10 STEPHEN KING IS SHOCKED

      9 September 2015.

      It was like being at a Cup Final. Or a rock festival. Or a riot. There was a kind of hysteria in the air. Tribal passions. When the mob stood up and cheered I had to stand up with them, for fear of getting my teeth kicked in. (What is wrong with you, man?!) I didn’t want anybody to think I was rooting for the other side.

      Which is odd, really. Because it was just a couple of guys speaking at Harvard. You’d think it would be reasonably civilized. Hushed. Orderly. But not when the two guys are Stephen King and Lee Child. To some extent you can blame Jonathan Franzen for the fervour. Even though he wasn’t there. Or Professor Harold Bloom at Yale. The opposition.

      Lee and King were sitting up on stage together, in armchairs, to talk about books. Specifically one book, Make Me. But they were also fomenting revolt. They were overthrowing an intellectual empire in a way that reminded me of the old Revolutionary war: wild colonial boys versus the masters. Now it is pop fiction versus the literary ancien régime. Were this crowd applauding words? No, not really. They were baying for blood, they wanted heads on pikes, the massacre of the literati. What I was witnessing was a full-blown Readers’ Revolt. It felt a little like watching Danton and Robespierre having a conversation in front of the pro-guillotine Committee of Public Safety.

In the midst of all this inarticulate frenzy, I almost missed the headline news: King announced that he – the implacable author of fifty-odd novels, many of them almost physically unbearable – had been ‘shocked’ by the surprise ending of Make Me. Then he added, just in case anyone should misunderstand, ‘The new one is absolutely fuckin’ fantastic.’ I think it’s fair to say that King is a fan. In his novel Mr Mercedes, the bad guy pulls a Lee Child book out of his backpack; in another, Under the Dome, Major Reacher, ‘the toughest goddam Army cop that ever served’, provides a character reference.

      Stephen King had just received the National Medal of Arts. Quite a big deal. It’s like being appointed Secretary of State; you have to be vetted to make sure nothing too embarrassing is going to come out later. Previous recipients include John Updike, Philip Roth, Maya Angelou. The next day King was flying down to DC to have the medal – hilariously massive – hung around his neck, like an Olympic champion, by President Obama. Lee nicely said it was ‘the crowning achievement of his administration’. Only a day or so before, Lee had been writing the sentence about giving Jack Reacher a medal. A strange synchronicity between two writers. A medal for writing. For services to the nation. (I checked: Lee didn’t know anything about it when he started writing Night School; yet somehow, mysteriously, it still leaked into the Reacher story.)

      The Sanders Theater auditorium is massive, on three separate levels, with room for a thousand. And it was packed. More people than I have ever seen at a book signing in my life. The actual queue of readers lining up to get their copy of Make Me autographed by the author was not just long: it had strata, like a millefeuille. People at the back must have been in line for hours. They may still be there. I don’t know because I left to catch the last train back to New York (and I missed the train too). That queue was like a giant boa constrictor that wanted to eat Lee.

Altogether mysterious, and if I was Jack Reacher I would suspect there was some terrible conspiracy going on behind the scenes. Turns out there was. Except it was out in the open now. Call it The Revenge of the Reader. Or The Reader Strikes Back. What is Stephen King? A writer of horror stories, thrillers, science fiction? No. He is first and foremost a patriot. Like a latter-day Mark Twain or Walt Whitman, he sings the Song of America. From ‘I Was a Teenage Grave-Robber’ (his first published story) to Finders Keepers, at the core of even his most terrifying works there is (buried in there somewhere, like one of his bodies that just won’t lie down in Pet Sematary) a celebration of ordinary, everyday life in the United States. Secretly, every one of his books is a utopia. A hymn to a brave new world. (Or at least it could be if not for mad axemen, zombies, aliens, serial killers, man-eating cars, etc., etc.) Think of The Green Mile, for example. Even Death Row is a place of wonders. It seems appropriate that he likes to write while listening to loud rock music (notably Metallica and Guns ’n’ Roses).

      ‘You’re British,’ said King. (This got a big cheer by the way.) ‘But you really know America – I mean, in a loving sort of way.’ Which is true. Lee fell in love with America aged five when he came across a book at the public library in Birmingham called My Home in America. He married an American girl. He lives in Manhattan. He said that the thing that inspired him was something Brian Epstein had once said to the Beatles, in Paris, following some transatlantic phone-call, back in the sixties: ‘YOU’RE NUMBER ONE IN AMERICA!’ Lee said. ‘My plan A was to become one of the Beatles. But this is the next best thing.’ He’s an adopted Child.

      Jack Reacher drops out of the army to become a drifter vigilante hero. But the key thing is that he criss-crosses the whole of the United States, like an old troubadour roaming around Occitania. He loves it good or bad. In fact bad is good as far as he’s concerned. It gives him something to do. He might just get bored otherwise. But Lee also loves the ‘nothingness’, what Jean Baudrillard called ‘the desert of the real’. ‘I was driving through west Texas,’ he said. ‘It’s uninhabited according to the official census. Fewer than five people to the square mile, it’s “uninhabited”. I drove for 80 miles without seeing a single construction. Eventually I spoke to one woman on a farm. She said she had to drive five hours to buy anything she hadn’t grown or killed herself. And five hours back again.’

      Reacher has to be huge (6ʹ5ʺ and 250 lbs) because he encompasses a continent. He loves the weirdness of America. He embraces it. I overheard a guy in the row in front of me trying to sum up the works of Lee Child for another guy, a Reacher virgin. I thought he nailed it: ‘Reacher is, like, so totally …’

Not so, Jonathan Franzen and Harold Bloom. They are the opposite of so totally. They have a European slant to their writing. Elitist. They think most Americans are stupid. Franzen refuses to go on the Oprah show because it’s too down-market for his taste. He bad-mouths tweeters and social media. Harold Bloom, self-appointed guardian of the ‘western canon’, has gone on record as saying that awarding anything to Stephen King, a writer of ‘penny dreadfuls’, is nothing but ‘a testimony to [the] idiocy’ of the awarding committee. He didn’t flat out say King was an idiot and all his readers were idiots too, but he might as well have done.

      Bloom and Franzen, to be fair to them, are fighting a rearguard action on behalf of what can loosely be called the Untranslatable. They want to preserve Anything That Cannot Be Made into a Movie (especially one starring Tom Cruise). King and Lee, on the other hand, are modern mythologians. Lee is a serious writer, even if he denies it publicly, in a line-by-line way (try reading one of his books slowly – yes, put it down, come back to it, savour those sentences, short though they may be). But Lee’s and King’s stories and characters, like the ancient myths, don’t belong to any particular form. They are essentially oral and translate into any medium. (‘I’m in!’ said that other guy, by the way, in response to the ‘So totally …’ ‘Can’t wait to see the movie!’) Try making Purity into a movie. It would be worse than that Thomas Pynchon film, Inherent Vice. (What