The greatest chapter in an otherwise so-so book. The chapter is devoted to our "hero" Mike Noonan being pelted with rocks by Max Devore and his secretary the elderly Rogette Whitmore. In chapter 17, Mike says that, "Michael Noonan, Max Devore, and Rogette played out their horrible little comedy scene Friday evening." (page 272). This would lead me to believe that King knows this upcoming chapter is funny (I would say hilarious).
Mike takes a walk by the lake and is overtaken with spirits entering his body. His mouth fills with water from the lake (this is used throughout the book to mark when the spirits are entering him) but when he goes to spit it out nothing comes out. His head is filled with multiple spirits all shouting at once.
While he is going through this spell of demon possession, Max Devore comes up behind him and says, "Whore master, where's your whore at?" Max is in some kind of motorized cart and Rogette Whitmore is beside him. In this section, King has left any kind of reality based characterization behind and Max is a mix of Ross Perot and the grandfather on "King of the Hill." He taunts Mike about Mattie and Mike tells him to go to hell. Max tries to run him down with his cart and to avoid this, Mike jumps off the embankment into Dark Score lake.
This is where the chapter really takes off. Max's assistant, who has been described as being about seventy, starts to throw rocks at Mike as he tries to swim away to home. King does a very good job of describing what it's like to have rocks thrown at you while you're swimming. King (like most popular writers) is quite adept at describing action sequences. Mike tries to come up for air, down comes another rock. He looks up to see Rogette standing at the cliff with more rocks and Max egging her on and laughing. It's all very funny and I bet King had a good time writing this chapter.
The fact is, that Mike Noonan is a pretty unlikable protagonist. He does nothing but think about himself and while he appears to have feelings for Mattie all the forty something thinks of when he's with the twenty year-old Mattie is just straight-up sex.
There's a part in an earlier chapter where he's telling Mattie the meaning of the short story, "Bartleby," by Mellville. Noonan says that Bartleby is the first "existentialist protagonist" in American literature. This is because he has no family or community affiliation. Work is his only connection with human society. When he stops working, "he floats away like a balloon." King inserts this little bit of wisdom, and while it's an OK interpretation of Bartelby it doesn't fit Mike Noonan at all. Bartleby refuses to do work, even though he is capable of it. Therefore voluntarily cutting those ties. Mike cannot perform his chosen task and therein lies the difference. No other line of work is even discussed in the novel for him and Mike also serves on a number of volunteer boards and such. Mike's no existentialist hero, just an asshole. Believe me, he takes no joy in anything but his writing and the thought of sex with Mattie. I loved seeing him pelted with rocks for ten pages.
At the end of the chapter he struggles to get to his floating deck in the middle of the lake, out of range from the rocks. He tries to climb the ladder then clearly feels a hand helping him up onto the deck. He knows this is Jo's ghost helping him in a physical way.
Wonderful chapter.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Bag of Bones: Chapters 15 & 16 (pages 238-283)
Chapter 15 is fairly brief, describing Mike's deposition and further talks with Mattie and Mike's lawyer. The deposition and Mike's verbal sparring with Elmer Durgin, Kyra's court appointed guardian (who is in the pocket of Devore), is uninteresting and weak.
Durgin is introduced quickly by Mike as a small fat man, and while Mike "likes most fat people," he labels this one immediately as a "ELFF" or "evil little fat folk." Apparently there are a race of fat people that are to be hated on sight because these particular fat people (under 5 foot 2) hate the whole world because they are fat and especially hate anyone who is not fat. I'm not kidding, that's what King writes on page 239 of this book. Way to go with the stereotyping King and character development.
The main plot point of the deposition is that Durgin bluffed that he was going to play a tape of the phone call the Devore made to Noonan on July 4th where Mike lied about his first encounter with Mattie. In the deposition Mike declares that he doesn't remember the conversation he had with Devore and Durgin has a tape recorder there to start playing what would appear to be the tape but ultimately he does not. Mike later asks his lawyer about this and he comes to the conclusion that Max Devore probably has many other tapes with incriminating evidence on them and he doesn't want to introduce this tape because of the fear that the court would subpoena more tapes that he doesn't want heard.
After the deposition Mattie, Mike and the lawyer, John Storrow all go for a little picnic and talk for a little while about the case. John is convinced that Devore will drop the case.
At the end of the chapter Mike goes back to Sara Laughs and then the first fully sustained moment of supernatural horror appears. As he walks into the house he hears the bell by the Moose head ringing loudly (Bunter's Bell). Mike stops at the doorway and asks, "Who's here?" And a loud sustained shrink issues from the house and then after a minute or two it stops. After that Mike hears the sobbing. When the sobbing stops again he goes to the refrigerator and see that the magnets are rearranged to say, "Help I'm drowning." The chapter ends.
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Chapter 16 moves the plot a little further along. Mike sees that in the night the ghost has overturned the flour and is trying to spell out something but all it could do was make squiggly lines in the flours. Mike goes to the softball game in the hopes of seeing Max Devore, but Max doesn't show up and the only people he sees are John Storrow and Mattie there together, also looking for Max.
The next day Mike has a conversation with Brenda Meserve about the history of the TR and Dark Score lake. She tells Mike that one of the Red-Top boys who was in Sara Tidwell's settlement around the lake got caught in an animal trap and died later of infection. Brenda says that's why the settlement disbanded but her mother says the boy's ghost still haunts the lake.
Another boy that died around the lake was a boy with the last name of Auster. His father, Normal, drowned the baby by putting his head under the water pump until he was dead. Then the father took a shotgun and shot himself. The father might also be haunting the lake Brenda thinks.
Mike then goes to the library, careful to talk mostly to the other librarian (Mattie works at the library) to give the appearance that nothing is happening between him and Mattie. He wants to find some histories about the town and the lake. He finds a picture of Sara Tidwell and the name of the boy who got caught in the trap was a Tidwell and Mike thinks the boy might be the nephew of Sara.
John Storrow calls Mike up and is excited about the case because he hired a detective who has evidence that Durgin is being paid by Devore. John also tell Mike that he is interested in Mattie.
John doesn't even ask Mike if he interested in her himself. This is a huge mistake on King's part because large portions of the book are devoted to Mike and Mattie trying to be seen only in public and not appearing romantic at all on the lawyer's advice. If the lawyer thought that nothing was going on or that nothing was likely to happen he would not have given that advice and the fact that he doesn't even ask Mike or bring up the possibility that since Mike is paying all this attention to her, not to mention $75,000 in legal fees that Mike, might, you know, have some kind of feelings that are least a little bit romantic towards her. Storrow is either really dumb, really mean and inconsiderate or King was writing very sloppy.
After the conversation he starts to think about Jo and whether she really was cheating on him with someone up on the TR and whether or not she lied. The TV immediately turns on to an old movie with a woman shouting, "I am not a liar!" I thought that was kind of cool. Ghosts communicating via TV shows. Nice.
The next morning Mike runs into Bill Dean, the caretaker, and now that Mike is asking a lot of questions he warns Mike to stop. Bill is no longer the nice old man but another stock King villain. We know this because Bill describes the Tidwell settlement and says that they left because they were wanderers but Mike knows psychically that Bill was going to say niggers instead of wanderers (page 278). Bill is trying to be nice but underneath you can tell that King is just aching to make him a cliched villain and probably by the end of the novel he'll be holding a gun to Mike's head telling him to get out of town.
At the end of the chapter Mike makes a call to Jo's old friend and asks her if Jo was cheating on him. Bonnie declares absolutely not but she does say that Jo quit all of her volunteer committees and activities in the winter of 1993. But Mike has Jo's old calender from 1994 and see that it is full of notes that she is going to committees throughout that year even Bonnie just said she had quit them all which Mike did not know about. Mike thinks that on all those days that instead of being on the volunteer boards she was at Sara Laughs.
Durgin is introduced quickly by Mike as a small fat man, and while Mike "likes most fat people," he labels this one immediately as a "ELFF" or "evil little fat folk." Apparently there are a race of fat people that are to be hated on sight because these particular fat people (under 5 foot 2) hate the whole world because they are fat and especially hate anyone who is not fat. I'm not kidding, that's what King writes on page 239 of this book. Way to go with the stereotyping King and character development.
The main plot point of the deposition is that Durgin bluffed that he was going to play a tape of the phone call the Devore made to Noonan on July 4th where Mike lied about his first encounter with Mattie. In the deposition Mike declares that he doesn't remember the conversation he had with Devore and Durgin has a tape recorder there to start playing what would appear to be the tape but ultimately he does not. Mike later asks his lawyer about this and he comes to the conclusion that Max Devore probably has many other tapes with incriminating evidence on them and he doesn't want to introduce this tape because of the fear that the court would subpoena more tapes that he doesn't want heard.
After the deposition Mattie, Mike and the lawyer, John Storrow all go for a little picnic and talk for a little while about the case. John is convinced that Devore will drop the case.
At the end of the chapter Mike goes back to Sara Laughs and then the first fully sustained moment of supernatural horror appears. As he walks into the house he hears the bell by the Moose head ringing loudly (Bunter's Bell). Mike stops at the doorway and asks, "Who's here?" And a loud sustained shrink issues from the house and then after a minute or two it stops. After that Mike hears the sobbing. When the sobbing stops again he goes to the refrigerator and see that the magnets are rearranged to say, "Help I'm drowning." The chapter ends.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Chapter 16 moves the plot a little further along. Mike sees that in the night the ghost has overturned the flour and is trying to spell out something but all it could do was make squiggly lines in the flours. Mike goes to the softball game in the hopes of seeing Max Devore, but Max doesn't show up and the only people he sees are John Storrow and Mattie there together, also looking for Max.
The next day Mike has a conversation with Brenda Meserve about the history of the TR and Dark Score lake. She tells Mike that one of the Red-Top boys who was in Sara Tidwell's settlement around the lake got caught in an animal trap and died later of infection. Brenda says that's why the settlement disbanded but her mother says the boy's ghost still haunts the lake.
Another boy that died around the lake was a boy with the last name of Auster. His father, Normal, drowned the baby by putting his head under the water pump until he was dead. Then the father took a shotgun and shot himself. The father might also be haunting the lake Brenda thinks.
Mike then goes to the library, careful to talk mostly to the other librarian (Mattie works at the library) to give the appearance that nothing is happening between him and Mattie. He wants to find some histories about the town and the lake. He finds a picture of Sara Tidwell and the name of the boy who got caught in the trap was a Tidwell and Mike thinks the boy might be the nephew of Sara.
John Storrow calls Mike up and is excited about the case because he hired a detective who has evidence that Durgin is being paid by Devore. John also tell Mike that he is interested in Mattie.
John doesn't even ask Mike if he interested in her himself. This is a huge mistake on King's part because large portions of the book are devoted to Mike and Mattie trying to be seen only in public and not appearing romantic at all on the lawyer's advice. If the lawyer thought that nothing was going on or that nothing was likely to happen he would not have given that advice and the fact that he doesn't even ask Mike or bring up the possibility that since Mike is paying all this attention to her, not to mention $75,000 in legal fees that Mike, might, you know, have some kind of feelings that are least a little bit romantic towards her. Storrow is either really dumb, really mean and inconsiderate or King was writing very sloppy.
After the conversation he starts to think about Jo and whether she really was cheating on him with someone up on the TR and whether or not she lied. The TV immediately turns on to an old movie with a woman shouting, "I am not a liar!" I thought that was kind of cool. Ghosts communicating via TV shows. Nice.
The next morning Mike runs into Bill Dean, the caretaker, and now that Mike is asking a lot of questions he warns Mike to stop. Bill is no longer the nice old man but another stock King villain. We know this because Bill describes the Tidwell settlement and says that they left because they were wanderers but Mike knows psychically that Bill was going to say niggers instead of wanderers (page 278). Bill is trying to be nice but underneath you can tell that King is just aching to make him a cliched villain and probably by the end of the novel he'll be holding a gun to Mike's head telling him to get out of town.
At the end of the chapter Mike makes a call to Jo's old friend and asks her if Jo was cheating on him. Bonnie declares absolutely not but she does say that Jo quit all of her volunteer committees and activities in the winter of 1993. But Mike has Jo's old calender from 1994 and see that it is full of notes that she is going to committees throughout that year even Bonnie just said she had quit them all which Mike did not know about. Mike thinks that on all those days that instead of being on the volunteer boards she was at Sara Laughs.
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