Duma Me

Book report: Duma Key by Stephen King

I can be a snob sometimes: I enjoyed most movies based on Stephen King novels but read nothing of his until seeing a short story or two early this decade in The New Yorker. The plan’s not to catch up on everything he wrote, but so far I’ve enjoyed the early now-classics and recent books, including On Writing.

Cell is normal King, a creature thriller set as a road story, great fun, hiding a societal satire. The much-praised Lisey’s Story was nearly a standard novel: a woman resumes living after the premature death of a beloved spouse. An insight then became more manifest when I grabbed this year’s Duma Key, another formal novel with a twist: The man can’t help adding a monster or ghost or giving a character a bit of the old telepathy. [King cannot be trying to hold his core audience — fans of the Dark Tower series aren’t getting near a 40-something woman dealing with her husband’s estate and her sisters.]

Both Lisey and Duma would have been fine works as detailed character studies, bringing King critical praise from literary types. I don’t think King added the paranormal to thumb his nose at them. The old boy can’t help himself.

Edgar Freemantle is an established Minnesota builder, an American success story, until a debilitating accident. He moves to Florida’s fictitious Duma Key to recuperate not just from his injuries but what they brought: chiefly a divorce from his wife and a divorce from the life they built, forced to retire, one-armed, gimp leg, brain damage. Get a hobby, he’s advised, and he recalls he’d taken an art class or two in school. Edgar in his rent-house turns out to be a painting prodigy, but is his gift his own?

Stephen King, by emphasizing that plot-question instead of keeping this pulpy gimmick a subplot, is being honest with using what he likes in storytelling. Every creativity-targeted how-to writing book, including his own, says write for yourself. (The other kind is market-oriented.) He dares infect a post-9/11 saga with what may be zombies, refining the question to, Does he jeopardize the book’s integrity? The plot would collapse in the drafting of thousands of other writers.

What I like about King is what the supernatural aspect represents. He is not a fiction writer who merely rearranges the deck chairs of his own life time after time, memoir pulled like taffy. That’s not to say the true fiction writer doesn’t use his own life; of course he does. King knows about convalescing from multiple injuries. As a subtext, the man has a lot to say in Duma about pulling work from the creative process. After skads of Oprah author interviews (except the Cormac McCarthy), you’d think “let’s pretend” was a perversion past the point where sick sells so well. God bless Stephen King for believing in imagination.

His On Writing belongs with just a few other decent books of that sort, Anne Lamott’s and Natalie Goldberg’s, and the mighty godmother of them all, On Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande.

There’s one other book, and, today, gratitude must be expressed.

Ten years ago today, My Beloved and I began the 12-week exercise program in The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. It’s so important we mark the date on calendars, for it changed our lives.

A few days earlier, an east Arkansas artist stayed the night at the B&B we managed that year. She made bas relief renderings of homely houses and barns in painted clay, less than a foot in size. Her work sold pretty well in our gift shop. It was midweek, and she was the only guest (I’ve forgotten her name). The crafter evangelized about the book but in a no-nonsense way, or I would have politely disappeared into the laundry or kitchen. MB and I found a copy in a Eureka Springs bookshop and ordered a second on Amazon.com so we each could make notes in the margins.

In what Cameron would call synchronicity, we were shopping for supplies in Fayetteville and saw a poster for an Artist’s Way class starting right away. We already were falling for Fayetteville, having to make frequent Sam’s Club trips, and we’d stay for a movie or a band at a club. The teacher, our fellow students and most important the friends of all these folks quickly made us family. And family’s for keeps.

What’s this have to do with King? Art teacher Betty Edwards says a lucky few figure out on their own how to paint (or write), but the rest of us, if we want, can start with learning blind contour drawing. Cameron teaches contour writing. King’s a natural.

You can find good lessons everywhere, but when you find a hot spot loaded with them, why not lock it in.