Relay: Staring at Stephen King
The back of the hardcover of “Christine” that my 13-year-old daughter is reading is taken up entirely by a photo from 1982 showing Stephen King sitting on the hood of a vintage Plymouth in the mouth of what looks like a service bay. His spread collar is indeed spread, his sleeves are manfully rolled up, his zip-up leather boots, prominently displayed, are well traveled. Despite the rabbity Down East grin, was the weirdo ever cooler?
Also that year, another writer with a jet-black Dan Rather hair helmet, truncated sideburns, and fashion-backward glasses, Paul Theroux, could be seen kicking back in the Cape Cod beach grass on every square inch of the flip side of “The Mosquito Coast,” which sits half-read on my shelf. The son of a bitch is even smiling for once in his life. And all, as they say, in glorious black and white.
These photos needn’t have been taken by Jill Krementz or Nancy Crampton — any old longhair with a Leica would do. They reveal something about the authors. They’re art.
Instead today we have blurbs. So this is where we are. Publicists make the world go round. Every cover must be marred. But what to do about it? One answer readers of the late, lamented Spy magazine might recall was a feature called “Logrolling in Our Time,” which plainly laid out the credibility-compromising back-scratching appearing regularly on the dust jackets of the nation.
On the other hand, the way Iris Smyles went with the marketing flow and embraced the schlock with her National Blurb Contest was fun. From the publicity material that actually crossed my desk, here’s my favorite, courtesy of Andrea Martin: “There are two kinds of people in this world, those without peanut allergies and those who cannot tolerate peanuts or any food produced or packaged in a facility that processes peanuts. Both will love this book.”
(Favorite, that is, if fuddy-duddy nostalgia isn’t taking over, as I harbor happy memories of struggling to stay awake after Johnny Carson on Friday nights in high school in the ’80s to catch those 90-minute, thematically linked SCTV episodes Martin starred in — the best television comedy ever made.)
But enough of book covers. What about reading what’s between them? I was thrilled to pluck Philip Roth’s “American Pastoral” from the carts of community discards at the back of the East Hampton Library the other day. It’s been like nourishment to a shipwrecked man subsisting on rainwater and tree bark. The story of —
Wait a minute, in one corner on the front of the paperback, above a photo of Eisenhower-era parents and child walking away from the camera, superlatives appear stacked like cordwood: “powerful . . . moving, generous and ambitious . . . fiercely affecting.” They greet me every time I pick it up, thanks to Michiko Kakutani of The Times in a review that in proper context simply could not have been that thuddingly bad.
Time to just give up? Shrug my shoulders and move on? After all, as the saying goes, if advertising didn’t work, people wouldn’t keep paying for it. It can burrow its way into an associative mind. Why, here I think of Roth and his nearly exact contemporary, an equal in productivity, stature, and breadth of red-blooded American subject matter, one recently dead, the other, Roth, having reached a kind of working death, a self-imposed cessation of output, and —
I’m sorry, the blurbs have got the better of me: Hey Michiko! You were wrong about Updike! Always.
Baylis Greene is an associate editor at The Star.