NYT: Maslin on Stephen King's latest

Lisey’s Story - Stephen King - Books - Review - New York Times: "This sentence is about to do the unthinkable: connect James Joyce and Stephen King. The comparison is not made for reasons of poetry, audacity or soul-searching: Mr. Joyce has a definite leg up in all those departments. But Mr. King has delivered his version of Joycean wordplay, idiosyncrasy, voluptuousness and stubborn, obsessive chronology in “Lisey’s Story.”

Here is a tender, intimate book that makes an epic interior journey without covering much physical terrain. It can move great distances while traveling no further than from a house (home to lonely Lisey Landon, the widow of a Writer �la King) to its neighboring barn (the late writer’s “mostly benign one-boy clubhouse”). The scope sounds modest, yet this book is haunting even by Mr. King’s standards. And he knows a thing or two about haunting.

This is no occasion to make great literary claims for Mr. King, or even to exalt his linguistic experimentation. His use of language in “Lisey’s Story” is so larded with baby talk that it borders on the pathological. Here is a writer who has a thousand ways of naming a toilet, and whose work can thus be an acquired taste. But “Lisey’s Story” transcends the toidy-talk to plumb thoughts of love, mortality and madness — and to deliver them with gale-force emotion. When Mr. King writes in a coda to this blunt but stunning book that “much here is heartfelt, very little is clever,” he is telling the truth."