Title: Lisey's Story by Stephen King
Details: Copyright 2006, Scribner Books
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap):
"Lisey Debusher Landon lost her husband, Scott, two years ago, after a twenty-five-year marriage of the most profound and sometimes frightening intimacy. Scott was an award-winning, bestselling novelist and a very complicated man. Early in their relationship, before they married, Lisey had to learn from him about books and blood and bools. Later, she understood that there was a place Scott went -- a place that both terrified and healed him, that could eat him alive or give him the ideas he needed in order to live. Now it's Lisey's turn to face Scott's demons, Lisey's turn to go to Boo'ya Moon. What begins as a widow's effort to sort through the papers of her celebrated husband becomes a nearly fatal journey into the darkness he inhabited. Perhaps King's most personal and powerful novel, Lisey's Story is about the wellsprings of creativity, the temptations of madness, and the secret language of love."
Why I Wanted to Read It: I've been a fan of Stephen King's work since middle school. I have favorites in various eras, various genres, and among the short story collections. I have an all-time favorite (two, actually!) and yet there are still plenty of his books I haven't read yet, spread out over the years. This was one of those such books.
How I Liked It: I want to start out by recommending to you a Stephen King book, although it is not this one.
In his brilliant memoir cum writing guide On Writing, Stephen King succeeds in making a book about writing not only interesting, but makes you actually want to write, something that cannot be said about most books about writing (I've read quite a few). In it, he compares the act of taking a good idea and making it into a story to the act of excavating a fossil. Getting it out of the ground and removing the debris is a careful and largely intuitive process, according to King, and it's impossible to get the fossil out in one piece completely: you're going to lose some of it and have breakages. It's all a matter of getting as much of it as you can.
He also shares a story about one of the first rejection letters he got that actually contained constructive criticism that said "NOT BAD, BUT PUFFY" which he took to heart.
I share these two stories from On Writing because they're what came to mind when I read Lisey's Story. I've heard of King called a maximalist writer , but I've never quite agreed until this book (I again point out my disclaimer that I haven't read all of his work, just roughly three-fourths of it).
Why? Because there's a brilliant and compelling story within this book. Several, actually! For one, there's a magical land that exists that the main character's husband (two years dead, his story is told in flashbacks) could assess to heal and where he got ideas for his bestselling books and that plays a huge role in their story. We're led to believe that maybe this is a land that her husband invented until we see that other characters, even unrelated to the main, are there too. And yet we don't get much of the magical land. It seems almost an afterthought, to be developed later.
There's also a story of a marriage, a wife struggling with processing her grief and her husband's estate (in many senses of the word), and a family struggle.
This seems like a lot for one book, but the thing is, King is capable of it. Unfortunately here, though, we don't get enough of any of it.
The relationship between husband and wife isn't as established as it could be and lingers sometimes too long on flashbacks that don't move the plot (or establish their relationship) as far along as the length would have you believe. The magical land is as I said more of a suggestion and the central action of her husband's estate is considerably slowed and dulled by aforementioned flashbacks. The family strife (the wife's family of sisters is having a caretaking dispute, to put it mildly) is worth exploring, but throwing it against the other moving parts just does a disservice to the whole.
Although it doesn't come together the way it should, the suggestion of the fascinating cohesive story just at the surface of all of this is close enough to still make it an interesting read. It's just that King needed to be more careful of the breaks and smooth off more of the debris when excavating.
Final Grade: B-
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