King reigns over popular book sales

Bag of Bones

Scribner

HHH

The time has long passed since the pending arrival of Stephen King's latest work would generate genuine excitement in the publishing world. The man is such a cottage industry by now, the monolithic sales of his books so numbingly assured (though no more so than the monolithic bulk of the books themselves) that the publicity for whichever one happens to be hot off the presses operates more or less automatically.

Oddly enough, now that King is no longer the young phenom with a creepy public persona who caused parents to squirm and English teachers to talk to themselves, he is coming up with work that is less formulaic than any he has produced before.

Perhaps King is finding it creatively stimulating not to have to deal with the burden of would-be groupies and the knowledge that his next book's title will be on bumper stickers and T-shirts.

It's also possible that his latest, "Bag of Bones," is made more memorable by the degree to which it is so clearly the author's most personal work.

The narrator and protagonist is best-selling novelist Mike Noonan, a character who is not a publishing supernova of quite the magnitude of Stephen King. Nonetheless, through his detailed accounts of his career, Noonan doesn't identify, but at least aligns himself on negotiable terms with his real-life creator.

In despair and suffering from terminal writer's block as a result of his wife's death four years before, Noonan returns to his summer home in a small Maine town that also seems drawn from particular authorial affinity, even above and beyond the extent to which it parallels much of King's milieu.

From the hoary mainspring of the outwardly circumspect but inwardly rotten small town, King explores a broader palette of tones and moods than for which he might be given credit. The result is a work that is engaging but not lasting, for King is so aggressively referential to other writers that he obscures anything of his own that is really original.

This is a long-standing trait of King, about whom it is not a joke to say that the use of a mere three epigraphs at the beginning of "Bag of Bones" constitutes restraint. In his defense, King does smoothly and effectively synthesize such diverse influences as Robert Frost's Yankee mysticism, Daphne Du Maurier's psychological lyricism,and Kurt Vonnegut's zaniest science fiction, as well as King himself as reflected in Mike Noonan's dormant, then threateningly resurgent, creative endeavors.

In the end, these complaints, as well as King's prodigal-as-ever diction (does the man have a bonus clause in his contract for surpassing 500 pages?) are trumped by the emotional sincerity that distinguishes "Bag of Bones" from anything else in its league. It seems to be a league to which King is restricted, though, even when mining his personal resources so boldly.

- Jeff Druchniak

01-13-99