Her breasts jiggled fetchingly, but Larry wasn't fetched.
— Stephen King, from The Stand
A recent radio interview with the author has prompted me to re-read Stephen King's 40-year-old doorstop The Stand.
On Page 101, I encountered the sentence above: perhaps the worst in all of King's novels; perhaps the worst in American literature.
I have relished reading trash ever since high school, where the Jesuits, hoping to instill in us "catholic tastes," encouraged our indulgence in "middlebrow" literature (after all, they said, Shakespeare aimed to please the groundlings as much as the audience in the seats; and Faulkner supported a family of ten writing short stories for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Mademoiselle and The Saturday Evening Post).
And so I've consumed scores of best-sellers by the likes of Upton Sinclair, John O'Hara, James M. Cain, Henry Miller, Jim Thompson, Philip K. Dick, James Michener, Ross Macdonald, John D. MacDonald, Herman Wouk, John leCarre’, Robert B. Parker, Ken Follett, James Lee Burke, Henning Mankell, John Grisham, Dean Koontz and, yes, Stephen King.
My teachers understood: reading middlebrow authors would help us appreciate the skills of highbrow ones (authors like Hardy, Conrad, Maughm, Hemingway, Faulkner and Heller).
I adore all those best-selling writers; and, besides, sometimes you need to go downtown to get uptown.
And so I've consumed scores of best-sellers by the likes of Upton Sinclair, John O'Hara, James M. Cain, Henry Miller, Jim Thompson, Philip K. Dick, James Michener, Ross Macdonald, John D. MacDonald, Herman Wouk, John leCarre’, Robert B. Parker, Ken Follett, James Lee Burke, Henning Mankell, John Grisham, Dean Koontz and, yes, Stephen King.
My teachers understood: reading middlebrow authors would help us appreciate the skills of highbrow ones (authors like Hardy, Conrad, Maughm, Hemingway, Faulkner and Heller).
I adore all those best-selling writers; and, besides, sometimes you need to go downtown to get uptown.
