"Lisey's Story"

Since "Lisey's Story" is partly meant to be the portrait of a successful marriage, this might seem like more of a problem than it turns out to be. Lisey and Scott -- an aimless woman and a profoundly damaged but imaginative man -- are exactly the kind of couple that forms an unbreakable symbiotic bond because neither is entirely whole alone. He gives her purpose, she gives him stability; together they function like gangbusters. Sure, her role is overly maternal, but that's just garden-variety craziness. A better balanced couple often has fewer reasons to stay hitched.

The real problem with "Lisey's Story" is that it's just believable enough to rub your nose in how unbelievable the rest of it is. The maniac's motivations for attacking Lisey are pretty flimsy (even for a maniac), and the trail of clues left by Scott leads to a "treasure" that's anticlimactic and belies the book's title. The two story lines seem to be connected only by chance -- and by the author's desire to explore Boo'ya Moon. And that's where the metaphor deficit comes in.

King's alternate world has a partial, stage-set quality, but that's OK since it's not meant to be as fully realized as, say, Middle-earth. It's a dream place. A few touches -- namely, the scary ones -- deliver a nice Lovecraftian chill. But the central feature of Boo'ya Moon is a large, magical pool, like an oversize quarry pond, that plays a key role in the unfolding story, and here King gets into trouble.

Some of the descriptions of the pool are arresting. It is very still and has a white sand beach rimmed with "long, curved stone benches." A few people are sitting on them, but not side by side. On the beach, "standing far apart from one another, were four people, two men and two women, staring raptly at the pool. In the water were a half dozen more. No one was swimming. Most were no deeper than their calves; one man was in up to his waist." If you look at the surface of the water for too long, you can fall into a trance and lose track of time, remaining on the beach forever.

All of this has a nice, archetypal resonance, but King can't seem to let it alone to work its magic. He's already explained what the pool stands for in advance, several times, via scenes in which Lisey recalls Scott yammering on about "the word pool" and "the myth pool." Then there's Lisey's opinion on the subject: "it is the pool of life, the cup of imagination ... it's always about a mile deep in the Fairy Forest, and it's always sad. Because imagination isn't the only thing this place is about." We figure out what the other things might be when we learn that "gomers" -- Scott's word for catatonics -- are actually staring at the pool in another world when they seem to be zonked out in this one.

So far, so good; ponds, lakes and oceans are often symbols of the unconscious mind. But King, with the erring, materialistic instinct of the nonmetaphorical writer, gets too wrapped up in the pool as pool. He has Scott talk admiringly of the artists who sail out to the middle of the pool "in their flimsy wooden boats, after the big ones." One of the writers he names is Jane Austen, which conjures up unfortunately hilarious images of Miss Austen, in her pin curls and filmy empire-waist gown, trying to wrestle a swordfish into a boat like Ernest Hemingway. King means well by this, but while all imaginative writing involves some recourse to the unconscious, it's hard to think of a less chthonic novelist than Austen; she speaks with the serene voice of Enlightenment reason.

By the time King reveals that some of the people standing around the pool -- the figures wrapped in shrouds -- are actually dead, confusion sets in; I'm fairly sure dead people don't have unconscious minds. Maybe the pool is meant to be the collective unconscious? But dead people don't really have that, either. Perhaps Boo'ya Moon is what the ancients used to call the Underworld, the Land of the Dead, but in that case, what are all the living people -- like Scott, who could visit it at will -- doing there? Oh, and did I mention that the waters also have miraculous healing properties?

The pool symbol becomes so overworked that it loses most of its potency. King can't let it alone. He has the autodidact's exuberant impulse to toss in every idea that crosses his mind and the outsider's suspicion of tasteful restraint. These aren't necessarily bad traits in a novelist, but they're self-defeating if you want to deliver what A.S. Byatt has called "the shiver of the sublime." That is a matter of distillation, not multiplication. If you want a metaphor to have mythic resonance, you can't explain it to death. Its power lies in the unspoken, subterranean connections between images and abstract ideas. Kafka never has Gregor Samsa stop to tell his family, "You know, my turning into a giant cockroach is all about how monstrously alienated I feel from you and the rest of society." Kafka doesn't have to. And he knows it.

It's not clear whether King just doesn't get this, or he doesn't want to leave behind those of his readers who need to have everything spelled out for them in neon lights. Probably it's a little of both, but at any rate, there's nothing primal or sublime about neon. As it goes along, "Lisey's Story" abandons its interest in the mysteries of intimacy and creation and becomes a cat-and-mouse game with a generic sadistic baddy. How else to get pulse-pounding action out of this novel's quiet premise? As with "From a Buick 8," the genre elements of the novel are perfunctory; you can tell King just doesn't care about the psycho. The climactic confrontation arrives like a dose of the drug an addict can't kick even though it no longer packs a thrill.

What King ostensibly set out to do with "Lisey's Story" -- to portray a symbiotic marriage like the Landons' and to ask what happens when one of the partners dies -- may simply be incompatible with a here-comes-the-boogeyman plot. Or maybe King's just not cut out to combine the two. "Metamorphosis" is about a man who turns into an insect and it's about a man who feels inhuman, at the same time. It's not two stories, but one, inseparable. For King, the story of Lisey's marriage and grief merely occurs in the same book with the story of her adventures in Boo'ya Moon and fending off her persecutor. They don't really reflect meaningfully on each other. When King is writing about clearing out a dead husband's stuff, then he's writing about cardboard boxes and moving vans; when he writes about the long boy and its piebald side, he's writing about a gigantic diabolical tapeworm -- it's either one or the other, not both at once. A cigar is always a cigar.

This is the realism that makes King an effective horror novelist -- effective, that is, in scaring the bejesus out of us when that's what he wants to do. It also allows him to write persuasively about real life and its less exotic trials. So here's a final question for that "Lost" book group: What kind of novel would Stephen King write if he didn't think he had to have the protagonist fighting a supernatural fiend to the death on Page 500? Just asking.

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