Part III: On Stephen King's "Under the Dome” / Cheever

The fun King has here reminds me of some of the pseudo-science of "11.22.63"; there, if you went back in time and changed just one detail of history, there could be a butterfly effect, causing cataclysms greater than anything you'd ever imagined. So, sparing JFK's life might seem to be a good thing, but it could actually lead to an apocalyptic war with Russia and Cuba (!). Or: preventing some random dude from hacking at his wife with a meat cleaver might seem like a good idea, but, through dazzling chains of cause-and-effect, it might somehow lead to the destruction of an entire continent.

Portents and weird moments of soothsaying also unite "11.22.63" with "Under the Dome." In the former, there's a bizarre Yellow Card Man who seems to advise the narrator about terrible stuff down the road. (In this way, he's like the three witches in "Macbeth.") In "Under the Dome," children appear to have seizures, and to say scary things about the months to come: "The pink stars are falling. Blame it on the Chef. It's all the Chef." (And then the thrill of recognizing that the Chef--a peripheral character--will have a role in the conclusion. The Chef is the main meth cooker; he's emaciated and semi-nude and hiding, quaking, in a closet somewhere. The meth operation is of course conducted under cover of one of the two main churches in Chester's Mill; the pastor, who enjoys whipping himself, can just almost half-justify his meth-support actions by reminding himself that some of the meth proceeds go toward the spreading of the Lord's holy words.)

Have I persuaded you to read this yet? Stuff actually happens. That's what I note, at the end of several chapters, when someone is left decapitated, or widowed, or without a government. Stuff--in this story--does consistently, actually happen!

P.S. King wrote "Dome" and "11.22.63"--two of his most celebrated novels--back-to-back. And he did it after recovering from a major, life-threatening car accident. This guy's streak post-car-accident--and fairly late in his career--includes these two novels, along with the "Mr. Mercedes" trilogy, "Joyland," "Revival," and "Lisey's Story," his own favorite among his novels. (I've not read "Lisey's Story," but people love it. In it, through descriptions of a woman's coping with the loss of her novelist husband, King appears to imagine his own death.) It's no shock that King went after Smith--who wrote "A Simple Plan"--for taking so long to come back with "The Ruins." We all have limited time; that's King's perpetual reminder. So inspiring.

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The opening of John Cheever’s “Goodbye, My Brother”:

We are a family that has always been very close in spirit. Our father was drowned in a sailing accident when we were young, and our mother has always stressed the fact that our familial relationships have a kind of permanence that we will never meet with again. I don't think about the family much, but when I remember its members and the coast where they lived and the sea salt that I think is in our blood, I am happy to recall that I am a Pommeroy--that I have the nose, the coloring, and the promise of longevity--and that while we are not a distinguished family, we enjoy the illusion, when we are together, that the Pommeroys are unique. I don't say any of this because I'm interested in family history or because this sense of uniqueness is deep or important to me but in order to advance the point that we are loyal to one another in spite of our differences, and that any rupture in this loyalty is a source of confusion and pain.

We are four children; there is my sister Diana and the three men Chaddy, Lawrence, and myself. Like most families in which the children are out of their twenties, we have been separated by business, marriage, and war. Helen and I live on Long Island now, with our four children. I teach in a secondary school, and I am past the age where I expect to be made headmaster--or principal, as we say--but I respect the work. Chaddy, who has done better than the rest of us, lives in Manhattan, with Odette and their children. Mother lives in Philadelphia, and Diana, since her divorce, has been living in France, but she comes back to the States in the summer to spend a month at Laud's Head. Laud's Head is a summer place on the shore of one of the Massachusetts islands. We used to have a cottage there, and in the twenties our father built the big house. It stands on a cliff above the sea and, excepting St. Tropez and some of the Apennine villages, it is my favorite place in the world. We each have an equity in the place and we contribute some money to help keep it going.

There’s a sense of tension right away. What does it mean to be “close in spirit”? How does that differ from “being close”? A rupture in loyalty is “a source of confusion and pain”; who wants to bet there will be a rupture later in the story? (The narrator’s coolness almost feels like something from an alien; here’s someone dispassionately observing human behavior, the stuff that makes the rest of us struggle with steam coming out of our ears.)

Cheever had an interest in water; his famous story, “The Swimmer,” seems to allude to Narcissus staring at himself in a pond. Cheever is also responsible for “The Ocean.” Here, in “Brother,” an early story, the ocean destroys Dad, in a kind of fairy-tale moment. And it’s there in the background at Laud’s Head, a force of destruction and re-birth, re-creation. “The sea salt is in our blood.”

A few other things that I like very much in this opening. “I have the nose, the coloring, and the promise of longevity.” Tribal markers. The narrator doesn’t need to get into precisely what kind of nose he is talking about; a simple reference to “the nose” makes us think of some shorthand for our own family traits. “We have been separated by business, marriage, and war.” (There’s that list again--“the rule of threes.” That word "war" is almost ominous; it likely refers to World War II, but there are other kinds of wars, wars that do not involve guns and grenades, and we'll hear about them soon.) And then my favorite phrase: “We used to have a cottage at Laud’s Head, and in the twenties our father built the big house.” The use of “the” is so important. It’s not “a” big house. Cheever’s “the” suggests familiarity, a kind of mythic stature: The narrator is so caught up in the legend of his family, he forgets that he’s addressing an audience. He forgets that we don’t know the house he is alluding to. And so a single article conveys to us the importance of this one house. It’s the seat of the Enchanted World; it’s where the action will happen.

Cheever had a unique eye for Divided Selves. He himself propped up a terrible marriage for decades, while enjoying semi-covert homosexual liaisons, sometimes mere yards away from his wife’s presence. He was a mess, and he wrote great stories. “Goodbye, My Brother” is about a family war, and it also seems to be a depiction of some wars within Cheever’s own soul. Stay tuned!