Review of Stephen King’s The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
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Let’s see now; how can we make a lot of money? I know; let’s combine the “all-we-gotta-do-is-mention-his-name” appeal of Stephen King, master of the horror novel of the late 20th century, and the off-the-trail concept of The Blair Witch Project. The result has gotta be a money-making monster, right?
Actually, I don’t know how much money the book made, but you can bet your rent money that The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon spent some time on the bestseller lists.
TGWLTG is the story of Trisha McFarland, a nine-year-old girl who gets lost in the woods while hiking with her mom and brother on the Maine-New Hampshire branch of the Appalachian Trail. The novel chronicles her struggle for survival and her love for the Boston Red Sox, specifically their closer Tom Gordon. Yes, the two concepts are related; Trisha uses her imaginary version of Tom Gordon in much the same way that Chuck Noland uses the volleyball Wilson in Cast Away. This is a novel that is at least partially about how elements of our culture become almost spiritually embedded in us.
King draws the character of Trisha well. She is a nine-year-old who is so level-headed and resourceful that she could probably only exist in fiction, but that resourcefulness is thoroughly illustrated. King finds credible ways of allowing Trisha to survive her ordeal, including fashioning a makeshift fishing net out of the hood of her poncho. As we follow her through the woods, we learn that Trisha loves her family, but that she is also disappointed in how selfish each member seems to be. Her brother is self-absorbed; her father feels sorry for himself and is rapidly becoming a drunk; her mother is so concerned with demonstrating her self-reliance that she doesn’t really listen to her kids. Trisha is the only person in the family who seems genuinely concerned about everyone else, but, ironically, the only way she can get everyone’s attention is by getting lost.
Though Trisha herself is a well-rounded character, everyone else is sketchy. The above descriptions are about all we ever learn about her family, as King decides to focus the entire novel around Trisha’s forest trek. One wonders why King does not cut away to the family, since he has never before been shy about focusing on many characters at once. The result is that we empathize with Trisha but don’t give a rabbit’s fart for anyone else.
While narrating Trisha’s adventure, King provides his always-solid sensory descriptions and figurative language; he makes the woods a now-benign, now malignant force, much like what we see in the aforementioned Blair Witch Project. Trisha’s sense of fear and gnawing, all-consuming hunger are similarly strong; King’s grasp of the darker emotional forces in us all proves once again that he is the Man when it comes to horror.
But some elements of the plot seem just too convenient. At one point in the novel, Trisha decides to deviate from the course that she’s been following ever since losing her path. Here I turn this review over to Mr. King, as he describes what happens to Trisha because of this choice.
. . . She had done a great many things right since becoming lost—more than she ever would have guessed—but this was a bad decision, the worst she’d made since leaving the path in the first place. Had she crossed the marsh and climbed the ridge, she would have found herself looking down at Devlin Pond, on the outskirts of Green Mount, New Hampshire. Devlin was small, but there were cottages on its south end and a camp-road leading out to New Hampshire Route 52 . . . Instead of finding the pond, she turned toward the Canadian border and began walking deeper into the woods. Some four hundred miles ahead was Montreal.
Between it and her, not much.
This “bad decision,” coming on the heels of having done “a great many things right,” seems awfully convenient. It reminds me of one of those moments in bad scary movies where the heroine makes a left turn into the woods or a cemetery, leaving the camera to pan right and reveal fourteen waiting police cars. Watch Scary Movie and you’ll see Carmen Electra, pursued by the killer, approach two street signs; one reads “Safety ß” and the other reads “Death à.” Why even tell us she’s missed civilization by this much?
This is also one of the few times—perhaps the only time—that King cops out of the world he’s created by employing the old deux ex machina ending. Generally King sticks to his own rules, no matter how outlandish those rules are; if the reader has suspended his or her disbelief, those books seem tight and well-constructed. Here, Trisha gets off light. I won’t tell you how and give away the ending, but I think you’ll be throwing your bricks at King’s temple once you get there.
You might also take King to task for the various unresolved plot threads. What happens to Trisha’s parents after they reconcile during her ordeal? Does her “boogery” brother become any less self-centered, as our few glimpses of him seem to imply? Does mom open her eyes to her daughter? We don’t know. If King was going to focus exclusively on Trisha, one wonders why we were treated to these brief scenes with the family in the first place.
I’m actually a Stephen King fan, an academic who defends King’s genre and abilities. And The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is fun. But it isn’t really a good book. King has certainly done much, much better.