I know (of) you

It would be easy to casually remark that Stephen King’s 2006 Lisey’s Story is the long version of the old adage, “behind every great man is an even greater woman.”  But the surface telling of a widow obsessively remembering life with her late husband is also a vessel used to explore the lives we live in public, versus those we choose to share only with our dearest confidants.  Anyone voluntarily subscribing to a celebrity Twitter-feed should understand the difference between Knowing someone, and knowing of someone.  Lisey’s unfolding memories underscore this gap, which King refers to as the difference between love and curiosity.

“When you look at me, you see me holistically,” remarks writer Scott Landon to his wife in a memory.  She cares for his person, and his personal well-being.  As a couple surrounded by followers and fanatics, she cares for the person Scott Landon, not the beloved bestselling writer.  As King brings her to life through his first person account, it’s difficult to know when he is simply providing her character’s voice, and when he’s using her to voice his viewpoint on fame and all that accompanies it.  Both voices proclaim that truly Knowing a person comes from intimacy, and the other, a sense of  knowing-of, is depth-less and trivial.

When we know-of someone in the public eye, what really can we say of them?  We know-of those things a publicist crafts while engineering their persona.  We know-of those things which spill out from tabloids, based on secondhand observations of decisions made in private.  We know-of their image, crafted to make us believe they are our dear and trusted allies.  The relationship is one-sided at its best, and unhealthy at its worst.

Truly Knowing a person is being let in behind their daily defenses.  Knowing is having the key to the little door they live behind, to the room where they think, and feel, hurt and heal...and lock when they head outside to face each day in public.  “I was lost, and you found me, I was burning, and you gave me ice,” Scott recalls to Lisey gently in recalled exchange, sitting together in a hospital room after he has been deeply wounded by an obsessed and unbalanced fan.  This is a couple with full access to each other’s hidden places--not only married, but caring and devoted friends.

As with every man and woman who has left their mother and father behind as boys and girls, they bear with one another’s sometimes literally crazy family histories.  The very burdens which can dig in and hurt us as individuals are lighter when shared between two people.  King uses his couple to illustrate the “leaving and cleaving” aspect of married life--leaving behind parents, families, and all other past histories, and cleaving to one another as supportive friends through all endeavors.  

The tightness of Scott and Lisey’s relationship is one I can see in only a handful of marriages around me; two, maybe three.  I’m pretty sure that it’s the product of a unique mindset, and of a unique pairing of people set aside for one another by design.  I don’t believe there is only one person “right” for another, but I have witnessed that there are “perfect” matches, and not just the ones found on the bestseller’s list.  

Under the Dome, Part One

This year, my commute has been mentally shortened by working through a catalogue of Stephen King audiobooks. Halfway through King’s 2009 work ‘Under the Dome,’ I’m struck by the story’s allegorical take on post-911 life in America. The Dome becomes our nation’s border, or a closed ecosystem with limited and depleting resources. A drifting ex-serviceman bears the burden of every xenophobic fear of the outsider our culture can muster. The town reporter and several of the town pre-teens speak as the minority voices of free, critical, and objective thinking. Big Jim Rennie is the smug, self-righteous voice of ultra conservative "Christian" values looking to demonize all others while making an unapologetic power grab and putting political force far in front of individual liberties. King has created his vilest character EVER in Big Jim, and that’s no small feat from a guy who dreamt up a killer clown that lurked in the town sewer.

The tension between ex-serviceman Dale Barbara (aka ‘Barbie’) and Rennie is uncomfortable. As the outsider, Barbara is resigned to accept his low social status in the small town of Chester’s Mill. While the character’s past life includes being a decorated war veteran and intelligence official, he finds himself inside the town border as a short order cook and the target of suspicion, aggression, and scapegoating. Like many immigrants within our borders, his past life and achievements are invisible. At the halfway point of the book, at least, he is the quintessential "suspicious foreigner" who plays a critical servant’s role in the small town, while being despised by both the town leaders and its privileged sons.

Rennie is a monster on par with any King has unleashed. The small town political figurehead is outwardly a born-again Christian, with the dangerous self-assurance that he is always right. A used car salesman and second selectman, Big Jim brings out a voice in our culture which is everywhere in our political and cultural headlines: "I’m right, but you’re stupid and going to Hell." He is most dangerous behind the scenes, passively but aggressively manipulating the town, its officials, and its resources to personal gain.

Most intriguing is King’s attention given to the spiritual condition of his characters in Under the Dome. In King’s 1974 book ‘Carrie,’ title character Carrie White has a terrifying mother whose religious zeal, suspicion of the world, and abusive nature combine to show the dichotomy between a public faith and a private failure. 36 years later, the townspeople of Chester’s Mill who express any public faith carry their own shortcomings. From substance addiction to abusiveness, each Christian character is either struggling or is completely ineffective in a moral sense. Mostly, the town would be better off without them.

With the second half of the story still unknown, it’s difficult to guess where the story will turn. But that’s true in reality, not just in fiction. As we find many in our nation quick to demonize, stereotype, and label people who are different than "we" are, it really is hard to tell where the current tone will lead us as a nation. If it’s anything like a real Stephen King novel, the end could be pretty scary indeed.