{"id":13206,"date":"2020-02-28T13:36:38","date_gmt":"2020-02-28T17:36:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/?p=13206"},"modified":"2020-02-28T13:36:38","modified_gmt":"2020-02-28T17:36:38","slug":"the-past-isnt-dead-its-just-unevenly-distributed-two-book-reviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2020\/02\/the-past-isnt-dead-its-just-unevenly-distributed-two-book-reviews.html","title":{"rendered":"The Past Isn’t Dead, It’s Just Unevenly Distributed: Two book reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

of two very different books, which both riff on events in the living memory of the authors.<\/p>\n

Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis<\/em><\/strong>. This book tells you up-front that it will be about The Sixties\u2013the mythical drowned continent of the title. And although I found this collection of linked novellas unsatisfying, its response to The Sixties surprised me, and it\u2019s the book\u2019s greatest strength. Because the major emotional key King touches here is guilt.<\/p>\n

The first novella, \u201cLow Men in Yellow Coats,\u201d is a portrait of a young boy growing up in the early \u201960s, in a recognizably King-like small town, with the kind of mother you hope to find not at home. This mother is a great creation. She understands one big thing in life, and that\u2019s that it is precarious. Her love and protectiveness toward her son come out as criticism and suspicion.<\/p>\n

This section introduces several characters we\u2019ll need later, but its role in the collection may be to show the grime, economic struggle, and violence against women which pervade the adults\u2019 world and seep into the children\u2019s. King is so good at making the early \u201960s at once an idyll and a site of fear and suffering; he somehow balances the sweetness of childhood friendships, games, and discoveries with the unhappiness and helplessness which often characterize childhood. And not all of those discoveries are sweet.<\/p>\n

The shadows over these children\u2019s lives are not the shadows of The Sixties that he\u2019ll explore later. They\u2019re linked\u2013there\u2019s a way in which all violence in this book is the same violence. But King really does capture the feeling that this is the before<\/em> and the later novellas are set in an after<\/em>. The Sixties are a real dividing line, not simply the usual wrack of wickedness and folly wearing different clothes.<\/p>\n

One group of this story\u2019s many villains is the gang of Catholic-school bullies who harass and attack the public-school kids. Their Catholicism is really hammered on (there\u2019s even a snide comment about how their families have too many kids!); King is going somewhere with it, though I don\u2019t know that his ultimate purpose justifies the stereotype-laden portrayal here.<\/p>\n

The second novella, \u201cHearts in Atlantis,\u201d is by far the strongest. It\u2019s a strange tale of scholarship students who need to maintain their grades in order to keep their draft exemptions, but nonetheless get sucked in to an addictive card game. There\u2019s some sentiment here, especially at the end, but mostly this story is about being baffled by what you\u2019re doing. We do things we know to be wrong, to be cruel or terrifyingly stupid, we drift into them or suddenly find ourselves in the middle of them. It\u2019s a story about becoming a spectator to history while everyone around you is becoming a participant.<\/p>\n

In terms of The Sixties, one thing I noticed is that although King himself very very clearly believes the war in Vietnam was at best a mistake full of crimes, at worst a crime from the start\u2026 when his characters try to argue against the war their arguments are desultory, lazy, amoral. \u201cPepsi F\u2014in Cola\u201d is making money off the war; who cares if the Communists kill Catholics (there we are again! only right-wingers like Catholics) since after all, \u201cWe stood back and let the Nazis kill Jews for six years\u201d; if the domino theory is right and the Communists can win across Asia, \u201cmaybe they deserve to win.\u201d It\u2019s pretty clear that nobody making these arguments really believes them, which is good because they\u2019re terrible f\u2014-in arguments. I genuinely loved that King let his own views (seriously, I\u2019d be shocked if I\u2019m wrong about this) be represented by such shameful posturing. It\u2019s a confident move which places fidelity to theme above desire to propagandize.<\/p>\n

Both the slow-moving horror of the card game and the climactic Fall of Stoke Jones are fantastic, memorable pieces of writing. Hold on to that, because the rest of this book is not great.<\/p>\n

\u201cBlind Willie\u201d is both the low point artistically and the moment when King\u2019s theme fully emerges. One of those Catholic schoolboys has become a tortured Vietnam veteran who won\u2019t go to confession, but does a daily self-imposed \u201cpenance\u201d which also, coincidentally, nets him a lot of cash. It all feels cartoonish, and while I guess it is ok that my religion is apparently King\u2019s keyboard shortcut for \u201cguilt and repentance,\u201d I believed zero of this tale. \u201cWhy We\u2019re in Vietnam\u201d is more deeply-imagined, more true to human life, and so I\u2019m more willing to accept it even though its climax is a rain of consumer goods from the sky, which is not the subtlest possible answer to the question in the title. And then the final section ties the threads together in a reunion of the two eleven-year-olds at the center of \u201cLow Men in Yellow Coats.\u201d This reunion is made possible only by supernatural intervention: not divine, exactly, but still a kind of inbreaking from above, via the utterly Kinglike means of a mysterious baseball glove.<\/p>\n

In this book about The Sixties, the civil rights movement is completely absent. There are no black people. That isn\u2019t a criticism; this is about one kind of The Sixties, a story worth telling even if there are other The Sixtieses out there. But it was striking to read King\u2019s underbelly-Americana and then move immediately on to Charles W. Chesnutt\u2019s Marrow of Tradition<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Marrow<\/em> is a novel teetering between melodrama and allegory, about the Wilmington, NC Massacre of 1898<\/a>, in which white citizens seeking to claw back the gains of Reconstruction ravaged their town\u2019s black community and committed \u201cthe only coup d\u2019etat in American history.\u201d It\u2019s as wrenching to read as you might expect. It has the authentic 19th-century teacherly cadence where nobody minds having the events interpreted for them\u2013although Chesnutt often injects irony into this didactic tone. There\u2019s a subtheme about the making of historical memory. What goes in the newspaper? Which records are kept, which hidden, and which destroyed? This book is an attempt to ensure that people remember what really happened, not what the remaining documents would show. And yet the book is about black testimony disregarded and black communities, the havens of memory, destroyed. So there\u2019s a desperate urgency to the novel, published in 1901 by a writer whose relatives were survivors of the violence in Wilmington.<\/p>\n

One of the true cliches about American literature is that it\u2019s about the forced encounter with the submerged past, in a country which pretends to have only a future. (I may as well say that I re-read The Great Gatsby<\/em> right around this time too. That book is a lot better than I remembered!) In Marrow<\/em>, as in real life, the bodies of light-skinned black people told a story which the documents governing their legal inheritance denied. Here, two women look shockingly alike\u2013shocking because one is a white inheritor, and the other is a black pauper. Everyone knows what their resemblance means, but it\u2019s possible to use law and prejudice to render that truth powerless, unspeakable. This novel knows that the hidden truths which come to light at the climax could easily have remained buried forever. In many families\u2013including Chesnutt\u2019s own\u2013there never was a full reckoning.<\/p>\n

People say that allegory is a hokey old genre but how many of us find that our real lives bear its traces?<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

of two very different books, which both riff on events in the living memory of the authors. Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis. This book tells you up-front that it will be about The Sixties\u2013the mythical drowned continent of the title. And although I found this collection of linked novellas unsatisfying, its response to The Sixties […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[101,79,18,41,322],"class_list":["post-13206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","tag-america","tag-moral-memories-of-the-past","tag-race","tag-reading-and-repentance","tag-stephen-king"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Past Isn't Dead, It's Just Unevenly Distributed: Two book reviews<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"of two very different books, which both riff on events in the living memory of the authors. Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis. This book tells you up-front\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2020\/02\/the-past-isnt-dead-its-just-unevenly-distributed-two-book-reviews.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Past Isn't Dead, It's Just Unevenly Distributed: Two book reviews\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"of two very different books, which both riff on events in the living memory of the authors. Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis. This book tells you up-front\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2020\/02\/the-past-isnt-dead-its-just-unevenly-distributed-two-book-reviews.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Eve Tushnet\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2020-02-28T17:36:38+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Eve Tushnet\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Eve Tushnet\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2020\/02\/the-past-isnt-dead-its-just-unevenly-distributed-two-book-reviews.html\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2020\/02\/the-past-isnt-dead-its-just-unevenly-distributed-two-book-reviews.html\",\"name\":\"The Past Isn't Dead, It's Just Unevenly Distributed: Two book reviews\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2020-02-28T17:36:38+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2020-02-28T17:36:38+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/#\/schema\/person\/ca04686b93c92257f019070302a23415\"},\"description\":\"of two very different books, which both riff on events in the living memory of the authors. Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis. This book tells you up-front\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2020\/02\/the-past-isnt-dead-its-just-unevenly-distributed-two-book-reviews.html#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2020\/02\/the-past-isnt-dead-its-just-unevenly-distributed-two-book-reviews.html\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2020\/02\/the-past-isnt-dead-its-just-unevenly-distributed-two-book-reviews.html#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"The Past Isn’t Dead, It’s Just Unevenly Distributed: Two book reviews\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/\",\"name\":\"Eve Tushnet\",\"description\":\"Conservatism reborn in twisted sisterhood\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/#\/schema\/person\/ca04686b93c92257f019070302a23415\",\"name\":\"Eve Tushnet\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/be87ff28da150cb07788911c22e42ae2?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/be87ff28da150cb07788911c22e42ae2?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"caption\":\"Eve Tushnet\"},\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/author\/evetushnet\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"The Past Isn't Dead, It's Just Unevenly Distributed: Two book reviews","description":"of two very different books, which both riff on events in the living memory of the authors. Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis. This book tells you up-front","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2020\/02\/the-past-isnt-dead-its-just-unevenly-distributed-two-book-reviews.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"The Past Isn't Dead, It's Just Unevenly Distributed: Two book reviews","og_description":"of two very different books, which both riff on events in the living memory of the authors. Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis. This book tells you up-front","og_url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2020\/02\/the-past-isnt-dead-its-just-unevenly-distributed-two-book-reviews.html","og_site_name":"Eve Tushnet","article_published_time":"2020-02-28T17:36:38+00:00","author":"Eve Tushnet","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"Eve Tushnet","Est. reading time":"6 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2020\/02\/the-past-isnt-dead-its-just-unevenly-distributed-two-book-reviews.html","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2020\/02\/the-past-isnt-dead-its-just-unevenly-distributed-two-book-reviews.html","name":"The Past Isn't Dead, It's Just Unevenly Distributed: Two book reviews","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/#website"},"datePublished":"2020-02-28T17:36:38+00:00","dateModified":"2020-02-28T17:36:38+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/#\/schema\/person\/ca04686b93c92257f019070302a23415"},"description":"of two very different books, which both riff on events in the living memory of the authors. Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis. This book tells you up-front","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2020\/02\/the-past-isnt-dead-its-just-unevenly-distributed-two-book-reviews.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2020\/02\/the-past-isnt-dead-its-just-unevenly-distributed-two-book-reviews.html"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2020\/02\/the-past-isnt-dead-its-just-unevenly-distributed-two-book-reviews.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"The Past Isn’t Dead, It’s Just Unevenly Distributed: Two book reviews"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/","name":"Eve Tushnet","description":"Conservatism reborn in twisted sisterhood","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/#\/schema\/person\/ca04686b93c92257f019070302a23415","name":"Eve Tushnet","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/be87ff28da150cb07788911c22e42ae2?s=96&d=mm&r=g","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/be87ff28da150cb07788911c22e42ae2?s=96&d=mm&r=g","caption":"Eve Tushnet"},"url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/author\/evetushnet"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1071"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13206\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}