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Christine
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Christine
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A Novel Critique / 2006 Update
Note: I originally wrote my review for Christine when I was twenty-one and had only read the book twice. On the other side of my fifth re-read (and on the darker side of thirty-one), I decided to write a new, hopefully better review. Thanks for reading!
The thing that’s always amazed me about Christine is how it’s held in such low esteem. No one ever comes out and calls it a bad book, per se, but it’s generally considered one of King’s more “minor” works; amusing in its own right, but in no way approaching the epic dynamics of, say, The Stand, or It.
Upon a fresh re-read of the book, however, I have to disagree. Certainly the scope is narrower than that of one of King’s larger novels, but that doesn’t make it any less important. What King has done with Christine is taken a fairly standard storyline with fairly standard characters and made it something far more interesting than the sum of its component parts.
Let’s start with the plot, which borders on ludicrous: boy meets car, boy falls in love with car, car turns out to be a homicidal killing machine. Pretty dumb, right? Then we have our players: at the core of our book, there’s a brainy nerd with an emasculating mother, a lothario jock who plays football and drinks beer, and a girl who exists almost primarily to be the love interest – a girl without flaws (the sheer improbability of such a girl is even remarked upon in the text.) So, at the outset, we have stock characters and an outlandish plot; really, why should this be interesting?
Because Christine plays to King’s greatest strengths: making broad characters human and making the unbelievable real. The nerd in question, Arnie Cunningham, is certainly brainy and certainly a loser (King loves his losers) … but he’s also a brilliant mechanic. That these two seemingly incongruent sides of Arnie’s personality should seem to gel so easily – to make perfect sense, given the circumstances – is a testament to King’s writing. That Arnie turns out to be funny and, oddly enough, charming, fleshes out the character even more. A generic loser we wouldn’t have cared about, but King infuses Arnie with an actual unique and quirky personality, so that when the bad stuff starts to happen, we care about him … and fear for him.
Dennis, as his best friend, is even more well-drawn, mainly because we get to spend more time in his head. The first and third parts of Christine are written from a first-person point of view (the second is third-person omniscient, though a brief aside in part three seems to indicate that Dennis wrote that, as well, piecing it together from stories and supposition. King found the interruption of viewpoint jarring, stating that it nearly ruined the book for him, but I like the change. It lends the book an off-kilter feel that I believe works in the book’s favor.), and as such we get a relatable hero who, like the reader, can only watch in horror as Arnie’s relationship with his car goes from bad to worse. That this jock-character turns out to be the sentimental heart of the book – not to mention the bright, intelligent narrator – is something of a revelation. That Dennis (who spends the first third of the book building a sense of compassion for himself and Arnie, as well as being our tour guide into the nightmare that is Christine) can be so brutally taken out of the action this early serves to remind us that the horror in this book – as in so many other King novels – can strike randomly and without warning. And once the horror starts, it is unrelenting.
But also like other King novels, in Christine, horror is only part of the thrust; I won’t go so far as to say that the horror here is beside the point (that seems almost sheepishly apologetic), but I will say that it might not be the main point. There are several instances where Dennis makes reference to this time period – the senior year of high school for our heroes – as being the end of a long, quiet era. Instead of looking ahead to college and life beyond, almost all the characters seem to dwell on the past … a past that is slowly but inexorably becoming lost to them. Arnie’s parents only want Arnie the way he was before he met Christine: under their thumb and bending to their will. As the situation escalates and Arnie becomes someone even Dennis doesn’t recognize, he, Dennis, begins to remember what Arnie was like when they were kids, and how much better life was then. At several points in the book, Will Darnell – owner of the garage Arnie keeps Christine at – reminisces to excess about the only good time in his miserable life. Even the villains, especially Buddy Repperton, who is the author of most of Arnie’s pain before Christine gets her hooks in him, attempt to stay trapped in their “glory days,” remaining in high school long after they should have graduated. In this way, Christine herself becomes the ultimate metaphor: a car from a long-gone era that spontaneously regenerates, assuring a state of perpetual present. The real terror comes from the concept that things can always remain the same; Christine and her revenant previous owner, the ghastly Roland D. LeBay, go to great lengths to try to keep everything exactly the same. Often, and most chillingly, these lengths are lethal.
Early in the book, Dennis calls his story a tragedy; the book has a somewhat simple through-line, during which doom encroaches and then settles in, marching toward an inevitable end. But Christine never feels as dependent upon coincidence as Cujo does: though we sense the fates of our main characters, the payoffs never feel rote or pre-scripted. It’s important to note that even after being explicitly prepared for the worst, the worst still surprises.
One question I continue to have about the book is where the evil comes from: is it LeBay, who definitely haunts the car as well as Arnie, or is it Christine herself? At one point, King refers to Christine’s terrible “female force” and hints that there might be a demon living inside the machinery; at other points, LeBay seems to be the sole culprit. My guess is that it’s somewhere in between: Christine was malevolent from the beginning, but LeBay’s force of will – his unending fury (King’s obvious but wonderful recurring phrase) – fueled her.
One final point: in King’s early career, he often explored the lives of young children; in his later, he focused more on grown adults. Christine is one of the very few novels in which he looks at the social structures and inner lives of teenagers. It is an improvement on Carrie and is only improved upon much later in the novella “Hearts in Atlantis,” from the collection of the same name. In this way – and in scores of others – Christine is unique and satisfying. While it might be a quieter novel than some of King’s grander experiments, Christine is not one to be dismissed.
A Novel Critique / 1998 Version
The book Christine begins unusually for a Stephen King novel, that is, in the first person. Earlier, King had used this point of view only once in a full-length novel: the Bachman book Rage (then titled Getting It On.) Later on, he would employ the viewpoint effectively in the remarkable prose peice Dolores Claiborne, the multipart novel The Green Mile, and the simply amazing Bag of Bones. But only here does King skew the viewpoint, warping it into the third person omnicient in the second half of the book, bringing on a certain schizophrenic quality that may have been missing had the book been told straight through. King has mentioned in interviews that he had written himself into a box; what he wanted to do with the book simply could not have been done in the first person. He goes on to say that the shift almost ruined the book.
King is being too hard on himself (as he would be in later interviews deconstructing It). The POV shift brings out the stark reality of the bleak tale; now, instead of hearing Arnie Cunningham's sad story from one sorrowful voice (his friend Dennis Guilder's), we hear it from all sides, bringing the tragedy down around us.
The novel begins simply enough. Arnie, the prototypical geek with nerdy glasses, pimples, and no social life outside of Guilder, falls in love. But it's not with a woman; it's with a 1958 Plymouth Fury named Christine. And Christine is no ordinary car, either. She's got a life all her own, and that life is cold, dark, and jealous.
She inhabits Arnie as he inhabits her, and she becomes his obsession. As the car brings about some good (his pimples are rapidly fading and he finds confidence to ask the new girl in school, Leigh Cabot, out on a date), most of what Christine delivers is evil. Arnie's enimies start being run over and killed. His familial relationship explodes from its normal complacency into a feverish war of wills. Even Dennis becomes distant.
Now you ask, is Christine haunted? Maybe. We know the Fury's previous owner, Roland LeBay, was a mean spirited man who also made the car his obsession. We also know that his daughter, Rita, choked to death in it. So, does his spirit haunt Christine? Maybe. The fact that LeBay's daughter chokes (or is choked) to death while LeBay is still alive may lead us to choose the idea that Christine was malevolant the moment she rolled out of the factory.
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My aunt Marge gave me my first copy of Christine for Christmas of 1991. She wrote, "I liked this, I hope you do," inside.
Now, barring the fact that she had the audacity to write in a Stephen King book(!), I agree totally with her. Christine is on my Stephen King Top 10, which surprises many fans and critics, because it is "widely accepted" that Christine is "midrange King." I think the complexity and layers of Christine approach that of the dark chambers of The Dead Zone or It, I wholly identified with the main characters' fears and passions, which was why the tragedy was so heartfelt for me.
I highly reccomend this book.
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The same people who dismiss the novel Christine out of hand dismiss the movie in a similar way. Even those who praise King's high complexity and literate worth in other works, damn Christine here, saying, "But it's about a haunted car!"
John Carpenter's direction is superb, and Keith Gordon portrays Arnie so eerily perfect it's impossible to imagine anyone else in this role. Three scenes stand out:
1. When Arnie gets into Christine, talking to her, holding her steering wheel as Johnny Ace's "Pledging My Love" plays in the background is wonderfully, terribly, poignient.
2. Arnie's definition of love given to Dennis on New Year's Eve is scarier than any "car scenes" in the film.
And 3, when Arnie and Leigh find Christine battered, Arnie begins to fix the plastic around one of the mirrors obsessively, desperately. The hopeless love in his eyes can actually be felt. Reccomended!
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And the Burg.
->"What was it? [...] An ordinary car that had somehow become the dangerous, stinking dwelling-place of a demon? A weird manifestation of Lebay's lingering personality, a hellish haunted house that rolled on Goodyear rubber?"
"This special edition of CHRISTINE is limited
to 1,000 copies, signed by the author ans artist. This is copy _____."