Review: Stephen King's The Body: Bookmarked

Ig Publishing's Bookmarked series features writers contemplating the literature that has made deep impressions on their lives and work. Aaron Burch's entry is Stephen King's The Body, a brief but incisive consideration of King's novella and Burch's life in ways that surprise the author and intrigue the reader.

"The Body" is one of four novellas in King's Different Seasons (which also includes "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption"). It is perhaps better known for the film adaptation, 1986's Stand by Me. Burch's lifelong fascination began with the movie; he writes here about coming later to King's written work as he becomes a reader, a writer and a teacher. King's protagonist, Gordie Lachance, is also a writer and very much resembles King himself. The layers of meta-awareness continue in Stephen King's The Body: Burch refers to his writing of the book and to its earlier drafts.

"The Body" is a Bildungsroman circling themes of friendship, nostalgia and loss as four childhood friends trek cross-country to view the dead body of a boy their age. Burch explores these themes with tenderness and sentiment, even as he resists the latter. Although "The Body" and Stand by Me provide the framework for Burch's contemplation, his work is at least as much self-reflective memoir or personal essay as it is literary criticism. As he writes, his marriage looks to be breaking apart--a parallel Burch forces himself to confront. The two processes, writing and considering a marriage, prompt a direct gaze into difficult truths, but as King writes (as Gordie Lachance): "The most important things are the hardest to say." This is a recurring sentiment in Burch's slim book, where he earnestly attempts to address those hard things.

Burch exposes himself as a striking character who has a complicated relationship with art--the art he produces (up until now, only fiction) and the art he enjoys. He is an unlikely writer of literary criticism, with his resistance to considering authorial intent, and purposefully avoids behind-the-scenes perspectives on his favorite works. "It can be fun to take apart a magic trick and figure out how it actually works, but it also ruins the magic of the trick." Having pushed himself, however, Burch is surprised to find his venture into literary criticism extraordinarily enlightening.

Burch elaborates on King's themes of loss and friendship with those of transitions, of firsts: first date, first kiss, first job, first road trip. As Gordie (or King) writes, "There's a high ritual to all fundamental events... the rites of passage, the magic corridor where the change happens." The beauty of Stephen King's The Body is in Burch entering that magic corridor, and splitting the experience wide open--uncomfortably, even--for the reader to study with him. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Shelf Talker: A writer's examination of the writing that shaped him--even reluctantly--yields layers of self-awareness.

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