Ain’t Misbehavin’

People who’ve never read Stephen King’s best-selling novels are precisely the kind of readers it is hoped that his latest opus, “Bag of Bones,” will attract. “[F]or those of you who . . . have traditionally been content to let others actually read Stephen King,” reads the publisher’s note, “I especially urge you to give yourself up to the sheer seductive power of King’s voice in a novel I’m not reluctant to call a contemporary American classic.” Not satisfied with commercial success, the author and his publisher crave respect from the literati.

Not that respect has been entirely lacking. The advance copy of “Bag of Bones” boasts blurbs from Gloria Naylor and Amy Tan. A recent issue of the New Yorker featured a story by King. And, beginning with “Carrie” in 1974, King’s more than 30 novels have received quite favorable reviews from some critics, including the New York Times’ Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, who confesses himself a King addict. For, runs the argument, even though King may not be a great prose stylist or a profound thinker, even though his chief aim is shock effect, you have to admit he is a damned good storyteller. And now, his latest novel is touted as being more than a mere page-turner: It is supposed to represent a “breakthrough” into the higher realms of Literature.

Like “The Shining” (1977) and “Misery” (1987), “Bag of Bones” has a writer for its protagonist. (Nothing like a soupcon of self-consciousness to impress the critics!) And indeed, the best parts of this novel deal with the challenges and hardships of being an imaginative writer.

The hero, Mike Noonan, is a best-selling author not quite as successful as his creator (Noonan’s books only make the No. 15 slot on the lists.) Noonan lives in King’s favorite locale, Maine, where he also has a summer home called Sara Laughs--a place he’s avoided since the death of his beloved wife, Jo.

Four years later, he is still grieving and suffering from writer’s block. He decides to venture back to the summer home. There he meets an adorable 3-year-old girl, Kyra, and her beautiful young widowed mother, Mattie. Mattie’s late husband was the likable son of a powerful despotic old millionaire, Max Devore, who is hell-bent on getting custody of the child. Max has a ghoulish-looking assistant, Rogette, who reminds Mike of Mrs. Danvers in the novel “Rebecca.” (Just as, for no apparent reason, Sara Laughs reminds him of Manderley.)

Indeed, along with King’s usual references to movies, brand names and pop culture, this novel features scads of literary allusions and reflections on the writer’s trade. Toward the end, Noonan comes to question his motives as a writer: If murder is the worst kind of pornography, maybe writing about murder--as he has always done--is also an evil. Even the most carping critic has to admit this is a pretty neat specimen of irony.

But allusions and irony do not in themselves make for literature. “Bag of Bones” not only falls short of its literary aspirations, it also fails to deliver what we’d expect of a first-rate suspense novel.

King starts off with some likable characters in believable situations: a lonely widower trying to help a young mother and child, a town where many folks have been bought off by an evil millionaire.

But there’s lots more: a veritable rubbish heap of undigested material that King simply throws at the reader without bothering to make any of it seem credible, convincing or even interesting. Objects go banging around. Refrigerator magnets arrange themselves to form messages. Mike, Mattie and Kyra seem to have telepathy with one another. Mike often goes into a state he calls “the zone.” In one such episode he’s transported to a turn-of-the-century village fair where Sara Tidwell, a legendary African American blues singer who used to live in the area, is belting out her sultry lyrics. (The summerhouse bears her name, and her ghost gives Jo’s a run for its money when it comes to house-haunting.) Thanks to Mike’s ability to enter “zones,” he witnesses the terrible crime committed against Sara by Max Devore’s ancestor (a racist, what else?)

But meanwhile, before we learn about this, Max drops his custody case and dies. Unfortunately, he--or his henchwoman Rogette--has arranged for a cruel revenge. Despite a torrential storm that breaks loose just as this dastardly action occurs, Mike manages to rescue the child from the carnage and take her to his house where, quite unexpectedly, he seems to be planning to drown her in the bathtub.

Why on earth would he wish to kill a child he’s fought so hard to save? Because the ghost of Tidwell, over the last century, has somehow been making various folks drown children whose names begin with K, the first letter of the name of the son she lost. The ghosts of Jo and Sara wage a final battle, causing more objects to fly through the air. Mike finally puts an end to Sara’s curse by digging up her bones and pouring lye on them. The technique is efficacious: “ . . . her hate was gone, burned away in the corrosive.”

Stephen King’s admirers--and fans of plot-dependent writing--advise us to ignore high-brow stuff like prose style and focus on the story. Although I try to refrain from reciting plot summaries, the sheer slovenliness of this one is hard to convey by any other means. If this hodgepodge passes for skillful storytelling, I’d hate to imagine what constitutes inept.

Inappropriate as it might be to expect a King novel to resemble such masterpieces as “Moby Dick” or “Madame Bovary,” it does seem valid to consider his fiction in the context of works like “Rebecca,” “The Turn of the Screw” or the tales of Poe. A good ghost story can make you believe in ghosts--for the duration of the story, at least. King bases “Bag of Bones” on the assumption that the reader already believes in ghosts. Thus, the trances, voices and flying furniture don’t seem truly mysterious or spooky because they are taken for granted.

In “Rebecca,” Daphne du Maurier evokes a house haunted by a dead woman without resorting to a single supernatural event: no ghosts, no voices, no levitating objects. Yet the specter of Rebecca dominates every page. The plot is tightly constructed, the narrative focused and compelling, and every nuance of the heroine’s mental state is deftly portrayed. King’s plot is a mess, and he gives us no idea of how his hero actually feels when suddenly afflicted by a compulsion to drown the little girl. Du Maurier’s sinister Mrs. Danvers plays cunning mind games on the heroine; King has his Danvers epigone, Rogette, literally throwing rocks at the hero’s head.

It’s a pity that words such as “coarse” and “crude” have lost some of their derogatory force and serve more to brand the person employing them as overly genteel. The words came to signal sexual explicitness. Perhaps it’s time to recover their primary meaning. In her essay collection, “Art Objects,” Jeanette Winterson, well known for her own sexual frankness, warns against a future in which “machines become more delicate and human beings coarser.” Sadly, Stephen King’s novels are only one small symptom of a much larger cultural affliction.