Our relentless Dark-Tower-related Stephen King marathon continues. This is one of the strangest books I've read. Billed as "new fiction" on the cover, it is not a novel, nor is it a short story collection. It contains five different works, all loosely related through recurring characters.
The first is basically a novel of its own. "Low Men in Yellow Coats", a coming-of-age story set in 1960 with a supernatural twist, sees eleven-year-old Bobby Garfield saving up money for a bike while his widowed mother tries to make her way in a man's world. He meets Ted Brautigan, an old man with a secret who nurtures Bobby's love of reading and acts as a father to him, and in the first month of that summer Bobby learns about the hardness of human nature and his own weaknesses. The normal story here is quite good in its own right - Bobby and Carol's innocent first love is beautifully written, the conflict with his mom is emotional and tense, and the climactic scene (of the normal part) is a perfectly written tragedy. The supernatural elements add an interesting flavor, but they barely relate to the rest of the story, other than adding a sense of unreality and claustrophobia as signs of Ted's pursuers - the low men - start to crop up with more frequency until they cannot be escaped.The second piece, "Hearts in Atlantis", is a novella set in a college dorm in 1966. Told in first person, its only relation to "Low Men" is that the narrator falls in love with college-age Carol. The story is more about Vietnam and other crazy 60's college stuff. The main premise - a floor full of freshman become addicted to the card game Hearts to the detriment of their college careers - is pretty interesting, and I enjoyed the story while I was reading it, but now that I think about it, there was a lot of amoral 60's free-love anti-Vietnam glorification going on, making the whole thing a bit gag-worthy in retrospect. There's even a whole "I am Spartacus" stick-it-to-the-man bit at the end, plus a fast-forward-to-today "at least we tried to make a better world, even if we sold out in the end" eulogy. Blech.
Those two works make up the bulk of the book. Two other short stories, "Blind Willie" and "Why We Were in Vietnam", take up the thread in 1983 and 1999, respectively, and actually have something worthwhile to say, along with packing an emotional punch. The concluding piece, "Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling", tries to wrap it all up, and while it was very poignant, it didn't really unify everything that went before the way one might have hoped, and it actually creates some bizarre questions. There are very good moments throughout, but on the whole, Hearts in Atlantis is a bit uneven.
Arbitrary rating: 4 out of 5 innocent first loves
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