Bag of Bones

Bag of Bones
by Stephen King
p. 1998

Michael Noonan is haunted.

As the tragic lead protagonist in Stephen King’s 1998 novel, widower Mike Noonan finds him at the center of several dangerous and emotional plots when he retreats to his summer home in an attempt to move on with his life.

Bag of Bones is only my second King novel, and it leans closer to the genre he is best known for: horror and suspense. Indeed, the sprawling, multi-layered story is in turns mysterious, disturbing, tragic and dark. It wasn’t as long as my first King novel, but then few books are. It does, however, share some themes that may be King trademarks, not the least of which is having a widowed male protagonist who could be a stand-in for King himself. In this case, it is a little more transparent: Mike Noonan is a popular author who finds himself unable to write a single word since the unexpected death of his wife, Johanna, some years earlier.

In an attempt to make sense of the strange nightmares he keeps having, Mike decides to go to the location that keeps recurring in them: his vacation house on Dark Score Lake in small town Maine, nicknamed Sara Laughs for its notorious history with an old blues singer, Sara Tidwell. On his first day back, Mike’s life becomes intertwined with that of a young mother, Mattie Devore, and her 3-year-old daughter, Kyra. Reminded of his own childless marriage and attracted to the alluring Mattie—herself a young, tragic widow—Mike becomes embroiled in an ensuing custody battle for Kyra, led by the girl’s paternal grandfather, a multi-millionaire tycoon who is determined to always get what he wants.

Bag of Bones is a long book but it needs to be; there are plenty of plot threads, each with its own respective history, that are thoroughly explored before all coming together at the climax of the story. This is not a gory horror novel, as the suspense relies mainly on ghostly encounters and nightmarish secrets, but there are some starkly disturbing elements, especially that of the fate of Sara Tidwell and her kin and the ultimate fate of Mattie Devore, the latter of which took me especially by surprise. I did not expect King to kill his female lead so violently (after mercifully letting the main couple live in The Stand), but I guess I should have seen it coming. Mattie and Kyra were just so disgustingly precious that they couldn’t possibly be allowed to endure past novel’s end. I mean, where would the story be in that?

Though there were no female-to-female relationships in Bag of Bones (outside of the mother-daughter relationship), the novel is possessed and led by the actions of many interesting female characters: Mattie and Kyra, who provide the immediate action for the plot; Jo, who—though long deceased—haunts Sara Laughs and guides Mike on his spiritual journey to the truth; Sara Tidwell, whose fate began a curse culminating in the final showdown of the present, and Sara Laughs—the house who is herself like a living, breathing character. Even Max Devore’s spindly, prickly assistant, Rogette Whitmore, is a dynamic if villainous character who brings life to the novel, even if she is, at times, a bit over the top. I only wish that Mattie didn’t present as such a disposable character. Arguably the female lead, she should have presented as a stronger character, but she relied heavily on others to save her, and felt like more of a temptation and a complication for Mike than an individual. I have to admit I was a little grossed out by his fantasizing about this girl half his age, and it gets weirder when you realize that Mattie was really only a means of Mike getting what he always wanted (his own child), before being conveniently disposed of. Perhaps that last part is an oversimplification, perhaps not. The story is about the haunting of Mike Noonan, after all, everyone else is necessarily secondary to the story.

I didn’t enjoy this story as much as The Stand; even though it was somewhat shorter, I feel it dragged on at times, or took too long to get to the action, but these were minor points of contention for me. For the most part, I like slow-boiling plots and character-driven stories, as long as they are presented with a modicum of poetry and poise, and Stephen King is wonderful at demonstrating those. It mostly comes down to my genre preferences: The Stand is a post-apocalyptic story, one of my favorite genres, while Bag of Bones, a horror novel, is a genre I’m less likely to be invested in. The fact is, horror stories, to someone as pragmatic as I typically am, require much more suspension of disbelief. If Bag of Bones had culminated in a psychological and wholly realistic finale as opposed to a mystical one, I might have a different opinion altogether.

Lowboy

Lowboy
by John Wray
p. 2009

I picked this book up on a whim and although I have mixed feelings about it on the whole, I’m extremely glad I did because I think I may have discovered a new writer to look out for in John Wray.

Lowboy is the story of 16-year-old William Heller—a paranoid schizophrenic nicknamed Lowboy—after he escapes from a mental institution where he has been kept since an incident with his girlfriend, Emily, a year previous. Will takes to the New York subway system—the scene of his fateful episode with Emily, who later joins him on his journey as he tries to ‘stop the world from ending.’ Will is a man on a mission; he holds all the answers but none of them make sense to the people in his orbit, not even to his worried and troubled mother, Violet, Will’s sole family member and the one who is closest to understanding his condition.

Lowboy also tells Violet’s story as she alternately collaborates and collides with Ali Lateef, a missing persons investigator determined to track down Will before he does something violent, for Lateef is sure the boy is a powder keg waiting to explode and that Violet is keeping secrets from him. Violet is not so sure of her son’s ill intentions, and insists on tagging along with the detective to ensure her the boy’s safe return home.

There are some twists and turns in this novel. The revelation about Violet was not particularly surprising to me, as there was plenty of evidence in the language that she was hiding something. I also saw the ending coming, but it didn’t make it any easier. I have a hard time figuring out what Wray was trying to accomplish with this ending. It’s so stark and devastating and really tough to crack for someone who doesn’t think like Will Heller. I would have come away from this book wondering ‘what’s the point?’ but one quality keeps me coming back to the positive side:

I am absolutely in love with John Wray’s character descriptions. The novel had a tendency to meander, but Wray’s language repeatedly brings you back to the center, grounds you in the moment. I could so perfectly picture every movement and interaction of Violet and Lateef and Will and Emily and in a book where dialogue was often a riddle, body language is so important. Even his descriptions of the New York subway system—so lovingly vivid—helped give the novel an identity by making the subway a character in itself. For someone like myself who hyperfocuses on characters and dialogue, everything in Lowboy resonated for its realness. I may not understand what Wray’s overall intentions with this novel were, but his writing style is enough to keep me coming back for more. Sadly, he only has three novels to his name, so there is not a whole lot more to come back to, but I anticipate them all the same.

Previously on Extreme Hoarders:

Homer & Langley
by E.L. Doctorow
p. 2009

E.L. Doctorow’s Homer and Langley is a historical fiction novel based on the lives of real-life brothers, Homer and Langley Collyer, Manhattan eccentrics who gained unwanted publicity during the Depression era. Taking considerable liberties with history, Doctorow has created a rich collage of 20^th century Americana, presenting the brothers as ambassadors of culture in a way, rich treasures tucked away in obscurity, observers of history but not necessarily non-participants.

Homer—the younger brother and narrator of the story—and Langley are the only sons of a wealthy couple who pass away in the young mens’ adolescence, leaving them a spacious Fifth Avenue home. Due to a genetic affliction, Homer has lost his eyesight in his teens. Langley, meanwhile, comes home from the first World War in the wake of his parents’ deaths, greatly changed from the boy that left. Homer—blind and deeply self-conscious—and Langley—stricken with insanity from being gassed in the war—begin to slowly but surely shut themselves off from the outside world.

This doesn’t happen all at once. The hermit lifestyle evolves over time as Homer sinks deeper into loneliness and resignation and Langley literally constructs the walls to his own prison as he amasses a veritable junkyard of knick knacks and possessions that he can never seem to get rid of. Over the years they invite dozens of unique personalities into their home; gangsters, prostitutes, flappers, jazz musicians, and—for a brief period in the sixties—a bevy of hippies that float in and out of the brothers’ lives. They experience a wide range of American life—the evolution of pop music, unrequited love, techonological advance, the pain of losing a loved one in the war, organized crime risen from the Great Depression, McCarthyism and fear-mongering, antiwar protest, a battle with the taxman—before they eventually shutter their windows from the world.

Doctorow has done a wonderful job creating vibrant personalities for two notorious hermits that make them seem endearing and genuine; their motivations for retreating from society are well-defined and relatable. I felt moved by their plights at times and frustrated by their inability to connect at others. Their journey which spans many decades yet never moves beyond the confines of their home is very moving and the way Homer narrates his life tale, addressing a mystery woman named Jacqueline, gives the reader hope that—before the end of his life—Homer finally finds the type of love and companionship he has been seeking his whole life.

... Except that’s not what happens at all!

In a cruel twist, it turns out the oft-mentioned but yet unseen Jacqueline is simply a writer that Homer met once and had a nice afternoon with then never saw again. He constructed an imaginary life with her as he did several other women before her, and deluded himself into believing she would come back for him. Instead, Homer and Langley die, separate and alone, entombed and literally suffocated by their amassed possessions.

I waited patiently for things to turn around for the Collyer brothers but it wasn’t until I read the final few pages and put the book down that I realized I wasn’t going to be getting any sort of uplifting ending. I felt cheated; surely their symbolic suffering would come to an end, surely it meant something, but instead I just felt like chucking the book at the wall.

I didn’t think about the book again for some days but then I sat down to write this review and finally looked up the real-life Collyer brothers, of whom I knew nothing... and it turns out Doctorow’s invented history is actually the optimistic version of the story. Go figure.

Doctorow’s story can pass for truth because not too much is actually known about the reclusive brothers. In the fictionalized story, Homer’s blindness and Langley’s insanity become metaphorical walls between them and the world, a complement their literal walls. In reality, Homer (actually the older of the two in real life) became blind in his forties, and Langley moved in to care for him. Their parents didn’t die young, they didn’t host tea dances and jazz music sessions or put up their house like a hostel to young hippies. They didn’t even live to see the sixties and they never let anyone in anyway. Homer and Langley—the real Homer and Langley—died in 1947, the former of starvation and heart disease, the latter of asphyxiation, smothered by his own hoarded objects. Their deaths were probably painful and terrifying and they were alone, but together in the same house.

So at least Doctorow got that part right.

I don’t blame him for trying to make things seem sunnier. In the author’s version of things, Homer and Langley lived exuberant lives that intertwined with many unforgettable characters. It’s nice to think they experienced life from behind those walls. The more likely reality—that the Collyer brothers were hermits of their own design, afraid and resentful of the outside world all the way to their tragic ends—is a much less interesting story. If I had known the details of their true demise, I probably wouldn’t have resented Doctorow’s ending so much, as it mirrored the truth.

Still, when you take as many liberties as Doctorow has, you might as well fabricate a happy ending as well. Maybe Jacqueline did come back for Homer after all... Just maybe...

Ireland Unfree Will Never Be At Peace

Star of the Sea
by Joseph O'Connor
p. 2002

“And yet, could there be silence? What did silence mean? Could you allow yourself to say nothing at all to such things? To remain silent, in fact, was to say something powerful: that it never happened: that these people did not matter. They were not rich. They were not cultivated. They spoke no lines of elegant dialogue; many, in fact, did not speak at all. They died very quietly. They died in the dark. And the materials of fiction – bequests of fortunes, grand tours in Italy, balls at the palace – these people would not even know what those were. They had paid their betters’ accounts with the sweat of their servitude but that was the point where their purpose had ended. Their lives, their courtships, their families, their struggles; even their deaths, their terrible deaths – none of it mattered in even the tiniest way. They deserved no place in printed pages, in finely wrought novels intended for the civilised. They were simply not worth saying anything about.”

Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea became an overnight hit when it was published a little over a decade ago, a sprawling melodrama set against the backdrop of the Irish potato famine of the 1840s. I included the above passage because it is the one that stood out to me most amidst the 400 pages O’Connor has provided for digestion. Though that is probably an inappropriate choice of words for a book primarily preoccupied with the topic of starvation, I think it’s nonetheless a fitting one, since there is an awful lot of material here to break down.

Star of the Sea took me awhile to get into, and—I have to admit—even at the height of its mystery I still couldn’t find myself enthralled or unable to put the book down. Period-driven melodrama isn’t exactly my forte, no matter how finely wrought the language is, and I found there to be a lot of filler in O’Connor’s story, probably to enshroud the mystery at the center of this novel—the murder of one of its central protagonists at the hands of another central character.

The entire history of each main protagonist is covered in extensive flashbacks, but half of the novel takes place in the present, aboard a ‘famine ship’ (the Star of the Sea), a passenger ship sailing for America carrying a great many poor and starving Irish who have given up everything they own for the passage, in the hopes of eking out a living in a new, potentially more promising landscape. The story is told from the point of view of an American author on board the Star, many years after the voyage, so we are allowed the full range of perspective—we know the hardships leading up to the voyage, the suffering aboard the ship, the many who never made it, and the disappointment felt by those who did make it, only to discover their coveted new life may not have been as forgiving as they’d hoped.

No character in Star of the Sea is entirely innocent, nor are they all thoroughly despicable. Even the most ‘villainous’ character has a well-drawn out history that makes you feel somewhat for his plight. My second favorite passage in the book comes from a chapter focused on a murderer and thief:

“The lexicon of crime became his favorite contemplation. The English possessed as many words for stealing as the Irish had for seaweed or guilt. With rigour, with precision, and most of all with poetry, they had categorised the language of thievery into sub-species, like fossilised old deacons baptising butterflies. Every kind of robbery had a verb of its own. Breeds of embezzlement he never knew existed came to him first as beautiful words. Beak-hunting; bit-faking; blagging; bonneting; broading; bug-hunting; buttoning; buzzing; capering; playing the crooked cross; dipping; dragging; fawney-dropping; fine-wiring; flimping; flying the blue pigeon; gammoning; grifting; half-inching; hoisting; doing the kinchen-lay; legging; lifting; lurking; macing; minning; mizzling; mug-hunting; nailing; outsidering; palming; prigging; rollering; screwing; sharping; shuffling; smatter-hauling; sniding; toolering; vamping; yack-snatching and doing the ream flash pull. Stealing in London sounded like dancing and Mulvey danced his way through the town like a duke.”

The book has a preoccupation with the multivocality of words and of silences. Although a murder and the torrid past love affairs and tragic deaths that led up to it seem to guide the novel’s events, it is really the starvation—the pain of hunger and a slow, agonizing death—and the division of classes that possess O’Connor’s novel. The privileged British aristocracy rather expect to find desolation and hunger in third world countries. That it was happening in their own proverbial backyard was unthinkable, and so many of the rich simply turned a blind eye to the Irish famine. This story is an attempt to give a voice to those whom society deems invisible; and this is a universal phenomenon, something every society has experience with at one time or another.

Like many things wholly ‘Irish,’ Star of the Sea is quite heavy and a bit depressing, but never without a touch of wit to break the tension. I’ll wrap up this review by including my favorite quip here: “Lord Kingscourt said he would need a short time to discuss it with his wife. (His Ladyship, it appears, is the wearer of the britches.)"

"Ireland unfree will never be at peace."

I couldn't stop thinking about my study abroad program in Ireland the entire time I was reading Star of the Sea. Probably this was because many of the characters hail from parts of Connemara, including Tully, the city my peers and I lived in for four months, and the descriptions still felt so familiar to me that I could understand the yearning the characters felt upon leaving. I had purchased O'Connor's novel while I lived there, but I held on to it, unread until recently. The above picture is one I took in Derry in 2004.