Read: The Drawing of the Three–“Shuffle”; “The Lady of the Shadows”; “Re-Shuffle”
At this point what strikes me the most about Book Two in this series is how different it is and how different it feels from Book One. The Gunslinger was really no-frills, a collection of very austere short stories lashed together between two covers. Even if King’s comparative inexperience as a writer led him to the occasional, perhaps unintentional storytelling complexity–like the extended flashback within an extend flashback in the opening chapter–the book was a journey every bit as straightforward and austere as the gunslinger’s.
In The Drawing of the Three, however, you’ve got this comparatively elaborate structure involving a prologue, a section introducing a new main character, a sort of intermezzo section paced to mimic fading in and out of consciousness, a nother section introducing another new main character, another intermezzo, and so on. Meanwhile you’re dipped back into King’s reference-heavy idiom-heavy modern-day mode of storytelling after spending all of Book One in tersely worded depictions of a barren fantasy world. What’s more, the gunslinger is now sharing top billing with (so far) two characters who almost never shut up, and whose psychological conditions make them prone to sounding antsy at best and psychotic at worst. It’s all but cacophonous compared to the first installment.
But I’m impressed by the way the characters’ long, tedious journey up the unchanging beach maintained the feeling of austerity that I found so appealing in Book One. It really just goes on and on and on. Even the presence of the lobstrosities becomes more of a chore than a thrill due to the constancy of the threat they present, and their monotonous querulous yammering. Ditto Detta Walker, the nymphomaniacal kleptomanaiacl sociopathic stereotype split personality of Odetta Holmes, the rich, beautiful and intelligent civil rights activist whose “drawing” is the main event of this book’s second major section. King makes her taunting, shrieking banter with Roland and Eddie menacing to them through its annoyingness as much as through the knowledge that she’ll make good on her threats if she gets the chance.
As for Odetta/Detta herself, I’m a little bit unwilling to let myself invest in her as a character, because I was so thrown by King’s hamfisted mafia characters that I’ve now got my convinced he’s just as bad at capturing any other subculture. At least with Detta he’s given himself the out that this alternate personality (and by the way, schizophrenia isn’t the right word for this condition at all, though I dunno, I guess that’s what they called it back then or else Ian Hunter wouldn’t have named his solo album You’re Never Alone with a Schizophrenic) is deliberately a racist, misogynist cliché.
As a side note, I have a very clear picture of each of these characters in my head. Roland is Clint Eastwood, Eddie is the Larry Underwood from the TV version of The Stand, and Detta and Odetta are, interestingly enough to me, two different contestants from this season of America’s Next Top Model, the latest episode of which I watched just prior to reading this section. (FYI: Detta, Odetta.) I have no idea what that means.
PS: I forgot to say this yesterday, but if Roland is so amazed at the abundance of things like paper and sugar in our world, shouldn’t he be even more amazed at the presence of so many guns in the hands of so many losers? Isn’t that kind of the whole core of his upbringing?
PPS: It might be fun if Book Three is as structurally different from Book Two as Book Two is from Book One, and so on throughout the series. Like, maybe one of them is an epic poem in free verse, and one of them is a Finnegan’s Wake stream of consciousness.