King the Primitive?

One of the cheeky regular features I most enjoyed in the old Spy magazine (newly celebrated in a handsome retrospective volume) was “Review of Reviewers,” in which professional critics were taken to task for their over-the-top or below-the-belt comments, a turnabout-is-fair-play exercise that inevitably produced humor. Less funny, but certainly valuable, is Clinton Gillespie’s assessment of how critics have responded to Stephen King’s latest novel. At the Story Entertainment site, he writes:

When Stephen King’s new book, “Lisey’s Story,” debuted, literary critics reviewed it as King’s best book in years. The reviewer in the New York Times said it’s his most honest work and other critics hailed the new book [as] almost worthy of literary merit. But the critics weren’t interested in the merits of King’s story and barely mentioned it. Instead, they focused on King’s experimentations and writing style.

In the reviews, critics wrote about Mr. King’s chimerics; unlovely prose; Jungian space; daunting topography of one’s own thoughts; and his Joycean wordplay, idiosyncrasy, voluptuousness and stubborn, obsessive chronology. The reviewer for the New York Times used the first three and a half paragraphs to criticize King’s style before mentioning what the story was about.

And when the book’s content was addressed, the verdict was frequently flavored with a snobbish contempt for genre writing:

[A]mong literary critics, a writer who writes genre fiction is questioned for not writing “actual literature” and therefore writes solely for mass appeal and financial reward, as Ted Anthony hinted in his review for the Associated Press: “Will [King] continue to reign as the master of modern terror who gave the world ‘Salem’s Lot,’ ‘Cujo’ and ‘Pet Sematary’? Or will he morph into something more subtle, a writer able to harness American angst and turn it into actual literature (and, not incidentally, cash)?”

Read Gillespie’s whole article here.