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clarks_dad 's review for:
The Body
by Stephen King
The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them - words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked up within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.
I was twelve going on thirteen when I first saw a dead human being. It happened in 1960, a long time ago… although sometimes it doesn’t seem that long to me. Especially on the nights I wake up from dreams where the hail falls into his open eyes.
If you can’t recognize the profound truth in those words and you don’t feel compelled to keep reading, you probably haven’t spent more than a span of seconds contemplating anything heavier than whether or not Charlie Brown is always going to fall for Lucy’s football gag. The Body eloquently captures the coming of age experience of Gordon Lachance, big-shot writer, but one time wet end skulking around Castle Rock in the 1960s - suggesting and completing dares, playing cards, avoiding home and thinking about the changes coming in the future while generally trying to avoid melting into the blistering pavement under that late August Summer sun. In short, it captures what it was like to be a young boy in America “back then” without glorifying it. There was nothing to glorify. You couldn’t really leave your doors unlocked (even in a sleepy burg like Castle Rock) and middle-class small towns harbored just as many demons and just as much dysfunction as our bustling and complex inner cities. It’s relateability across generations is a testament to the novella’s staying power and the staying power of the American experience - at least of males - and I can see parts of my own childhood in parallel twenty years and a continent away basically unchanged in sentiment and psychology. This shouldn’t be a surprise given King’s obsessive fascination with childhood. One gets the impression that he’s spent years mulling over his own experiences and extracting from it the very essence that’s at the core of the American experience and then lays it out in ways that are able to reach your bedrock unlike anyone else in the world.
The Body is sentimental, but pulls no punches. The underlying subtext is one of closing, finality, and loss and in spite of the financial and personal success that lay in store for Lachance (the story’s narrator), there’s a definitively dark and hopeless tone to the experience that makes the word nostalgia not quite fit the bill. It’s not an experience that he has any desire to return to. It just is. The death of childhood (or the Fall from Innocence, as the novella is subtitled) is a tragedy that some people never recover from and attempts to recover it often end in more pain than the initial separation, but there’s a strong compulsion to sometimes like feeling out a cavity with your tongue or poking at a cut to see if it still hurts.
For me the center of the story isn’t Gordon Lachance’s maturation, it’s the tragedy of Chris Chambers. All of the characters are from dysfunctional homes and suffer on a spectrum ranging from neglect to abuse, but none have it worse than Chambers. There’s a beauty to his struggle agains the grasping hands of poverty, genetics, and small town politics that makes you root for him on a profound level. He’s what charismatic and tough guys like Ace Merrill could be if they weren’t swallowed whole by their own selfish desires and self-centeredness. He’s the hero of the story and his friendship with Lachance and his protectorship of the gang is so mature and admirable that it tugs pretty strongly on your heartstrings. Nowhere is this more apparent in his seminal advice to Lachance. Prescient, wise and selfless, it’s one of the most poignant statements of friendship in fiction.
And it’s reciprocation later in life, after the choices have been made, the lumps have been taken, and the die cast seems to fall tragically short. It’s almost there, but remains forever incomplete; it’s a scar that Lachance carries around for the rest of his life. It’s a scar we all carry when we look back on the past and think of the debts we owe to those people in our lives at that pivotal moment.
Sit back and let the master take you back through your own childhood by taking a tour through his.
I was twelve going on thirteen when I first saw a dead human being. It happened in 1960, a long time ago… although sometimes it doesn’t seem that long to me. Especially on the nights I wake up from dreams where the hail falls into his open eyes.
If you can’t recognize the profound truth in those words and you don’t feel compelled to keep reading, you probably haven’t spent more than a span of seconds contemplating anything heavier than whether or not Charlie Brown is always going to fall for Lucy’s football gag. The Body eloquently captures the coming of age experience of Gordon Lachance, big-shot writer, but one time wet end skulking around Castle Rock in the 1960s - suggesting and completing dares, playing cards, avoiding home and thinking about the changes coming in the future while generally trying to avoid melting into the blistering pavement under that late August Summer sun. In short, it captures what it was like to be a young boy in America “back then” without glorifying it. There was nothing to glorify. You couldn’t really leave your doors unlocked (even in a sleepy burg like Castle Rock) and middle-class small towns harbored just as many demons and just as much dysfunction as our bustling and complex inner cities. It’s relateability across generations is a testament to the novella’s staying power and the staying power of the American experience - at least of males - and I can see parts of my own childhood in parallel twenty years and a continent away basically unchanged in sentiment and psychology. This shouldn’t be a surprise given King’s obsessive fascination with childhood. One gets the impression that he’s spent years mulling over his own experiences and extracting from it the very essence that’s at the core of the American experience and then lays it out in ways that are able to reach your bedrock unlike anyone else in the world.
The Body is sentimental, but pulls no punches. The underlying subtext is one of closing, finality, and loss and in spite of the financial and personal success that lay in store for Lachance (the story’s narrator), there’s a definitively dark and hopeless tone to the experience that makes the word nostalgia not quite fit the bill. It’s not an experience that he has any desire to return to. It just is. The death of childhood (or the Fall from Innocence, as the novella is subtitled) is a tragedy that some people never recover from and attempts to recover it often end in more pain than the initial separation, but there’s a strong compulsion to sometimes like feeling out a cavity with your tongue or poking at a cut to see if it still hurts.
For me the center of the story isn’t Gordon Lachance’s maturation, it’s the tragedy of Chris Chambers. All of the characters are from dysfunctional homes and suffer on a spectrum ranging from neglect to abuse, but none have it worse than Chambers. There’s a beauty to his struggle agains the grasping hands of poverty, genetics, and small town politics that makes you root for him on a profound level. He’s what charismatic and tough guys like Ace Merrill could be if they weren’t swallowed whole by their own selfish desires and self-centeredness. He’s the hero of the story and his friendship with Lachance and his protectorship of the gang is so mature and admirable that it tugs pretty strongly on your heartstrings. Nowhere is this more apparent in his seminal advice to Lachance. Prescient, wise and selfless, it’s one of the most poignant statements of friendship in fiction.
”I wish to fuck I was your father!” he said angrily. “You wouldn’t go around talking about taking those stupid shop courses if I was! It’s like God gave you something, all those stories you can make up, and He said: This is what we got for you, kid. Try not to lose it. But kids lose everything unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks are too fucked up to do it then maybe I ought to.” …
“Those stories you tell, they’re no good to anybody but you, Gordie. If you go along with us just because you don’t want the gang to break up, you’ll wind up just another grunt, makin C’s to get on the teams. You’ll get to High and take the same fuckin shop courses and throw erasers and pull your meat along with the rest of the grunts. Get detentions. Fuckin suspensions. And after awhile all you’ll care about is gettin a car so you can take some skag to the hops or down to the fuckin Twin Bridges Tavern. Then you’ll knock her up and spend the rest of your life in the mill or some fuckin shoeshop in Auburn or maybe even up to Hillcrest plucking chickens. And that pie story will never get written down. Nothin’ll get written down. Cause you’ll just be another wisely with shit for brains.”
Chris Chambers was twelve when he said all that to me. But while he was saying it his face crumpled and folded into something older, oldest, ageless. He spoke tonelessly, colorlessly, but nevertheless, what he said struck terror into my bowels. It was as if he had lived that whole life already…
And it’s reciprocation later in life, after the choices have been made, the lumps have been taken, and the die cast seems to fall tragically short. It’s almost there, but remains forever incomplete; it’s a scar that Lachance carries around for the rest of his life. It’s a scar we all carry when we look back on the past and think of the debts we owe to those people in our lives at that pivotal moment.
Sit back and let the master take you back through your own childhood by taking a tour through his.