Book Review: The Institute by Stephen King

Photo Credit: The Hardcover's Cover, from Goodreads

I've got all of King's books, and I've been writing that his stuff lately is okay, but that we need to accept that the genius is...resting. Producing, but resting. I've been writing that his stuff is "compulsively readable" for so long now, I can't remember when that wasn't the best that I had to say. REVIVAL was a rare exception, but for a long time before that, and now for a long time after, "compulsively readable," and that I read his newest book in X number days, were the best I could say. But then I read that The New York Times, and that Kirkus, had given THE INSTITUTE rave reviews. They said he was back to form, that he hadn't written about kids this well since IT (but with the release of IT Part 2, what else would they say?), and that this novel was extremely well structured--all rare positive review bits, especially from the NYT and Kirkus, who are not always enamored with King's stuff. So I bought it, as I would've anyway, because I own all of his books in hardcover, and because I knew I'd read it swiftly (check) and that I'd at least find it compulsively readable. But this time--THIS TIME!!!--I felt confident I'd have more positive things to say.

And, well...I read THE INSTITUTE's 561 pages in about 2 1/2 days. And...it's compulsively readable.

It isn't IT, and he doesn't write about kids as well in this as he did in IT. It's possible that this is the best he's written about them since IT, but how many of his recent books have only been about kids? Maybe, none of them---since IT.

The book starts off with a drifter, and a small town, and how the drifter ingratiates himself in this small town...but King has done that millions of times, and can possibly write that now in his sleep. (Which he possibly did, here.) Then it switches rather abruptly to The Institute, which seems suspiciously like The Shop, from FIRESTARTER. But this ain't FIRESTARTER, and the baddies from The Shop are much more so than the ones here. (There are similarities, too. There's a John Rainbird character here, of the opposite gender, but Rainbird was a badass that nobody here approaches.) Nobody here is Charlie McGee, either. Those were better written characters than anyone here. I mean that in the kindest of all positive ways.

This book is really about Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil." The whole book, in fact, could've been from the point of view of those who work for The Institute, and maybe that would've been a better book. (Sounds like a helluva good idea to me.) Here, there's a cleaning lady who could've been fleshed out better, and at the end there's an 81-year old woman who seemed very interesting. Why did she stick around, and with such gusto? THE INSTITUTE tries to go there, but mostly doesn't, which is a shame. The baddest badass of them all gets short shrift at the end, to the extent that King himself suddenly seems to give up on her, and all she gets is the other characters calling her "the queen bitch." She was badder than that, and deserved better, if you know what I mean. She could've been this book's Rainbird. The one who gets that honor doesn't deserve it, and in fact seems kind of lame. At the end, you won't care too much what happens to him.

In the meantime, the kids are drawn out well enough, and you will care about what happens to them. But, A) they're kids, so that's maybe automatic, and B) it's really their book, so they get the most airtime. Still, you get caught up in the going's-on, and it is compelling in a slow-moving train kind of way. It'll pass the time, and it is compulsively readable.

But it could've been so much more. The people who work at The Institute have their reasons for doing so, and King strongly insinuates that these reasons are compelling--but never appropriate, of course. The ends don't justify the means, here, and that's really the point of the book. But why do such people work for such banal evil? Many of them are obviously deranged, but some are maybe almost good people, or those who could've been. This book could've been essentially the same story, with that theme been better pondered and shown. It's never answered, not even close, but King seems like he wants to go there, that he wants to try and answer it--but then just drops it.

And so ultimately it's a good read. 561 pages in just short of 3 days means the book is good on some level. Yet maybe this is what's lacking in King's work now. The why. The big themes. King was never "deep," per se, which he takes pride in, and on some levels he's right. He wants to entertain more than he wants to instruct (he could've stayed on as an English teacher if that's all he'd wanted), but the fact remains that THE SHINING, CARRIE, IT and many others had more depth to them, more heft, without ever sacrificing story. Lately his stuff is about 95% story, to the exclusion of perhaps all else, and that's why they seem lesser. CARRIE, for example, never tried to explain how religious mania could screw up a family and a kid, but it sure did show it very well. THE SHINING showed how a very, very flawed man could redeem himself to save his wife and son. THE SHINING therefore had a hefty thing to say about personal redemption. I could go on...

King's stuff now frankly just lacks this heft. It's all story, all the time, and it doesn't have too much to show, or to say, about things that it could, and should, show and say about. In this case, Arendt's "banality of evil." That's too bad, because it could've easily gone there, and it would've made this book a lot better. It's not as bad as the Bill Hodges fiascoes, but...you won't want to read this one again. It'll sit in my bookcase with all the others, but...it probably won't come out of it again.

Too bad. THE INSTITUTE is okay, but it could've been one of his better ones in a long, long time.

Epigrams: From Comic Strips to Montaigne

I love epigrams, those often small obtuse statements of forced weight and thematic issues that authors use to introduce their own works.  They are the author's way of hitting their readers over their heads with the literary two by four as they scream: Do ya get it?!?  As an example, for his novel Firestarter, Stephen King uses the first line of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451: "It was a pleasure to burn."  One of the best opening lines for a novel, I think.  You just know Bradbury used that during his pitch session.  As another example, I shamelessly offer my use of comic strips to introduce my novel, Cursing the Darkness, the epigrams, prologue and first chapter of which you can find here.  Here, if you get what the monk is saying to Hagar the Horrible, you get the essence of Foster's psyche, not too far from Ahab's, in its own way, a fist clenched in hateful rebellion against the skies.

So, in that vein, today's entry starts what I hope will be a continuing series of the occasional epigram, introduced and quickly pondered.  These may or may not be famous snippets of genius; though many are very well-known, others are just favorites of mine, for reasons not always literary, but hopefully always interesting.  For every last stanza of a famous Frost poem, for example, there may be a line from Lorrie Moore, or a quote from Charles Manson.  Whatever floats my boat at the time, don't you know.  What tickles my fancy from my collection of epigrams right now is:

Writing does not cause misery, it is born of misery.--Montaigne

Rather apt for this discussion, wouldn't you say?  Stephen King also grabbed this one for his novel, Misery.  Very fitting for his own work.  A true statement, from what I've seen and studied.  In my masters class right now, it has been often remarked by the professor that 20th Century literature--specifically for this class, the short story--is borne of the writer's innate misery, whether it be loneliness, isolation, parental issues, alcoholism (another form of self-expressed misery), lousy relationships (yet another), or any thousands of other expressions of self-torment.  

We write to connect, I believe, and often that connection is a tenuous arm outstretched to an uncaring (or so it seems) society, parent, or universe.  Maybe that's the most obvious difference between writing and what some, with a bit of elitism, call literature.  Literature is an open hand that says Pull me up, but be careful that I don't instead just grab onto you and pull you down with me.  Writing, like The Da Vinci Code, let's say, is still a connection, but it's an open hand that says I hope you find this as interesting as I do, so we can connect, share a passion, and so you can make me a millionaire.  Both equally worthy, I should say, and point out that I have read the latter and find it maybe the exemplar of its type, the escapist brain candy.  And Montaigne's quote still holds: Dan Brown, one could say, reaches out to connect to his readers, the misery possibly caused by the fact that he couldn't connect his passion for (extreme revisionist) history with his family or loved ones, so he had to write them down into opaque cliffhangers and share them with us.

It's the weight of the shared or implied misery that separates writing from literature.  The ponderous, perhaps profound misery of the writer is the bridge that makes some writing literary.  There's a solid whiff of pretentiousness in that.  But that doesn't make it not so.

Besides: Of all the writers who you know, are any one of them truly happy?