A L S O+.T O D A Y

The King of death
By Andrew O'Hehir
Andrew O'Hehir peers into the terrifying world of one of our most important writers -- and recommends five Stephen King novels for newcomers

Bag of Bones
Reviewed by Andrew O'Hehir
Sex, death, shambling ghosts -- this is Stephen King territory, all right. But this tale of a tortured romance novelist is a surprisingly mature, nuanced work

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Ghost Town
Reviewed by Allen Barra
In this funny, phantasmagorical book -- sometimes the hero is an outlaw, sometimes he's the sheriff -- Robert Coover re-imagines the Western novel

T A B L E+T A L K

Great book. Awful cover. Weigh in on judging the book by its content, but the publisher by its cover, in the Books area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Richard Powers
By Laura Miller
(07/23/98)

Ken Kalfus
By Dwight Garner
(07/23/98)

Richard Price
By Dwight Garner
(05/13/98)

Isaac Bashevis Singer
By Norman Green
(04/28/98)

Dorothy Allison
By Laura Miller
(03/31/98)

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INTERVIEW ARCHIVE

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_____T H E_.S A L O N_.I N T E R V I E W
_____Stephen King

The horror master talks about the latent violence of males, childhood terror and an "odious little man" named Kenneth Starr.

BY ANDREW O'HEHIR | Stephen King spoke with Salon Wednesday afternoon, via telephone, from his publisher's office in New York.

There's a relationship in "Bag of Bones" between a middle-aged man and a much younger woman, and it's presented in strongly unfavorable terms. I was wondering if that reflects your views about that, and how it relates to current events.

You're the first person to ask me that question, about Mike's relationship with Mattie. And I'd say that what I presented, I presented from the viewpoint of a 50-year-old man who's been happily married and happily monogamous for the entire course of that marriage. But certainly, we'll be driving along the street and my wife will say to me, "What are you looking at?" And she knows perfectly well what I'm looking at. There'll be some cute little girl on the other side of the street, maybe 22 years old, wearing shorts and a mini-top. And I'll always tell her what my brother used to tell me: "A man on a diet can read a menu." But there is a real attraction in guys my age to women who are younger. It's a male version of the body clock, where women start to look at babies and want one as they get older. Because you get to a stage in your life where it just becomes a biological imperative. It's probably your body's way of saying, "You've only got so many years left where you're viable as a reproductive entity. Hurry up!" And that comes later with men than it does with women, because we last longer as reproductive entities.

As far as it applies to the president of the United States, which I assume is what you're intending, the man has clearly got serious problems with controlling his sexual urges. I don't think that this is a substantive issue in his presidency, and basically there are a lot of right-wing groups in this country that want to see him impeached for adultery. I'm sorry, adultery is not an impeachable offense. The lying that he did was the sort of lying that anybody does when they've been caught in an embarrassing sexual situation. And that's not substantive in terms of his constitutional duties. Ken Starr is an odious little man who is trying to justify all the money that he's spent by finding anything that's dirty on this guy. And God knows, sexually speaking, Clinton's hands are not clean. But the American people knew what he was when they hired him. The crucial difference between Mike Noonan -- a 40-year-old man who's attracted to a 20-year-old woman -- and Bill Clinton is that Bill Clinton was a 50-year-old man attracted to a 21-year-old girl. But even that, I don't exactly have a problem with. They're both consenting adults. They didn't catch Clinton with a 9-year-old, did they? The problem is that Bill Clinton is married, simple as that. The man is married. But whether he's married or whether he's single, it's not an impeachable offense. It's not the end of the world.

To get back to "Bag of Bones," you seem to be suggesting that the kind of attraction Mike feels for Mattie, and that she feels toward him, creates an imbalance that presents the opportunity for bad things to happen. Do you think that happens in real life?

I don't think it really happens. I think that what Mike feels, particularly in this case ... Here's a guy that's been grieving for four years. It's been raining in his life for four years. And she's the first ray of sunshine that he sees. He's sexually attracted to her -- she's young, she's beautiful, she's vivacious, she has all of that energy. What he sees in her is a kind of joyfulness. And I certainly react very positively to that.

Mike says to himself that just because you want something, you don't necessarily have the right to have it. Not every thirst should be slaked.

That's the married man's philosophy. It's gotta be.

That's an interesting thing to appear in a novel now, when there is almost a guiding ethos that you're supposed to take whatever you want from life.

Well, we have a problem both ways. The foreign press around the world will look at the situation we're going through right now and their reaction -- and that of a lot of American people, including myself -- is to throw up your hands and say, "Oh, please -- get over it. This is a juvenile preoccupation. People are starving in Africa. People are killing each other in Africa. Stop worrying about Monica Lewinsky's thong panties."

I won't give away how you resolve the issue between Mike and Mattie. But in the book Mike sees the resolution of this dilemma as an unsatisfying novelist's trick. How do you plead to that charge?

I plead guilty and not guilty at the same time. The situation that Mike is in is a melodramatic one. You have to ask yourself, What happens to these relationships when, say, the man is 60 and the woman is 40? Or when the man is 80 and the woman is 60? In several of the reviews of "Bag of Bones," people have said, about Mattie, that she's an unformed character -- that she's not as satisfying as some of the other characters in the book. Well, I'm sorry, but when you have a 20-year-old girl who lives in a trailer, who's been married since the age of 17 and widowed a couple of years later, who's trying to sort of scrape by -- that is not the stuff of which fascinating, paradoxical, bewitching characters are made. So, I did the best with it that I could. What I'm saying is, you get married, or you have a relationship, you have weeks, months, maybe a year of delirious sex. Then one morning you come down at breakfast and you look at each other and you say, "What do I talk about?" In the course of "Bag of Bones," as you say, we won't give this away, but that situation is resolved. I have a lot of questions about the way the situation is resolved, and I think I express them in the book.

N E X T+P A G E+| Is there a killer inside every man?