King has, for better or worse, left an indelible mark on the culture, and continues to — even as it seems the culture has left him behind, or that he’s roamed even further from the horror genre he’s almost unilaterally celebrated for.
Even though I’ve been thinking about him and reading him for years, it wasn’t until a couple weeks ago, reading the 2003 foreword to The Drawing of the Three, the second book in his Dark Tower fantasy epic, that I think I finally got Stephen King.
Who among us hasn’t, in some sense, stolen a corpse and accidentally trafficked crack cocaine across state lines? That is a question you will ponder while reading Louise Erdrich’s “The Sentence,” a bewitching novel that begins with a crime that would seem to defy “relatability” but becomes a practical metaphor for whatever moral felonies lurk unresolved in your guilty heart.
How does a woman who has been viewed as an object her entire life reclaim herself as a subject? How can she finally “see” herself when she looks in the mirror, rather than the person the world thinks it knows her to be? Stephanie Gangi has some ideas in her second novel, “Carry the Dog.”
Throughout the collection, Wilson eschews clear motivations, leaving the actions of his characters open to broad interpretation. This ambiguous approach is another way Wilson infuses his work with a poetic sensibility. He has created a world that is unified by an aesthetic mood, as well as a few central themes, more than by shared geography or characters. The stories are rooted in the notion that the inevitability of death is the only thing we can be sure of, and that no matter how far we may go to outrun our mortality, there is no escaping the eventual end.
But if Damasio’s account of consciousness is not an unqualified success, that merely puts him in the company of all the other distinguished scientists and philosophers who have tried to crack this conundrum. And happily, “Feeling & Knowing” has supplementary virtues that make it well worth reading.
It was just luck: orange groves,
those two olive orchards, the way