low men and driven off to captivity in one of their gaudy automobiles—which may not be automobiles at all but supernatural creatures or vehicles that can travel between dimensions.

King does a marvelous job of making these evil monsters seem real. They are the kinds of lowlife creatures whose presence is sensed in the sleaziest environments. Brautigan describes them as

The sort of men who’d shoot craps in an alley, let’s say, and pass around a bottle of liquor in a paper bag during the game. The sort who lean against telephone poles and whistle at women walking by on the other side of the street while they mop the backs of their necks with handkerchiefs that are never quite clean. . . . Men who look like they know all the right answers to all of life’s stupid questions.

There are overtones of sexual perversity in this story. Bobby’s mother dislikes Brautigan, whom she insists on calling Brattigan. She suspects him of being a pedophile and a fugitive. Then her worst fears are confirmed when she returns home to find Brautigan holding the nearly naked little Carol Gerber on his lap. Carol has been so badly beaten by three hooligans that one of her shoulders is dislocated. Brautigan is not given a chance to explain that he is only trying to help the girl. His touch not only has the power to heal but also is capable of passing to both Bobby and Carol some of his psychic powers. “Low Men in Yellow Coats” ends abruptly. Brautigan is recaptured and never heard from again.

The second story, “Hearts in Atlantis,” jumps forward to 1966. It is set at the University of Maine in Orono, where King himself was a student from 1966 to 1970. “Hearts” refers to the card game. “Atlantis” refers to a then-popular song by Donovan Leitch and also alludes to the now-mythical character of the 1960’s. Protagonist-narrator Peter Riley has become obsessed, like most of his dorm mates, with hearts. He is neglecting his studies to indulge in all-night tournaments, which include smoking, dirty jokes, profanity, and the latest rock music blasting in the background. These card addicts are not only in danger of flunking out but also in danger of losing their student draft deferments and being sent to Vietnam. This is the first war covered by television, and they can see young men like themselves wading through swamps, burning villages, herding little barefoot people, bringing misery to those whom they are supposedly there to save. Through Peter Riley, King captures the anxiety, frustration, and confusion familiar to many college students who find themselves losing motivation while at the same time dreading being thrust into the dark, chaotic world outside the ivy-covered walls.

This is about the time when the antiwar movement is igniting college campuses. Young male students are exempt from the draft but feel guilty for letting others die in their places and failing to express their feelings about the dirty war for fear of losing their exemption. (Caleb Crain wrote in The New York Times Book Review that Hearts in Atlantis is a book about survivor guilt. King himself escaped the draft because of flat feet, high blood pressure, and burst eardrums.) Hearts are a form of escapism for students trying to avoid becoming involved either for or against American military intervention in Vietnam. They cannot take their academic work seriously because it seems so remote from what is going on in the real world. It is a time when civilization seems headed for atomic annihilation or an endless series of little wars in which the United States will always appear as the capitalist monster using napalm, Agent Orange, and high-tech weaponry against hapless peasants. Peter Riley gets involved in antiwar activism through his love relationship with Carol Gerber, who forms the only connection between this story and “Low Men in Yellow Coats.” Unlike some of his card-playing buddies, he manages to stay in school and avoid the draft.

“Blind Willie” is set in New York in 1983. It has virtually no connection to the preceding narratives except that the protagonist, Bill Shearman, served in Vietnam and knew some of the young draftees who flunked out of the University of Maine. King is doing a patch-up job to make the five pieces in his book seem interrelated, although he does not call the work a novel. The dust jacket calls the book “new fiction.” A version of “Blind Willie” appeared as a short story in the Autumn, 1994, issue of Antaeus, a quality literary magazine now defunct. Shearman was partially blinded by Agent Orange. He is capitalizing on his handicap by working as a panhandler who earns more than most affluent citizens who pass him on the sidewalk. “Blind Willie” resembles Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story “The Man with the Twisted Lip” (1891). Shearman lives in a luxury Manhattan apartment and is married to a beautiful woman. He leaves every morning dressed like the typical New York businessman. Then he disguises himself as a blind, homeless Vietnam veteran and stations himself where he can reap a harvest of charity from the endless stream of affluent pedestrians, many trying to assuage their share of war guilt by showering money on this symbol of the shameful episode. On a good day, Shearman can take in several thousand dollars in currency. He does not bother to count coins but bags them and gives them to charity. At the end of the day, he returns to his “office” and resumes his upper-middle-class identity. He has to pay a NYPD detective for exclusive right to panhandle in a prime location, but the detective, like the thousands of passersby, has no idea how much money can be raked in from such a scam.

The last two short pieces take place in 1999. In “Why We’re in Vietnam,” Bobby’s boyhood friend Sully- John, now a middle-aged car dealer, is haunted by the ghost of an old Vietnamese woman he saw murdered in the war. He calls her mamasan and never knows when she is going to appear at his side, staring at him in accusative silence. He dies of an apparent heart attack in an enormous traffic jam on the freeway. Bobby reappears in “Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling” to attend the funeral in their old hometown of Norwich, Connecticut. The final episode is reminiscent of the bittersweet conclusion of Charles Dickens’s best novel, Great Expectations (1860-1861), when Pip and Estella are reunited. After taking a sentimental journey through the old town, observing the changes that have occurred through population increase and urban sprawl, Bobby encounters Carol Gerber in the park where they played as children. Both are older, sadder, wiser, disillusioned. Both still love each other, although both are married to other spouses and have children of their own. Carol assumed a new identity and is still a fugitive because of her antiwar terrorist activities in the 1960’s.

This short coda is King’s attempt to tie his fragments together and make them seem like a novel with a consistent theme involving the effect of the Vietnam War on one generation of ordinary Americans. He is only moderately successful. The reader is left with many questions and unresolved emotions. There is no attempt, for instance, to explain what happened to Ted Brautigan, abducted by the low men in yellow coats to be used as a superweapon in the endless multidimensional war of Evil against Good. Hearts in Atlantis is not one of King’s best books, but any book by King is a publishing event. It immediately made The New York Times best-seller list and received generally favorable reviews.Library Journal called it “spellbinding,” while Publishers Weekly opined, “King probably can write a seductive story in his sleep . . . ” His secret is his unique ability to find the uncanny in the ordinary. No one but Stephen King would sense the horror in a lost pet notice thumbtacked to a telephone pole or in a kite tail dangling from the wires above.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist 95 (July, 1999): 1893.

Library Journal 124 (August, 1999): 140.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 12, 1999, p. 10.

The New York Times Book Review 104 (September 12, 1999): 10.

Newsweek 134 (August 30, 1999): 58.

Publishers Weekly 246 (July 26, 1999): 58.