Finally letting myself read this and yeah, I agree; much as I've enjoyed them, the series ultimately fails for me. To further your argument about King's brilliance with America popular culture, I find myself continually jerked out of the later books of Dark Tower by the fact that these worlds within worlds are entirely American; there's no "rest of the world" in any of the cosmos, nobody's ever heard of England even, to a point I find offensive. American myopia is all well and good in certain contexts, but not if you're trying to paint on a canvas that encompassases all universes that have ever existed but can't find South America on a map.
The other thing is that--yeah, while King's always been self- reflexive, the hero (and sometimes the villain, to give him credit) of his own stories, it doesn't feel right here. I don't so much mind SK the character as much as I mind SK the narrator nervously talking about deus ex machinas and kind of trying to disguise his loss of control over the narrative as postmodern meta. I LOVE postmodern meta, but this felt wrong to me--he kept writing himself into corners and then admitting he had, and then he kept footnoting his references as if he were embarrassed of them (ok, I got this from Browning and this from Clint Eastwood and this from the Wizard of Oz and this from--yeah, Steve, we KNEW that, and it was okay, we were fine with it, until you started chattering nervously like a prisoner in an interrogation room.) If you're going to make shit up, do it brazenly, without apologizing--the narrative voice here seemed to me to be caught between enjoying his tale and nervously fearing that it wasn't somehow up to literary snuff, and the latter feeling was contageous. I found myself wishing, instead, that he'd just brazenly let his imagination go--DO the deux ex machina, HAVE the goddess sweep down from a chariot, but don't TELL me that's what it is, and that it's a cop out, but hey, artist's perogative. Just DO it. To paraphrase another writer, hesitancy in a horror writer is like modesty in a prostitute--who wants it?
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Date: 2004-10-28 01:51 pm (UTC)The other thing is that--yeah, while King's always been self- reflexive, the hero (and sometimes the villain, to give him credit) of his own stories, it doesn't feel right here. I don't so much mind SK the character as much as I mind SK the narrator nervously talking about deus ex machinas and kind of trying to disguise his loss of control over the narrative as postmodern meta. I LOVE postmodern meta, but this felt wrong to me--he kept writing himself into corners and then admitting he had, and then he kept footnoting his references as if he were embarrassed of them (ok, I got this from Browning and this from Clint Eastwood and this from the Wizard of Oz and this from--yeah, Steve, we KNEW that, and it was okay, we were fine with it, until you started chattering nervously like a prisoner in an interrogation room.) If you're going to make shit up, do it brazenly, without apologizing--the narrative voice here seemed to me to be caught between enjoying his tale and nervously fearing that it wasn't somehow up to literary snuff, and the latter feeling was contageous. I found myself wishing, instead, that he'd just brazenly let his imagination go--DO the deux ex machina, HAVE the goddess sweep down from a chariot, but don't TELL me that's what it is, and that it's a cop out, but hey, artist's perogative. Just DO it. To paraphrase another writer, hesitancy in a horror writer is like modesty in a prostitute--who wants it?