colleen had been on the cooling board when Lisey was
barely four. Was it possible Lisey could even remember her? It seemed so, for
as she stood there, looking down at the shards of toothglass, the actual articulation of that omen came to her,
came in Granny D’s tobacco-broken voice. . . and returns now, as
she stands watching her husband be a good sport in his lightest-weight summer
sportcoat (which he’ll soon be sweating through under the arms nevertheless). —Broken glass in the morning, broken hearts at
night. That was Granny D’s scripture, all right, remembered by at least one
little girl, stored up before the day Granny D pitched over dying in the
chickenyard with a snarl in her throat, an apron filled with Blue Bird feed
tied around her waist, and a sack of Beechnut scrap slid up her sleeve. So. Not the
heat, the trip, or that fellow Dashmiel, who only ended up doing the
meet-and-greet because the head of the English Department is in the hospital
following an emergency gall-bladder removal the day before. It’s a broken. . . smucking.
. . toothglass combined with the saying
of a long-dead Irish granny. And the joke of it is (as Scott will later point
out), that is just enough to put her on edge. Just enough to get her at least
semi-strapped. Sometimes, he
will tell
her not long hence, speaking from a hospital bed (ah, but he could so easily
have been on a cooling board himself, all his wakeful, thoughtful nights
over), speaking in his new whispering, effortful voice, sometimes just enough is just enough. As the saying is. And she
will know exactly what he’s talking about. Lisey and
Scott Landon had a great relationship, and a vocabulary with each other that
outsiders would never understand (like “smucking” at the beginning of this
excerpt.). While Scott’s presence remains strong throughout the novel, this
is, after all, Lisey’s
Story, and in King’s hands, it’s a well-told tale. Steve Hopkins,
February 23, 2007 |
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·
2007 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the March 2007
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Lisey's
Story.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park,
IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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