Superiority Through Characterization
I read Stephen King’s The Institute and Robert Glick’s Two Californias recently. The former isn’t that great, while the later is outstanding, and the reason for that is characterization.
I’m not going to write an introductory essay on the elements of story—the Internet and your local library and book store are full of resources that explain these better than I have the patience to do. However, before I get into these two books, I want to briefly explain why characterization allows one of them to putter out, while the other soars.
Typically when we think about the elements of story, we think of:
Plot
Setting
Character
Point-of-view
Theme
They’re all important, but in my view character is the critical one, standing above the others. Everything flows from character.
Plot, setting, point-of-view, and theme are all just window dressing for character. No one gives a shit about a story without compelling characters.
Well I don’t, anyway. Maybe you do. But then you’d be wrong, and since this is my site, I get to claim whatever the hell I want.
I got around to finishing Stephen King’s The Institute this weekend. It’s an alright book. He’s written better (Pet Sematary and The Shining come to mind as among his best when thinking about character, perhaps as well as Duma Key and The Dark Tower series).
The Institute (Scribner, 2019)
The Institute has a huge cast, like many of King’s stories, and it’s full of characters you love as well as ones you despise—but they’re boring, even if fully realized.
It’s an entertaining read, but I’m hesitant to give it a glowing endorsement. The character arc for each is relatively flat. The ‘good guys’ and the ‘bad guys’ are immediately known, and there’s little in the way of development beyond those definitions. Luke Ellis, the youth protagonist, develops from a fairly weak child to one full of agency, hate, and adult intelligence, but that doesn’t make his character complex. Compare that to Jack Torrance and you immediately understand what I mean. King understands this as well, which is part of why he hated Kubrick’s adaption so much: the Torrance family had no arc in the movie.
Part of the fun for my own writing is coming up with characters that readers fall in love with, and then making them do things to betray that love. There are few things more satisfying than writing a ‘good guy’ that successfully turns into a villain.
In stark comparison to The Institute is Robert Glick’s Two Californias (C&R Press, 2019).
Two Californias (C&R Press, 2019)
Full disclosure: Robert Glick is a dear friend of mine, but his writing stands completely on his own. He’s a tenured professor of English at the Rochester Institute of Technology and has publishing street cred like no one’s business: The Normal School, Denver Quarterly, Black Warrior Review, and The Gettysburg Review. Enough said.
The back of Two Californias reads:
From the suburbs of Los Angeles to the countercultures of the Bay Area, the emotionally powerful, intricately woven stories in Two Californias explore the unexpected and unorthodox ways we come to terms with everyday tragedies.
This is not genre fiction. There’s not too much by way of setting, and the plot for each story is interesting but not usually much more. But where Glick kicks ass and takes names is the masterful way he’s written his characters. In such tight spaces does Glick do remarkably heavy lifting. For instance, the opening story “In the Room / Memory is / White,” which first appeared in The Normal School (The Normal School Normal Prize for fiction, judged by Margot Livesey), describes the collapsing marriage of a doctor who cheated on his pregnant wife and their neglected young son, Jacob. She gets an abortion, and the husband is not happy about it. Observe:
If he doesn’t know what he wants, then how can what comes out of his mouth not be a lie? It’s such curious math, he thinks—not having any idea how that phrase came to him—that he wants this life, this marriage, but not this configuration.
What’s worse, he has no idea what to change. So he’s a liar every word of the way.
The walls are painted blue and pink. Why? It’s disgusting for this kind of office. The goldfish sleep behind the small, rust-colored treasure chest. Dr. Mulhouse lets the oxygen bubbles mesmerize him. In groups of two and three, they rise through the tank and, at the surface, explode.
Dr. Mulhouse is the cheating husband. I’m not going to break this down for you—that would be like forcing open the petals of a flower—but maybe read it again, and let it sit with you.
Here’s another example from the same story. In this moment, Jacob’s babysitter, Dorian, is considering what all of this is doing to the boy:
If Jacob were her egg, like the unboiled one she had to care for in Home Economics, what would she do? She put her egg in a small basket for strawberries and lined the sides with hay to protect it. It’s not her place, but maybe she should say something to Dr. and Mrs. Mulhouse. She would say, I think you need to put more hay in the basket.
And finally, again from the same story:
All in all, despite the fact that Mrs. Mulhouse didn’t leave written instructions and Dorian had to ask for their phone number in case of emergency, the Mulhouses seemed pleasant enough.
These excerpts just hit you. There’s so much packed into each one, so much detail revealed about the characters, their mindsets, their priorities.
as the back cover promises, Glick explores “the unexpected and unorthodox ways we come to terms with everyday tragedies” in sublime fashion.
Is it horror? Not strictly speaking, no. I’m doubtful many—including Glick himself—would categorize it as such. But as I’ve long advocated, horror comes about in many different ways to many different people, and there’s something horrifying in the subtle ways many of the characters in Two Californias treat each other. So while I’m hesitant to recommend The Institute (unless you wanted a good example of poor characterization, despite how well each is fleshed out), written by the King of horror, I enthusiastically recommend Two Californias, written by a dude who taught a class on zombies.