On a Role

In my college Ethics class, we studied existentialism and its influence on ethical thinking.  In particular, we talked about how some existentialists reject the concept of defining life through roles played.  At the time, I thought it was a beautiful way to live, and I've pretty much agreed with it without question ever since.

But the following from John Le Carré's The Constant Gardener gave me pause:

[S]omething was happening to Justin that, to his excitement and alarm, he was unable to control.  He had been drawn completely by accident into a beautiful play, and was captivated by it.  He was in a different element, acting a part, and the part was the one he had often wanted to play in life, but never till now quite brought off.

I've never heard so eloquent a defense (even if it may have been unintentional) for viewing life as a series of roles to be played, each with its own rough script.  Maybe a significant number of our decisions are made because of who we are--the role we're playing at the time--and for no other reason.

Just a thought.

Poor Bialy. What a loser.

Last night, I finished reading Stephen King's 1989 novel, The Dark Half. It's a fascinating book about a writer dealing with his murderous pseudonymous alter ego. Yet that description doesn't really do the novel justice. "Dealing" ought to be "dueling," and "alter ego" might more properly be rendered "ghost of his never-existent twin brother." But that's just confusing. Read it anyway. I wouldn't really call the book scary (at least not like The Dark Thirty, which still gives me chills); I would call it psychological in the most thrilling sense of the word.

You know the difference between classic, good, and crappy books? You finish a crappy book saying "Wha--???", then you put it down and never think about it again. You finish a good book saying "Wha--???" and spend the next few days trying to figure out exactly what happened. (If you're like me, you look for anything on the internet that will tell you what really happened.) Finally, you finish a classic saying "Wha--???" and spend the rest of your life trying to figure out exactly what happened.

We've all read crappy books. I won't embarrass the writers (or risk libel) by naming them. Examples of good books include Scott Turow's Reversible Errors or John Grisham's The King of Torts. The best example of a classic is John Steinbeck's East of Eden. (If you haven't read that, you can hardly say that you know how to read.)

The Dark Half falls squarely into the good book category. Since I took a creative writing class in college, I read books with an eye toward literary innovation and creativity, in addition to the pure enjoyability of a book. The Dark Half is creative and enjoyable, if not innovative (at least not like Carrie). I highly recommend it.

Not Firestarter

I just finished Stephen King's first novel, Carrie. I was so confused because I had conflated Carrie and King's other book, Firestarter. I don't know why I did, but I did. So when Carrie didn't burn the town down with her mind, I was pretty confused.

OK so my confusion is boring. What did I think about the book? I thought it was excellent for a first novel. Authors tend to get known for one aspect or another of their books, and I thought that King was known for being scary. This book wasn't scary. Not even in the "maybe that used to scare people" kind of way. It just wasn't scary. It's about a reject girl with telekinesis who finally gets picked on too much. The moral? Don't pick on the fundamentalist fat girl or else she might blow your whole dadgum town up. There's a freaky-ish scene where she's walking down the street with a knife sticking out of her shoulder, but that's about it.

But let me say that King did beat out my favorite author in one respect. Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods is an incredible novel that alternates between telling the story in the present and presenting the story from the future through evidence, interviews, documentaries, etc. King does the same thing in Carrie, but I'm sad to say, he does it better and more interestingly.

In short, if you're looking for a scary book, look elsewhere. If you're looking for a well-written, interesting book about telekinesis, this may be for you. Or if you like stories set in small towns in Maine, this story is for you.