Sometimes a story’s gotta be told, and Dolores Claiborne aims to tell the whole story, ghost ship-like memories be damned. Stephen King’s 1993 book named after that character, Dolores Claiborne, is unlike any of his I’ve read to date, albeit still containing vintage King hallmarks. In fact, it’s the first book of his I’ve read that felt like a Tennessee Williams play, where I could visualize an almost a one-woman act on stage. That’s because the entire book is essentially Dolores’ monologue to the police and a stenographer about the death of Vera, the rich woman of Tall Island, Maine, who Dolores was the housemaid to. But in the course of that tellin’, she starts tellin’ about her husband, Joe, and her family, and her history with Vera.
Dolores talks in an apparently very New England way with clipped words, like “n” instead of “and” and dropping “g’s” off of words, and whatnot, with plenty of other idiosyncrasies and regional phrases. It was captivating and what made this “monologue” worth reading for 393 pages. There are no chapter breaks or even “breaks” within the pages, as King sometimes does, or a break from Dolores’ side of the story, so, in that way, the book really does read like a monologue.
This book is also part of what some Constant Readers have taken to calling a trilogy of King’s “abused women,” along with 1992’s Gerald’s Game and 1995’s Rose Madder. In the foreword, at least, King does draw a direct connection — through a total solar eclipse, interestingly enough — between Dolores and Jessie Burlingame of Rose Madder. I’ve read the other two and reviewed them here and here. If you want to call it a trilogy, then I would say it’s a fantastic and somewhat unexpected trio of books from the horror master. Perhaps the “gems” of his oeuvre.
In a marriage (and a family), Dolores tells us, there’s two sides to every marriage, the outside and the inside. The outside people saw was Dolores and Joe, not too happy, not too sad, “mostly just goin along like two hosses pullin a wagon … they may not notice each other like they once did, and they may not get along with each as well as they once did when they do notice each other, but they’re harnessed side by side n going down the road as well’s they can just the same …” But Dolores goes on to tell us, people aren’t hosses and marriages ain’t much like pullin a wagon. Real people exist in marriages and in those marriages, what’s on the inside can be different from the outside.
Take Joe. He’s a classic terrible guy in King’s molding: abusive, verbally and physically, to Dolores, verbally abusive to his oldest son, a drunk, a loser, a thief (of his kids’ own college money, no less), and worst of all, sexually abusive toward their oldest daughter, Selena. Once Dolores unearths the latter information out of Selena, she means to kill him. Because even though she threatened Joe off of touching Selena again, how can she rightly expect Selena to remain in the house with her abuser? And what if he does it again? So, she conceives of him having an “accident” and falling down a well in 1963, on the day of the total solar eclipse when the small town of Little Tall might otherwise notice.
There’s a great descriptive moment in the death of Joe, where he’s fallen into an old, mostly dried up well, and yet, is still alive. He looks up at Dolores, sometimes pleading and sometimes threatening, for her to save him. When he sees her, her shadow passes before the sun, and in that way, she becomes his total solar eclipse. The last thing he would ever see.
But no, Dolores didn’t kill Vera, who in Dolores words, could be a bitch in three different ways (basically just being an overbearing woman), but the two women formed a bond of sorts anyhow, as two strong, stubborn women who didn’t take anything from a man, a piece of stovewood, philandering, or otherwise. Vera has her own torments that come in the form of dust bunnies, which are the metaphor for her own grief at the death of her two children, which itself followed the likely orchestrated “accident” of her husband, too. Vera would go on to leave $30 million to Dolores, which Dolores then gave to an orphanage. Dolores was cleared in Vera’s death.
She and Vera also shared a word nastier than the sound Dolores couldn’t get out of her head of Joe’s crackin’ skull: “estranged.” Vera was estranged, in a way, with her kids a year after their father’s death, and had an argument with them about their driver’s licenses. Of course, as Dolores poignantly notes, arguments often seem like the “top” thing when really, it’s about the “bottom” thing all along. The same is true of Dolores’ estrangement with Selena because the “bottom” thing is that Selena knows Dolores killed their dad and thinks it’s because of what he did to her. That’s a lot to deal with as a teenager.
But even their estrangement has a happy ending, as Selena comes home to Dolores after 20 years away.
If you’re looking for what King does best — writing characters, dialogue, scene-setting, with ample tension and profundity — then, I think Dolores Claiborne is one of his better books you don’t want to miss. Plus, I gotta say, it’s one of his better, simpler endings! But don’t go looking for horror, even if horror imbues itself within these pages, because it’s not that kind of book. It’s real horror, the horror of unspooling marriages and relationships, and the forging of new, unexpected ones.
Milam's Musings 