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The end
of the world is just beginning.
Synopsis
The general outline of the plot is
fairly simple. An accident occurs in an Army lab doing research on
biological warfare. A virus breaks through the isolation barrier and
rapidly causes the death of nearly everyone working in the plant. There is
one survivor, however, who walks past the failed security apparatus, races
home to his wife and child, bundles them into the car and speeds toward
the Texas border. By the time they reach a gas station in Texas, he is
very ill and his wife and daughter have died a horrible death that leaves
their bodies bloated, blackened and stinking.
Of course, the
handful of people at the gas station are also contaminated and they, in
turn, pass on the virus to others in a macabre chain of association that
is described in loving detail, like a parody of the circulation of money
(the perennial bad penny) or a mammoth game of pin the tail on the donkey.
From Texas to Maine, Los Angeles to New York, in a gruesome variation on
the refrain of ''This Land Is Your Land,'' the superflu spreads, causing
its victims at first merely to sniffle and sneeze but soon after to expire
in paroxysms of pain and burning fever. (The AIDS epidemic had not been
identified when Mr. King originally wrote this book. What in 1978 might
have looked like a fantastic exaggeration, in 1990 still appears
statistically exaggerated but, sadly, not so fantastic.) Hundreds of pages
of text are devoted to vignettes - some poignant, nearly all disgusting -
of Americans in all regions and walks of life being stopped in the tracks
of their ordinary existence by the dread and incurable disease. Two things
make Mr. King's rendering of this phenomenon peculiar, one might almost
say original. The first is the sheer number of cases reported and
described. At first, you read along expecting things to change, a cure to
be found, an escape to be discovered, but after 300 or more pages it
becomes clear that variations on one theme - not progress - are the
novelist's plan.
The second thing that makes these vignettes, and
indeed the entire novel, peculiar is that the characters and situations
are virtually all reproductions of American cultural icons. ''L.A. Law''
meets ''The Wizard of Oz''; ''On the Road'' meets ''The Grapes of Wrath'';
''Rebel Without a Cause'' meets ''Walden''; Li'l Abner gets lost in the
House of Usher; Huck Finn finds Rambo. The New England we see is Norman
Rockwell's; the West is John Wayne's. They are often pointed out, lest the
reader miss them. ''She looked like a woman from an Irwin Shaw novel'' or
''It's like Bonnie and Clyde'' are common interjections from the narrator
and the characters. At the same time, neither comic parody nor a Joycean
complexity is at work here. The reproduction of the familiar seems instead
a kind of corporate raid, a literary equivalent of a megamonopoly in which
the new owner parades brand names to show off the extent and importance of
the newly purchased domain.
Everything is processed through a
gigantic American meat grinder. Just as foreign monuments become a
''Leaning Tower of Pizza'' or ''the Forbidden City Cafe,'' so the names
and words of writers from other parts of the world are reproduced,
respelled and repronounced. An admiring general turns Yeats into Yeets:
''He said that things fall apart. He said the center doesn't hold. I
believe he meant that things get flaky. . . . That's what I believe he
meant. Yeets knew that sooner or later things get . . . flaky around the
edges even if he didn't know anything else.''
The few healthy
characters seem not just to have survived the plague; they have also
survived a rough-and-tumble translation from another medium. There is a
Woody Allen look- and sound-alike: a New York songwriter with a sassy
mother, who nags and pampers her successful and neurotic son during one of
his rare visits home. There is a Jane Fonda character from Maine who is
gutsy, beautiful, bursting with aerobic energy and slightly pregnant. And
there is the hero, a strong, silent Texan, an amalgam of Gary Cooper and
Kevin Costner. When the virus eventually peters out, after having done
away with what appears to be most of the population, these and a few
others gradually converge on the road, with their battered motorcycles,
jalopies, slick sports cars and stolen bicycles, or just tramp exhaustedly
from empty town to empty town in search of life and some place to start
over.
Boulder, Colo., turns out to be the point of convergence for
these friendly and cinematically familiar survivors and some dozens of
others like them. No sooner do they find one another than they begin
planning a government. Someone suggests a meeting in which they all ratify
the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution and the
Bill of Rights. Another objects that this is unnecessary since ''we're all
Americans.'' But, it is quickly explained, government is really an
''idea,'' and the reality of a democracy no longer exists: ''The President
is dead, the Pentagon is for rent, nobody is debating anything in the
House or the Senate except maybe for the termites and the
cockroaches.''
It is all too shockingly and heavy-handedly clear
that such statements - literally accurate within the plot of the novel -
could (like the deadly virus) serve as metaphors for the dangerous and
deplorable state of things in this country. However, rather than analysis
or narrative development, there is a prophetic and programmatic
explanation: a satanic figure, who has gathered his evil forces in Las
Vegas, Nev. (where else?), has been haunting the American dream with
fearful nightmares. He must be stopped. A few handpicked heroes, macho
males from ''Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid'' or ''The Longest Day,''
scramble over dangerous, desolate terrain to get him, but are saved the
trouble when he and his minions melt, like the Wicked Witch of the West,
in a nuclear accident.
In short (well, not so short), this is the
book that has everything - adventure, romance, prophecy, allegory, satire,
fantasy, realism, apocalypse, etc., etc. Even Roger Rabbit gets mentioned.
''The Stand'' does have some great moments and some great lines. A
desperate character trying to save his mother reaches an answering
machine: ''This is a recording made at Mercy General Hospital. Right now
all of our circuits are busy.'' And there is a wonderful description of
''mankind's final traffic jam.'' But the overall effect is more oppressive
than imposing. -- Robert Kiely, New York Times
Quotes from the
Book
"That
wasn't any act of God. That was an act of pure human fuckery."
"M-O-O-N, that spells moon. Laws, yes."
"Life
was such a wheel that no man could stand upon it for long. And it always,
at the end, came round to the same place again."
"What
kind of world was it where God would trap a person like a bug in a puddle
of gasoline? A world that deserved to burn, that was what."
"Show
me a man or a woman alone and I'll show you a saint. Give me two and
they'll fall in love. Give me three and they'll invent the charming thing
we call 'society'. Give me four and they'll build a pyramid. Give me five
and they'll make one an outcast. Give me six and they'll reinvent
prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they'll reinvent warfare. Man
may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the
image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back
home." |
