I am 28. I was a columnist for the campus paper at ASU, and am the author of ALMASHEOL and the upco...
I am 28. I was a columnist for the campus paper at ASU, and am the author of ALMASHEOL and the upcoming POSTCARDS OF THE HANGING. I enjoy the music of Bob Dylan and consider the cheeseburger nature's perfect food.
Member since:12.02.2004
Reviews:8
"As difficult as it is," Stephen King admonishes us, "to believe, the sixties are not fictional. They actually happened."
In "Low Men in Yellow Coats", Bobby Garfield is an irremarkable eleven-year-old living in Harwich, Connecticut. His big dream in life is a new ten-speed bike; his biggest concern is his widowed mother, working hard, scraping up a bare living. Carol Gerber is the neighbor girl he secretly has a crush on. His best friend is "Sully-John" Sullivan, a boisterously foulmouthed kid probably a lot like one of our own boyhood chums. War is a distant thunder on the horizon., and the three kids pal around in the irremarkable, idyllic days of 1960.
But then a man moves into the apartment over the Garfields, and things become quite remarkable. Ted Brautigan is elderly, of indeterminate age, lives simply, and makes fast friends with Bobby. He introduces the boy to literature, like LORD OF THE FLIES (a book King himself holds in high regard). However, Brautigan has secrets. He speaks with a paranoic hush of "low men"--men who drink cheap booze from paper bags, gamble in dark alleys, and delight in victimizing honest people. They wear yellow coats, according to Ted, to hide their true selves. He tells Bobby of secret messages in sidewalk chalkings and lost-pet posters. Bobby is both afraid of and fascinated by the mysterious old stranger.
One of the most
memorable scenes in the book calls forth memories of the Wheel of Chance in THE DEAD ZONE, as Bobby plays an almost lunatic game of chance from McQuown, a carny hustler, and bests him handily. Another touching scene is Bobby and Carol's first kiss--which, as Ted says, is the one by whom all others in your life are stacked and found wanting.
The time comes to say goodbye to Ted and to leave behind old friends and childish pursuits. Bobby grows up. He learns that not all low men dress like Chester Gould's comic-strip detective and smack of the supernatural--some are like Biderman, Liz Garfield's all-too-human lecherous boss; others are high-schoolers who like to pick on little defenseless kids like him and Carol. Liz does some growing of her own. She and Bobby do the only thing they can do: the best they can.
The second installment is "Hearts in Atlantis", my favorite, and the most honest of the book. I was a college student in a dorm where there was a perpetual card-game going on in the corner of the TV lounge, and for me the walkway where Stoke Jones meets his Waterloo was the path that cut between the towers of my residence hall, which indeed often flooded during heavy rains.
Pete Riley tells the story in first-person of his first year at the University of Maine, of the characters--prudish Nate Hoppenstand, the prick RA David Dearborn, the backslapping and guttermouthed Skip Kirk, and Ronnie Malenfant, king of assholes--that he met around the dorm (who magically in my mind became guys I knew in my college days)...and Carol Gerber, the pretty but tortured 18-year-old coed to whom he loses himself in almost instantly.
In 1966 the campus is gripped in 'Nam fever, but the sickness that spreads through the men's dorm is Hearts. The men of Chamberlain quite literally are gambling their futures away at cards...all but "Dearie" Dearborn and the surly cripple Stoke Jones. They have much higher--if contradictory--aspirations than a card-game. For Dearborn, an ROTC boy, is clearly hawkish, and Stoke, with his peace-signs and his kiss-my-butt attitude, is almost fanatically anti-war. And if that isn't bad enough, Carol is succumbing to the same anti-Nam fervor. Pete wonders if she can be redeemed before the taunts and the rock-throwing cease to be playing and start turning deadly serious....and if he can be redeemed before la femme noire eats his soul.
The third book, "Blind Willie", deals with Bill Shearman, a Vietnam vet who has a problem with pychosomatic hysterical blindess. He stands begging on a street corner day after day, disguised as a bum, when the sickness comes upon him, and thinks about the past. He recalls his boyhood in Harwich, when he picked on a girl named Carol Gerber. He thinks of John Sullivan, a grunt he served with, from the old neighborhood, and another grunt named Malenfant, an ex-college boy who was forever playing cards in the brush. And he recalls years later learning that Carol died for her beliefs in a crappy fire in a shack in LA. Dressed in his shabby field jacket, blind for hours a day and at the mercy of a crooked cop demanding a slice of pie for himself, Willie has stood here for years on a NYC street corner. It is his atonement for a thousand sins committed as man and boy.
"Why We're in Vietnam" is probably the least of the vignettes. Set at a funeral, it ties up a few loose ends, letting us know what happened with some of the old grunts and outlining Sully-John's theories on how to recognize a vet at a glance...but the surreal dream-sequence turn it takes seems a bit confusing and detracting from the high themes of the book.
"Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling" closes the book sweetly. Bobby Garfield, in a scene reminicent of the Losers' walking tour of Derry in IT, comes back home to Harwich after forty years. He sees a friend buried...and he talks to a ghost. And thinking of his old friends, of the night outside the Corner Pocket, and of the day an eon ago when he carried the girl he loved home in his arms, he asks himself this: what if he'd done things differently? Would it have changed things for the better? worse? had no effect at all?
Historical fiction is probably the hardest genre to write, but HEARTS IN ATLANTIS does it admirably. It takes someone who is late in life, perhaps, to write so well on Vietnam, to lend us the experience of mellowed hindsight, and this insightful novel was long-simmered and worth waiting until the close of the century for. If, like King, you were a child in the fifties (IT) and a college student while the sixties raged, you have more perspective than say, I (born a year after 'Nam had wrapped up and the last troops left the jungle) and can write about the war with more authority than most. But then again, as Wavy Gravy once said, if you can remember the sixties, you weren't actually there.
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
Stephen King's collection of five stories about '60s kids reads like a novel. The best is ... more
"Low Men in Yellow Coats," about Bobby Garfield of Harwich, Connecticut, who craves a Schwinn for his 11th birthday. But his widowed mum is impoverished and so ...
Postage & Packaging: £2.75 Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
Stephen King's collection of five stories about '60s kids reads like a novel. The best is ... more
"Low Men in Yellow Coats," about Bobby Garfield of Harwich, Connecticut, who craves a Schwinn for his 11th birthday. But his widowed mum is impoverished and so ...
Postage & Packaging: £2.75 Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
Stephen King's collection of five stories about '60s kids reads like a novel. The best is ... more
"Low Men in Yellow Coats," about Bobby Garfield of Harwich, Connecticut, who craves a Schwinn for his 11th birthday. But his widowed mum is impoverished and so ...
Postage & Packaging: £2.75 Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
Stephen King's collection of five stories about '60s kids reads like a novel. The best is ... more
"Low Men in Yellow Coats," about Bobby Garfield of Harwich, Connecticut, who craves a Schwinn for his 11th birthday. But his widowed mum is impoverished and so ...
Postage & Packaging: £2.75 Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
Feb 17th, 2004
(Feb 18th, 2004)
very helpful by (100%):
