All the King's Men

This blog was originally intended for those reading along with the list that kicked this journey off. According to this original vision, my entries would be one of many and a conversation would arise between blogs as our different impressions and interpretations came together. To that end, I was only too happy to include spoilers in my entries so that we could discuss the books in as much specific detail as possible.

It now seems that I am the last man standing, as it were, and the few who read my posts read them as a kind of book review. Because of this change, I will be spoiling as little as possible in my following posts. If anyone out there wants to discuss things in detail, please make comments, get down to business, and I will meet you there!

Robert Penn Warren is an amazing writer. I had seen the black and white film version of All the King's Men, but I had never read the book before. It is of course common place to note that a book is better than its cinematic counterpart, but I don't always feel that that is true. If a book is heavily plot-driven, it can typically be made into a successful film because cinema loves action and doing; it can show that vividly and powerfully. My impression of All the King's Men from the movie is that the book is about Willie Stark, the country bumpkin who rises to power as the Governor of an unnamed state, and who then confuses his ambitions for power and for doing good. It is a story of the rise and fall of one man and all the collateral damage that creates. Indeed, even reading the jacket cover of my edition, that is the story that it summarizes.

I was surprised then to find almost halfway into the book that the narrator is not simply Watson to Stark's Holmes, but that he is the very center of the novel. The richness of this story is the richness of the narrator's observations and feelings. The extent to which this is an amazing book, and it is indeed an amazing book, has everything to do with Jack Burden's self-loving, self-loathing, caring, uncaring relationship with himself and the world he operates in. Robert Penn Warren brings everything he has to this book and touches upon so many aspects of humanity that I have no idea how he found anything else to write about in the 40 years of his life that followed the publication of this book.

Jack Burden is straight out of a hard-boiled detective novel. He is world-weary and wise and shocked by nothing. He talks the tough talk and doesn't get emotionally attached. And he watches everything and everyone to see which way things go. The difference is that Jack isn't out to make a buck or save someone's life. Moreover, he has failed relationships with everyone in his life, including himself. And the novel reveals those relationships and Jack's every impulse in amazing detail while never once feeling like the pace of the novel is sagging. Hell, the greater portion of one chapter (and the chapters in the book are rather long) is given over to retelling the story of the life, love, and trials of a distant relative during the civil war who was the subject of Jack's dissertation when he was a graduate student of history. It has nothing to do with Willie Stark and yet everything to do with the concerns of the novel and the relationships that boil at its center.

This novel is about good and bad and the good bad people can do and the bad good people can do. It's about the utter uselessness of concepts of good and bad when applied to people. The novel manages to do what so many other storytellers have tried and failed: it presents individuals and society in all its complexity. When others attempt such a thing, you are often presented with a big blob of a mess, everything entangled and meshed, muddy and shadowed. Robert Penn Warren deftly shows the sides of people without destroying the individual impressions, like light shining on a multifaceted gem, the gleam bouncing off one facet sharply without denying the presence of the other facets. In fact, the mere presence of that facet speaks of all the other facets that share a side with it. It is an amazing thing to see.