Jim Lewis: The King is Dead
[Published in PLAYBACK:stl, October 2003]
An impressive, occasionally wandering, often viscerally poetic new novel, Jim Lewis’ The King is Dead (Knopf) is an American tale of family and the bite of love and passion. The book’s split into two parts, the first one tighter and more memorable than the second. But before those, Lewis provides a five-page prelude, stocked with a procession of characters that leads from 1720 England to Chicago, to Philly, to New York, and finally to mid-20th century Memphis, where the book’s main concern, Walter Selby, has just settled. Reading the prelude is like watching a fast-motion mini-movie of the growth of a family tree. Lewis ends the section by putting the brakes on the growth’s speed, preparing us squarely for the simple story that’s ahead: “[Walter] met a woman named Nicole, he loved her more than love knew how; he married her and they had two children, a boy named Frank, and a girl, four years younger, named Gail. This book is their annals, twice-told and twofold.”
It’s a sad, simple story – man loves woman; things turn tragic – and the solidness of the prose (quotes-less dialogue somehow contributes to this) suits the task. But the author’s odd jumps in chronology and character-focus provide a contrast to the story’s simplicity (for better and worse). We first see Walter returning home early from work. His love for Nicole is cast in a single observation: “…her hair was down, and once again he was struck. The man who first burned clay to make china: Wasn’t this what he was after? This face, in age?” But the thrill is tempered when he silently notes her flushed cheeks, dilated pupils, half-hard nipples, and damp palm. What had he missed while at work? “He lay awake for a long time,” Lewis writes, “his arms stretched behind his head, while he pondered the prodigal inching of her blood, and the damp heat of her hand.”
Lewis immediately heads back to the couple’s meeting nine years earlier. Walter sees Nicole in a parking lot after a baseball game, feeling “a notion nudged a little further on by a trace of her perfume, loosened by the passing car from the kingdom beneath her clothes.” Then we’re back even farther to Nicole’s earlier life, a brief section in which the author carves out the memorable supporting character of John Brice, a confident oddball who pursues Nicole from phone booths around town. (“He spoke to her as if he were trying to coax her over a cliff,” Lewis writers.) And then we’re taken to Walter deep in his war days (“He came home half-skinned, with a nice medal to cover his rawness”), then to his hero’s job as a valued aid and speechwriter for the Governor (“He was an inevitable man, and his campaign would be steered by the stars”), another supporting character richly portrayed.
The book’s first part comes to head with two consecutive events: Walter is witness to a morally debilitating tragedy related to his job; then he finds, upon returning home early again, naked evidence that Nicole’s earlier condition was not self-induced. Shattered, he walks back through the house and out to his car. “Helplessly, he started the car again and drove around for a while,” Lewis writes, “going ghostly through intersections and along boulevards, wondering if he would ever have another thought that didn’t feel like it had been wrung from him.” He won’t. But it’s because of the wringing he does with his own hands. Imprisoned for his crime, he writes his brother, “When they are old enough, I want you to tell my son and my daughter that I was not a bad man, but a good man who did a bad thing—whose passion killed his passion’s cause.”
And so part two moves to the children, though primarily to the son, Frank. The narration shifts to the second-person voice of a rambling, bitter Walter, projecting on the children’s post-parents lives and Frank’s uneven career as a Hollywood actor. “They sent you roles and scripts almost every day,” the narration goes, “and they offered you extravagant sums of money, dollars which you consumed the way a whale consumes plankton…” This continues until Walter, whom we can picture behind bars talking to no one, is slobbering insults. “Oh, Frank. You dangling nerve, you poor punch line, you dumb fuck. What went wrong?” I began to wonder the same thing of the book. The story had begun slipping out of the skilled hands of the narrator and into the shaking hands of one of its characters.
Fortunately, this overdone narration ends and the third-person resumes, though it lacks the authoritative stamp of the book’s first part. Part of the problem may be that Lewis reverts back again to long sections of Frank’s early life, and he writes of adolescence less powerfully than he does of those in their working years. Pretty soon, though, we’re back to Frank as an adult, and one of several plots that thicken is the son’s interest in reuniting with his father, now out of prison, dying, and baffled by the world into which he was released. Lewis risks entering cliché territory here, but comes out winningly, shifting between Frank’s search and Walter’s hospital deterioration. Another risk the author takes proves tougher to manage. Continuing a narrative device he introduced in part one, Lewis begins describing scenes not by starting with their central characters, but by taking pages to get there, focusing at length on unnamed characters who live just outside the central characters’ world. To again use the cinematic metaphor, Lewis’ technique is something like a director foregoing the pan-quickly-across-the-room-until-you-hit-the-lead-actor strategy, and instead spending pages with those in the way. This device – the author ‘throwing’ his narrator’s voice – is more interesting than effective, and the hesitation and temporary bewilderment it provides the reader doesn’t have a payoff that’s worth it. (It pays off once, brilliantly, but it’s because it happens quickly. Walter and Nicole are fighting, pre-murder, on a water’s bank: “Lovers in the moonlight, said the voice from the boat. Ain’t that nice…”)
Nearing the novel’s end, with the well-handled attempt at reunion, the reader has more to be grateful for than frustrated by. And what I was most grateful for, and will long remember, is Lewis’ handling of the two subjects that serve as the book’s cause and effect: sex and death. Here’s just one example of the former, when Nicole and Walter are bedroom shopping: “That bed would be worn to a hollow, later by years. That was where he would discover how to make her gasp.….In that bed she would abrade her face on his rough evening stubble until her features burned; they would invent words for rank things and jubilant things; they would sweat and shout….Bed on sugared, sour mornings, where they would turn to each other, turn again, and turn themselves all inside out.”
Lewis’ descriptions of death are equally exceptional in their cruel beauty, and they seem to offer that which no author could really produce on the subject: interior insight. Struggling for her life on the water’s edge, Nicole “could feel her limbs and the back of her head against something hard, unless it was her head that was hard, and she was feeling it through the ground? She said: ?…?…?” And much later, when Walter’s own life is ending, Lewis shows him “reeling in time, closing generations….here on the edge of always.”
If you can stay with Lewis as he occasionally slips from the story at hand, or shifts his focus to those characters not already in our hearts, such stunning writing awaits you.
