By now, readers will understand the extent of his violent nature the first person he murders in "Rose Madder" he literally bites and chews to death. Norman, a man intuitively gifted at surveillance work, goes after her. She takes a bus to a city (modeled on Chicago) 800 miles west, checks into a shelter for battered women, meets a variety of good-hearted people, lucks into a job reading books aloud for audio tapes and gets her own apartment. A few pages and 14 years later, Rose walks out with Norman's ATM card, surprising herself (and Norman) with her courage. Norman Daniels is a policeman, a victim of childhood homosexual abuse that has given him (the author makes clear) a ferociously aggressive hatred of any authority, but particularly of women. The novel begins with a horrifying prologue in which King depicts a miscarriage suffered by a young woman whose husband has just "talked to her up close," his euphemism for a beating. On the other hand, I consumed the last 200 pages of the book at one sitting, and if that doesn't define the term "page-turner," I don't know what does. The novel yearns for a sense of tautness and inevitability.
In fact, at 420 pages, "Rose Madder" is a hundred pages too long. Curiously, his dialogue often falls flat, he sometimes lunges for the cheap effect, and he has a tendency to carry a passage too far.
The author displays his usual facilities and talents he's a crackerjack on quick characterization, a whiz at describing action (especially violence), a virtuoso at setting the scene. King's novel, his 29th, is very clever but not too clever for its own good. In the '50s, terror came from outer space in the '90s, it comes from within.
These issues have become the flying saucers of the 1990s, symptoms of the gigantic unease, alarm and guilt that characterize America in the late 20th century, just as those spinning extraterrestrial trespassers did during the Eisenhower era.Īdvocates of the reality of flying saucers and their opposing skeptics squared off in the 1950s similar stridency and hysteria, though more personally intense, surround discussions today of childhood sexual abuse and domestic violence. The book plumbs the rusty water of our particular fin de siecle's (and end of the millennium's) clogged behavioral sink, childhood sexual abuse and domestic violence. It's not surprising that Stephen King's new novel, "Rose Madder," quickly dashed to the upper rungs of the New York Times best-seller list.
ROSE MADDER, by Stephen King, Viking, $25.95.
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