Lost Signal

Cell
by Stephen King
2006, Scribner


I've always had a sort of love-hate relationship with Stephen King.

Perhaps as a result of my love for another mid-brow form of entertainment, cinema, I am somewhat defensive of Mr. King's oeuvre. I think it is a definite place for an appreciation of genre - even those that cling to certain tropes - in appraising the worth of literature.

Yet, paradoxically, I will admit to being slightly nonplussed by King's recent acceptance among the "serious" literary community - editing Best American Stories, for example, or front page New York Times Book Review features. Most puzzling of all, perhaps, is a medal for distinguished contribution to American letters from the National Book Award, whose fellow recipients include clearly popular but unquestionably "respectable" writers like Toni Morrison, John Updike and Joan Didion.

I first read Stephen King when I was in junior high, at the exact age where the Agatha Christie mysteries I loved so dearly did not seem edgy enough and the Christopher Pike novels I had previously consumed seemed demonstrably below my reading level. In those few years, I read a number of King novels, none of which sufficiently impressed me except for The Shining.

Years later, just after graduating college, I took a few weeks to read The Stand in its unabridged glory, a book I enjoyed a great deal. That book is so incredibly epic in scope one can't help but be swept up into its pages. The ideas and characters in that book remain so crystal clear that they cannot help but become iconography: the deadly superflu Captain Tripps, the kindly negress Mother Abigail, the evil Randall Flagg. These are not sophisticated ideas or characterizations but are powerful in their simplicity. That they are plays on cliches makes them only more essential, somehow; King manages to imbue each with a feeling of necessity.

I was initially quite excited to read Cell. I saw Mr. King at a Margaret Atwood reading in Portsmouth. He was there with his son and it seemed to further cement his ability to traverse the line between popularity and respectability. On the one hand, Ms. Atwood is venerably popular, because of her rather modern approach to genre, but her work is without question considered serious literature. King's presence in the audience was unsurprising; his attendance was more predictable than at a more "serious" literary luminary like, say, a Philip Roth reading.

Cell continues, to an extent, to elaborate on this dichotomy of reputation. The novel again continues, as did The Stand, to find itself convinced that there is strength in simplicity, but manages to wobble over the line from so-simple-it's-powerful to so-simple-it's-predictable with his concepts and characters.

Part of what drew me to Cell was an excitement about the zombie conceit: people answer their cell phones and become rabid, tearing up New England like the caffeinated zombies populating the Dawn of the Dead remake. I was incredibly drawn to the time-tested zombie scenario, and the early portions of the book did not disappoint here. The main character, a graphic novelist about to sign with a publishing house in Boston, witnesses a wave of destruction in downtown Boston as the zombie virus spreads.

The main character holes himself up in a hotel downtown with a small band of cell phone-less survivors, including a middle aged gay man and fifteen year old girl. This section of the book is quite exciting, as they survey the damage inflicted by the cell phone-dependent zombies and hide from potential danger, acquiring shotguns and mapping out a route north that would pass through my hometown of the Merrimack Valley.

As the characters dodge mutilation by zombies, the only thing marring my experience of the book (thus far, anyway) was the very poor editing. It would seem as though Mr. King's status as literary superstar exempts him from being granted a meticulous editor. I found numerous examples of poor editing in the book's early pages and Cell provoked my wrath sufficiently enough to incite me to break out a highlighter, where I captured the following passages:

"What we need to do is get off the street before we get run over," said the man with the mustache, and as if to prove this point, a taxi collided with a stretch limo not far from the wrecked Duck Boat. (page 14, second emphasis mine)
As if to underline the idea... (page 16)
As if to emphasize his point... (page 17)
As if to underline this... (page 23)
As if to underline this point... (page 36)
As if to contradict this... (page 44)
As if in answer... (page 46)
As if the bald sales clerk had conjured it... (page 48)

I certainly don't fault the prolific King on such mistakes. I would imagine that certain phrases get stuck in one's craw; if you were to search my blog for unique keywords or conspicuous vocabulary words, I'm sure you'd turn up some amusing results.

But the fact remains that an untrained (or at least unprofessional) eye such as mine had no trouble locating such repetitive sentence structure in one sitting - why was King's editor unable to do so? Creative talent need not be constrained by the tenets of grammar or spelling, but I think it would be ignorant to say that style is not an integral part of a writer's command of narrative. Moreover, it is a good editor's responsibility to identify and exterminate such stylistic (to borrow a title) dead zones.

There were more troublesome examples of bad writing, of course.

There is a character in the book who is a fifteen-year-old girl, who, in stilted English, remarks:

"To me it looks like a special effect in some big summer movie. Buy a bucket of popcorn and a Coke and watch the end of the world in... what do they call it? Computer graphic imaging? CGI? Blue screens? Some fucking thing."

Perhaps it's just my extensive training as a film snob, but I don't buy the existence of a fifteen-year-old unfamiliar with the phrase CGI. Examples proliferate: at one point whilst under zombie attack, the narrator speculates aloud on how "insidious" the cell phone attack is; the narrator refers repeatedly to wearing "the type of pullover the kids call a hoodie" (you mean a hoodie, Stephen King?); King writes that when under stress, the brain "whistle[s] and tap[s] its foot and look[s] at the sky."

Perhaps my favorite example (and I think my arrogance-fueled cruel streak is perhaps taking over here) though is one of the most convoluted and deliciously "folksy" mixing of metaphors I've ever read. In reference to an upscale Kennedy-esque Boston accent:

That tight little accent grated on Clay's frayed nerves, He thought that if it had been a fart, it would have been the kind that comes out sounding like a party-horn blow by a kid with asthma.

I think I'll let that beauty of a six-degrees-of-representation-Russian-nesting-metaphor stand on its own there.

But despite these inevitable missteps in style, the early portions of the novel actually read quite well. Vaguely reminiscent of The Stand, Cell's early chapters describe tense quests of survival in a land devoid of structured society, a father's altruistic journey to his son, and lots of delightfully gory zombie shenanigans.

Sadly, though, King is incapable of letting these strengths carry to novel to a logical, satisfying, zombie-filled conclusion. King is repeatedly drawn to the concept of psychic ability, so the zombies do not remain the scarily rabid monsters they appear to be at the beginning of the book: they eventually develop hive mind and cluster together to recharge while listening to Lawrence Welk during the daytime on psychically-powered radios, a concept that left me (as did the clueless description of hoodies) wondering in my best Amy Poehler voice "Really, Stephen King? Really?"

That's, of course, not the end to the psychic tomfoolery the zombies become capable of and King imbues them with characteristics cribbed doubtlessly from his own wikipedia "recurring themes" section such as: lucid collective dreaming, induced hallucinations, telepathy, telekinesis, levitation. As in The Stand, the antagonist has the power to communicate visions of the future to his enemies through dreams.

The zombies become increasingly intelligent and benefit from the group-think shtick to threaten human beings for dominance on the planet. Despite their soullessness, one is left wondering whether they are not, in fact, an evolutionary upgrade for the species: the iPhone 4 of homo sapiens?

I found myself pondering a great deal this very question. Even though the super fancy telekinetic zombies basically ruined the second half of the book for me (a problem that did nothing to slow the voracious pace with which I seem to consume King novels when I have the appetite for them), I kept returning to the book's central question: why does the zombie virus spread through the use of cell phones?

If you look at this issue from a purely mechanical standpoint the answer seems obvious. Zombie/apocalyptic lore needs a group of survivors, or there's no narrative. Plain and simple. In most zombie films (et ceteras) the group of survivors is perplexing. Why does one group survive and not another? It seems arbitrary. The cell phone conceit solves this problem. If the virus spreads through cell phone users, King can build in a predetermined group of survivors: the handful of people who still do not own a cell phone (and, if my father is any barometer, probably never will).

This solution to the question, of course, ignores a key tool available to a writer as intelligent as King. The scope of his powers as a writer should include (if not the term "hoodie") the land of signifiers and signifieds: the metaphor.

Of course the answer is both - King ingeniously solves a mechanical issue inherent to the zombie genre, but he's also exploring some aspects of American culture through his utilization of the cell phone as transmitter of evil.

It seems that Stephen King is arguing that over-reliance on such technology leads to zombification; he is likening our culture's obsessive need for the immediate gratification of interconnectedness cell phone use provides us in two ways. First, he is lampooning, I think, the way that cell phones inhibit our ability to think critically or engage effectively in the environments surrounding us. In other ways, our senses, our attention, our motor skills, are impaired in a way one might refer to as zombie-like.

Second, King is targeting our inter-reliance as a deficit of our culture. Cell phone users become zombies who engage in group think, who seem to program themselves to think and speak alike. Their culture is one of thought so immediate in its broadcast it is ostensibly shared, tandem. King puts obvious value on the "lone wolf", the character who is disinterested in synchronizing himself to society's pressures.

At the book's first pages, King quotes Freud on the need for the id to sustain immediate gratification and the tension this causes the psyche. King clearly views the overwhelming (but hardly sudden) trend for members of a society to sign on board with shared interests, shared communication, shared thought.

The members of American society who live on their cell phones because that is what they are told to do, that is what everyone else is doing, are merely the human signified for the signifier's group-think zombies. American society is syncing itself, he is saying, into a culture where everyone thinks and acts the same way. We are merely sheep, who flock together experiencing the same popular culture and technology as one another, at the expense of innovation, variation, individuality.

One, of course, can't help but wonder to where Mr. King sees his own literary contribution to a culture of conformity and shared experience? Or perhaps the joke is on us and he is merely writing to please the id of zombies everywhere.