Under the dome

Now that the town halls have blazed with vituperation, and fantastical patriots are girding themselves for fascist/socialist lockdown, Americans of a certain vintage must be feeling a familiar circumambient thrill. Boomers, you know what I'm talking about: cranks empowered, strange throes and upthrusts, hyperbolic placards brandished in the streets - it's the '60s all over again! Once more the air turns interrogative: something's happening here, but we don't know what it is, do we, Mr. Jones? Stop, children, what's that sound? In Stephen King's new novel, "Under the Dome," the people of Chester's Mill, Me., get a letter from the president. Typically exalted in its rhetoric, it wrings a tear from at least one grateful citizen. But Big Jim Rennie, the town's second selectman, is disgusted. He scowls at the printed sheet. Yep, there it is in black and white: "The bastard had signed it himself, and using all three of his names, including the terrorist one in the middle." Why is Obama writing to Chester's Mill? Because an enormous transparent dome, not breachable by prayer, bullet, laser beam or cruise missile, has suddenly and unaccountably descended over the town. Its provenance is uncertain (aliens? North Korea?), but its effect is incontrovertible: no one gets in, no one gets out. Some kind of energy field is attached to it; at close range it blows up i Pods and (bad news for incautious oldsters) pacemakers, and sends a gust of "horripilation" through the human nervous system. Bummer, right? Not for the tyrant-in-waiting Big Jim and his pet goon squad. For them this is Christmas Day in the morning. Secession has occurred! The "thug in the White House," the "Blackguard in Chief," is on the other side of the dome, and Anytown, U.S.A. - with its meth factory, its profusion of religious denominations and its atavistic police department - is about to, as the phrase has it, "go rogue." According to an author's note, King took a first crack at "Under the Dome" in 1976, but gave it up "after two weeks' work that amounted to about 75 pages." An interesting sequence of expressions must have crossed his face when he watched "The Simpsons Movie" in 2007: here, in glowing animation, was a great glassy dome landing on a clueless municipality, a civic meltdown, etc. ("We're trapped like rats!" screams Moe the bartender. "No," says the man from the E.P.A., "rats can't be trapped this easily. You're trapped like . . . carrots") But the Simpsonian merriment bounced off him, apparently; King held on to his dome concept, waiting perhaps with his genius on "sleep" for our national politics to get a little more kinky, a little more vicious - a little more like a Stephen King novel. So this is it: 1,100 pages of localized apocalypse from an author whose continued and slightly frenzied commerce with his muse has been one of the more enthralling spectacles in American literature. King's previous novel, "Duma Key" (2008), was a subterranean first-person trip, in the vein of "Misery" or "Bag of Bones": Edgar Freemantle, rehabbing on the Florida coast after a construction accident that cost him his right arm and nearly his mind, starts banging out lefthanded paintings whose Dalí-esque motifs have freaky real-world effects. Classic King: a maimed artistic consciousness, a symbolic journey. With "Under the Dome" we swoop up again to the God's-eye view, or to the view of some equally altitudinous but less merciful entity - a panorama of interlocking stories and a huge cast of characters, many of them being used rather cruelly. As the values of the dome assert themselves, people become matter: a woman flies through a windshield "trailing intestines like party streamers," another woman shoots herself in despair, leaving her brains drying on the wall "like a clot of oatmeal." Big Jim, taking control of the Chester's Mill police department, starts recruiting from the local pool of jocks and bully boys, "the ever-present football player rapist," as the songwriter Gibby Haynes once put it. A town leader congratulates the chief of police on doing "a hell of a job." Where is God in all this? Pastor Coggins, who flagellates himself and prays "in an ecstatic televangelist tremolo," doesn't last long; more durable, possibly because she doesn't believe in God anymore, is the Rev. Piper Libby of the First Congregational Church. And holiest of all is Phil Bushey, known as the Chef, the heavily-armed meth wizard who commandeers the town's Christian radio station. Chef, tweaking away, has some great lines: "God has told me this, Sanders," he booms. "You're in the Lord's army now. . . And I'm your superior. So report." As for the prose, it's not all smooth sailing. Given King's extraordinary careerlong dominance, we might expect him at this point to be stylistically complete, turning perfect sentences, as breezily at home in his idiom as P.G. Wodehouse. But he isn't, quite. "Then it came down on her again, like unpleasant presents raining from a poison piñata: the realization that Howie was dead." (It's the accidental rhyme of "unpleasant" and "presents" that makes that one such a stinker.) I felt the clutch of sorrow, too, when I read this: "What you're planning is terribly dangerous - I doubt if you need me to tell you that - but there may be no other way to save an innocent man's life." BUT then, King has always produced at pulp speed. "Nov. 22, 2007 - March 14, 2009" proclaims the final page of "Under the Dome": that's 1,100 pages in 480 days. We shouldn't be too squeamish about the odd half-baked simile or lapse into B-movie dialogue, is my point. Writing flat-out keeps him close to his story, close to his source. It seems to magnetize his imagination: by the final third of this novel King is effortlessly drawing in T.S. Eliot and the Book of Revelation, the patient etherized upon a table and the Star Wormwood. Pollution thickens against the inner wall of the dome, and the sunset outside becomes alien and terrifying, a "vast, dusty glare." The dome grows metaphysical - one character, contemplating the suffering of another, feels "a clinical sorrow, safely stored inside its own dome: you could see it, could appreciate its existence, but you couldn't exactly get in there with it." Big Jim Rennie, with his monster breakfasts and "carnivorously sociable smile," is swept to power on a wave of homicide and municipal procedure. He snaps necks, and he attends emergency-assessment meetings (echoes here of Donald Antrim's wildly black 1993 novel "Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World," which begins with an ex-mayor being drawn and quartered by some inflamed Rotarians). He's the worm in the brain of democracy: it takes him only four days to undo just about everything. The coalition that forms against him includes a journalist, a librarian, an Iraq veteran, some acned skateboarders and an English professor from Massachusetts who (rather wonderfully) has just edited an issue of Ploughshares. Get ready, libruls, King seems to be saying: If the dome comes down, you're going to need one another. James Parker is a contributing editor at The Atlantic.

Under the Dome 1 From two thousand feet, where Claudette Sanders was taking a flying lesson, the town of Chester's Mill gleamed in the morning light like something freshly made and just set down. Cars trundled along Main Street, flashing up winks of sun. The steeple of the Congo Church looked sharp enough to pierce the unblemished sky. The sun raced along the surface of Prestile Stream as the Seneca V overflew it, both plane and water cutting the town on the same diagonal course. "Chuck, I think I see two boys beside the Peace Bridge! Fishing!" Her very delight made her laugh. The flying lessons were courtesy of her husband, who was the town's First Selectman. Although of the opinion that if God had wanted man to fly, He would have given him wings, Andy was an extremely coaxable man, and eventually Claudette had gotten her way. She had enjoyed the experience from the first. But this wasn't mere enjoyment; it was exhilaration. Today was the first time she had really understood what made flying great. What made it cool. Chuck Thompson, her instructor, touched the control yoke gently, then pointed at the instrument panel. "I'm sure," he said, "but let's keep the shiny side up, Claudie, okay?" "Sorry, sorry." "Not at all." He had been teaching people to do this for years, and he liked students like Claudie, the ones who were eager to learn something new. She might cost Andy Sanders some real money before long; she loved the Seneca, and had expressed a desire to have one just like it, only new. That would run somewhere in the neighborhood of a million dollars. Although not exactly spoiled, Claudie Sanders had undeniably expensive tastes which, lucky man, Andy seemed to have no trouble satisfying. Chuck also liked days like this: unlimited visibility, no wind, perfect teaching conditions. Nevertheless, the Seneca rocked slightly as she overcorrected. "You're losing your happy thoughts. Don't do that. Come to one-twenty. Let's go out Route 119. And drop on down to nine hundred." She did, the Seneca's trim once more perfect. Chuck relaxed. They passed above Jim Rennie's Used Cars, and then the town was behind them. There were fields on either side of 119, and trees burning with color. The Seneca's cruciform shadow fled up the blacktop, one dark wing briefly brushing over an ant-man with a pack on his back. The ant-man looked up and waved. Chuck waved back, although he knew the guy couldn't see him. "Beautiful goddam day!" Claudie exclaimed. Chuck laughed. Their lives had another forty seconds to run. Excerpted from Under the Dome by Stephen King All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.