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Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Posted Friday, May 6th, 2011 - 1 Comment »
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Stephen King is Still Alive

Brenda should be happy. The kids are quiet, the road stretches ahead of her like an airport runway, she’s behind the wheel of a brand-new van. The speedometer reads 70. Nonetheless, that grayness has begun to creep over her again. The van isn’t hers, after all. She’ll have to give it back. A foolish expense, really, because what’s at the far end of this trip, up in Mars Hill? She looks at her old friend. Jasmine is looking back at her. The van, now doing almost a hundred miles an hour, begins to drift. Jasmine gives a small nod. Brenda nods back. Then she pushes down harder with her foot, trying to find the van’s carpeted floor.

I’m a little behind the game on this, but hey, maybe you are, too. The above paragraph is the teaser for Stephen King’s short story in the May 2011 Atlantic. It’s called “Herman Wouk is Still Alive,” and you should go read it. It’s good.

After you read the story, you should also go and read this excellent interview with King, also in the Atlantic, where he talks about writing fiction in general, and this story and its origins in particular. Good stuff there for any writer, or any lover of good writing.

King is one of my favorite writers, not even what I’d call a “guilty” pleasure, because I think he tends to be underrated as a writer by literature snobs. A lot of what he writes is very messed up stuff about human nature that a lot of people might like to pretend doesn’t exist, and you get the sense that, more than a lot of writers, he’s exorcising an awful lot of personal fears and demons with his words, but he gets life, especially its shadows, in a way that a lot of writers miss.

His storytelling rarely fails to grab me and hold my attention, and with this piece, as is often the case with his short fiction, he catches me by surprise. The characters are sketched a bit broadly, which is not unusual in short fiction, but it’s the way in which King skillfully interweaves two parallel stories that really nails it. I wasn’t sure quite where he was heading with it at first, but the imagery of the last scene really drives it home.

I don’t want to say more than that before you read it for yourself, but I’d like to hear what you think of it, and in particular whether you agree with the commenters arguing that the characters of Brenda and Jasmine are overly stereotypical and sketchy, or with those arguing that this is King as a master storyteller, using stereotype and abstraction to make a broader societal point.

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One Response to “Stephen King is Still Alive”

  1. Tom says:
    May 6, 2011 at 11:50 am

    … and he lives in Sarasota. Came out for our screening of TRUMBO. If only I’d known, I would have put you in touch…

    http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20110503/ARTICLE/110509829

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon