Shelfbound

“As children we made a complete circle in some way I don’t understand even now. I think that, if we agree to go ahead, we’ll have to try to form a smaller circle. I don’t know if that can be done. I believe it might be possible to think we’d done it, only to discover–when it was too late–well … that it was too late.”

Smitty: I’ve never been much of a re-reader when it comes to novels. As a self-professed slow reader, I find I’d rather spend my time delving into a new story and getting to know new characters instead of working my way through a novel a second time. (I’ve never had this issue with TV shows, movies, or comics, so I have to believe that it’s purely the time commitment that keeps me from re-reading books.) So it’s kind of a big deal for me to go back to a book I’ve read before. An even bigger deal when it’s a thousand page doorstop like Stephen King’s It.

Dixon: I’ll cop to being pretty surprised when you told me about this. This is a big change in habit for you.

Smitty: It is a book I’ve always had an inordinate fondness for–as longtime Shelfbound readers will undoubtedly have committed to memory, I picked it as one of my three desert island books. That pick was based on the one and only time I read it, toward the end of high school. Because I’ve been going through some hard times lately, part of trying to get myself back on the right mental track has been making an effort to reconnect with pop culture that is important to my life, that I’ve genuinely enjoyed.

Dixon: It is a book I have read many times, but not in several years. I have a fear that it will lessen through the eyes of Adult Dixon-  that I wouldn’t like it as much and it will sour my previous experiences. You want to reconnect with pop culture that’s important to your life; I’m positing the theory that it will retroactively destroy all joy. I am a terrible friend.

Smitty: Is the act of re-reading, particularly returning to a book after a long time away, of necessity a little disappointing? What makes a book even better the second time around? This is what I need you for, Dixon, as you are a much more experienced re-reader than I am. Thoughts?

Dixon: Buddy. I love re-reading. Love it. I can’t quite explain my habits, though. I can get caught up in how a plot unfolds despite knowing the ending, as with the Harry Potter and Dark Tower series. Other books I love to revisit for the language and style on display, The Rum Diary being the primary example. On the other hand I rarely revisit suspense books.

Smitty: That’s interesting, because my first thought was that suspense-driven books would be the type of book it’d be much easier to go back and re-read. But then thinking about it, it’s almost never plot that brings me back to a particular work. What does that is character, or style, or structure. Is it because so much of the suspense novel’s power lies in its surprise, which is of necessity diminished on a re-read? It seems that if the primary motive of an initial read is the plot, it would be difficult to experience that reading again, since you know all the steps. That doesn’t stop me from, for example, re-reading the same comics over and over, but there are many other aspects to that kind of re-reading, significantly the visual component.

Dixon: You are absolutely correct. Unless there are elements- the prose style, the characterization- that stand side-by-side with the mechanics of the plot I’m not really going to want to reread them. Dennis Lehane does a great job of providing such emotional depth to his characters that I would be amenable to rereading his stuff despite already knowing the ending. On the other hand I love Michael Connelly but I almost never reread any of his stuff (The Poet being the sole exception). Which is not to say that Connelly is bad at those other things. His characterisation of Harry Bosch is lean, mean, and bleak. But I don’t feel that Bosch particularly changes from book to book, which means there’s no point in rereading to revisit his journey. Then there is something like Ball Four which benefits by being both very anecdotal, so I can read bits and pieces randomly, and also hilarious.

Returning to King, The Stand is a novel that I reread about every two years.

Smitty: That’s one I’d like to revisit, another major life favorite that occupies that place in my mind purely through the rose-colored glasses of the one time I read it in–you guessed it–high school. Of course now with my reaction to It I’m a little bit afraid to do so.

Dixon: What was your reaction to It?

Smitty: At first I thought, what better way to reconnect with myself than to re-read a book that has always made me smile.

Yes, a book about a killer demon clown that kills children makes me smile. You know what I mean.

"Oh I know what you mean, young Smitty."

Having spent eight weeks chiseling my way through that rock of a book, I’ve now come to the funny part: I just don’t think it’s all that great anymore.

"What?!?"

Dixon: This breaks my heart.

Smitty: Funny ironic, not funny ha-ha.

Don’t get me wrong, It isn’t bad, or even just mediocre. It’s good with occasional bursts toward greatness. Overall I enjoyed it. I still think there are parts of it that absolutely sing, particularly the opening death of George Denbrough and any scene that takes place in that creepy house on Neiboldt Street.

Dixon: I think a tiny flaw in It is that the Neiboldt Street scenes are so scary that everything else, including the finale in the tunnels, pales in comparison.

Smitty: But what I once thought of as a sort of Book of All Terrors–a thousand page encyclopedia of monsters that somehow contained a fragment of every horror imaginable, including the horror of growing up–I’m now coming to think of as a book that is just too damn long. By like, a third.

Dixon: I thought that the length was one of its assets. Succumbing to an indulgent rambling narrative is a criticism levied at King often, and often with good reason, but for works like The Stand, Under the Dome and It, I’ve traditionally disagreed. If the world building is successful, I always want more time in the world. What would you cut out?

Smitty: As the grown-up Losers go back to the sewers, this time not only to kill It but also rescue Bill’s wife and defeat Bev’s husband, I’m mainly wondering what the deal is with all the distractions. Bill’s wife and Bev’s husband are such tiny parts of the story–after their opening scenes, they don’t appear again until halfway through the book, and then not again til almost the end. Why does the climax of this giant novel involve them so directly?

Dixon: I always took Audra and Tom to represent threads from childhood that grow, distort and reflect during adulthood. The Losers can’t escape from their past even if they can’t remember it.

Smitty: You’re not misremembering that: Audra looks remarkably like Bev, to the point where even Bev thinks so, and Tom is alternately said to be like Bev’s father (by her) and like their childhood tormentor Henry (by Ben, I think?). I don’t really have a problem with the thematic elements of these characters, but their role in the book feels forced to me: Tom kidnaps Audra and brings her to It, and then his head basically explodes and he dies. This all happens “off-camera,” though, so Tom ends up a total cipher.

Dixon: Is it just me or does King revisit the Tom character to far greater effect with Norman Daniels in Rose Madder? That novel explored domestic violence in a more layered way, as opposed to Tom’s henchman role in It.

Smitty: Based on my admittedly slim memory for that book, you’re probably right. Of course, I remember that book being saddled with an overlong denouement. But we’re getting off track here. I think asking the audience to care enough about Audra to devote the last part of the book to saving her is asking too much. We know Bill loves her because, well, King says so, but he also cheats on her just before the end and she is actually a less well-developed character than, say, Eddie’s mom. Saving Audra is important because it’s what happens, not because it has to happen. If the book is, in some ways, about finishing the unfinished business of childhood, how is Bill’s saving of his Bev-wife a reflection of that–he didn’t need to or fail to save Bev in the past. Similarly, if Bev needs to throw off the abusive men of her past, why does Tom die in between scenes, killed by It? These are the doubts I have about these characters.

Dixon: I can see your point about Tom’s fate. I think I still disagree about Audra; there is something there about having to use childhood to save adulthood, about putting the past to bed and embracing the future. Usually the future is unknown and the past is history; in It the past has to be discovered as well.

Smitty: I think the rescue of Audra is a weird way to end the book plot-wise. I think thematically the fact that childhood fades out (quite literally at the end) and adulthood takes back over is good, but the way it’s structured makes it ultimately just Bill’s story, which I think does the other six an injustice. Ben and Bev, for example, just kind of disappear altogether.

Dixon: Fair point, although I think you could make a case that It is Bill’s story.

Smitty: But Jesus Fucking Christ those last ten pages of that book are an absolute monumental achievement of writing. I mean, I remembered it as a good ending, but I’m not sure King’s ever been better than here, with the possible exception of the end of The Green Mile. If this was a short story (and, I guess, you didn’t need all the background of the preceding 1080 pages) it would be a masterpiece. So there is something to be said for coming to the end happily.

Dixon: Yeah the ending is boss. Stephen King’s next book, 11-22-63, is about a dude who goes back in time to prevent JFK’s death. I’m curious to see how he handles the nostalgia aspect in that one; will he also continue his recent return to suspense form a la Under the Dome, which had a strong vein that skewered American foreign policy and small town culture?

Smitty: Sadly, for both JFK and us, we cannot predict what will happen. But as we’re on the topic of nostalgia, how do you think re-reading relates to that feeling? Do you ever re-read with the primary goal simply being to achieve comfort in the familiarity of the story?

Dixon: I do a fair amount of comfort reading, which seems to be what prompted you to re-read It. I think I focus on comics to fulfill this, the seventh of my eight emotional needs. Any Grant Morrison super-hero comic will do; all I need to do is see Superman defeat Darkseid by singing, or Green Lantern envelop an exploding sun with only his willpower, or Batman say “Hh” and I feel better.

Smitty: Comics are definitely my comfort re-read as well. I love to pull out my run of The Invisibles every two or three years and see how it changes. What’s great about that particular work is that even Morrison thinks every reading should be different, and indeed I’ve come away each time noticing different things. I even love reading other peoples’ take on that comic: I’ve devoured Anarchy for the Masses during one reading and will be purchasing Our Sentence Is Up during my next read. I’m really never disappointed by a re-read of any Grant Morrison comic, and I also re-read Watchmen and Sandman pretty regularly. (Boy I’m really a rebel with my choices there.) And Dark Knight Strikes Again, though curiously, not Dark Knight Returns. One I’ve been dying to re-read lately is Akira; I keep talking myself out of investing in the six volumes of that series.

Dixon: Akira is a fantastic candidate for re-reading. Given that thematically it rose out of World War II and the post-war world, it would be interesting to examine it through through the lens of post-tsunami Japan. Alternately you could just ignore the story and stare at the beautiful beautiful art for hours at a time.

Smitty: But TETSUOOOO!!!! There must be an instance of re-reading that has left a sour taste in your mouth, too. Don’t let me be any more depressed about my disillusionment with It than I already am.

Dixon: I can only think of one time that I’ve been really disappointed when revisiting a book and that was with the Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series by Tad Williams. I made it through the first book but flamed out near the beginning of the second. I was disappointed because- and this is I think central to the point- like you with It I had not read these books since high school. In my mind it had grown in importance and quality. I did begin to suspect that it would maybe not hold up as well as I hoped after reading Williams’ Otherland series. Those books are about twenty-eight thousand pages combined, meandering as hell, mostly entertaining and completely infuriating come the last half of the final book. Williams not only didn’t stick the landing, he crashed that fucker into the trees six miles away from the runway. After that disappointment I had a premonition that Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn might have actually sucked and that my high school self was an idiot. Check and check.

Which leads me to think that it’s the books that we wait the longest in between reads on that fare the worst. Books that are re-read more regularly are allowed to grow up with us; our readings of them mature more slowly and gradually, and the perceptions are not so jarringly different if there hasn’t been fifteen years between exposures.

Smitty: I think this is probably exactly right; of course the standard of It grew in my head as years went by without a re-read, so perhaps it’s unfair to think it will mean the same thing to me now. On the other hand, I’ve gotten relatively close to the two settings of the book–the characters are alternately about 11 and  38, and I’ve worked through my two readings a few years to either side of that. Something to think about.

Ultimately what I’ve maybe learned from this experience is that nostalgia isn’t quite good enough of a reason to re-read something. There needs to be something more specific, something to learn from, to make the investment of time worth it. So much of It is about recollecting a forgotten past and using that recalled knowledge to enhance the present. Maybe the real issue is that I hadn’t forgotten It and so couldn’t re-learn it; I’d simply remembered it through the eyes of a child, which are less well-developed. But also purer. And it’s that purity that I’m nostalgic for.

“Disquiet and desire. All the difference between world and want–the difference between being an adult who counted the cost and a child who just got on it and went, for instance. All the world between. Yet not that much difference at all.”