Stephen King's "Misery": A Third Reading In 20 Years
This week I re-read Stephen King’s Misery (third time) because I'd started thinking for some reason of the weird-typeface passages I would skip in my two previous readings, where King presents us with direct prose from the 19th century romance novel his protagonist, Paul Sheldon, is being forced to write by his psychopathic, bi-polar, weirdly religious nurse-captor, Annie Wilkes.
I told myself that, this time, I’d read those passages, which I mostly skipped in middle school because I barely had the attention span to get through the horror bits, and I only cared about the horror elements, and then skipped them again, in my early twenties, because I just wasn’t interested.
This time, the whole reason I was picking up the book was to finally read through those passages, as they’re presented, and within the larger tapestry.
Completionism.
Masochism.
Ism-ing all over.
I read the book in four days and ended up skipping those passages again—but I made more of an effort this time, and read the first passage we’re presented with, which is only like 2.5 pages.
That one's interesting, though, because our hero’s first stab at resurrecting a series of books that he just ended, by killing off the protagonist, and his captor’s pissed.
This first effort is half-hearted, cynical, self-doubting; it also, in the beginning, feels critical to read. Annie Wilkes—the killer-kidnapper who rescued Paul from a car accident, where his legs were shattered, and at this point in the story is slowly dropping the performance of a well-meaning nurse and proving she’s a sadist—she reads those early pages and says, This is great, it made me cry, but it’s bogus. You need to follow the rules of your own story. Start over.
And so Paul starts over and, in the second attempt, nails it. Annie's thrilled. Even Paul—who in the opening chapters is rejoicing at the death of his character, feels freed from the prison of that franchise—becomes engrossed. Even with shattered legs (and then a severed leg), writing on a typewriter that has no “n” key (ultimately losing the “t” and “e” as well), and a swolling claw-like hand (the other hand shorn of its thumb), Paul’s commitment to his novel becomes hypnotic. He falls into “the hole in the page” and fuels himself along.
By the third act he quits trying to escape. Contents himself with being her prisoner because he wants to see the novel through to completion.
So we’ve got two characters, a pro-/antagonist in a tight space interacting with each other, and their behavior is changing in relation to this romance novel between them. They’re obsessing over it.
I think King makes a mistake by tryna make us care about that novel too.
The book he’s got his protagonist writing, Misery’s Return, is a McGuffin. A plot device. Something the characters are worried about, but the audience (us, the readers) isn’t supposed to care about.
What we’re supposed to care about is them. How they change in relation to the McGuffin, the things it makes them do, the dangers it presents.
But King seemed to think the reader would get engrossed in the Misery story, too. Or maybe its action is supposed to work as a parallel to what Paul is going through, and therefore give us a clearer sense of his character arc.
Maybe what we’re reading, in those passages, is King’s own effort to engross himself. To live the story somewhat. Because he’s certainly trying to do that in other passages. Another thing I noticed: on literally eight or nine occasions there’ll be a two-page passage where Paul Sheldon isn’t doing anything. It’s internal monologue. Just ruminating on his situation. Marinating in his situation. Sometimes it’s annoying but it feels, on a third reading (across 20 years), like three things happening at once:
King is trying to feel his own way into the scene, the story, the character by just putting them at a standstill and looking around at the situation through their eyes.
He’s trying to do the same thing for the reader.
He’s trying to calm the waters before some kind of violent splash in order to increase its effect.
Again, those ruminative passages can be disrupting, repetetive, annoying—but still: I loved it. Wasn’t surprised to find myself so engrossed, since I reacted so warmly in the last two readings, but since I came into the book from a more…diagnostic (?) position, and was at the same time noticing its more irksome tics, I didn’t expect to find myself succumbing, in the third act, to what Paul describes as The Gotta—the compulsion one feels, in a great story, to know what happens next.
It’s a short novel, it’d benefit from being a couple dozen pages shorter, I knew its tricks pretty well, going into it, but still, somehow, King worked his magic.
I caught the Gotta.