The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, by Stephen King

[rachelmanija]

A little girl gets lost alone in the woods. But for better or worse, no one is ever really alone…

The world had teeth and it could bite you with them any time it wanted. Trisha McFarland discovered that when she was nine years old.

Sounds like Cujo, doesn’t it? Sometimes bad things happen and it’s nobody’s fault, just the way of the world. Sometimes all the courage and willpower in the world isn’t enough to save you.

And sometimes it is.

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

Along with the Dark Tower series, this unique little book was my favorite of the new-to-me King books I read this year. While it has a lot of aspects that I like about King in addition to tropes I like in general, it’s different from his other books I’ve read (much pithier, for one thing) and a bit sui generis overall.

If you read survival memoirs, you’ll notice that many real people who got lost in the wild, in addition to their suffering and fear and physical breakdown, also had some kind of transcendent or spiritual experience. In between periods of misery and despair, they came to understand themselves, the natural world, and some kind of greater force in a way which felt deeply and lastingly important to them, though many say that no attempt at description can convey what it was really like. King delves into this phenomenon, giving the book an atmosphere at once delicate and powerful, full of realistic and suspenseful wilderness details balanced with a satisfyingly ambiguous exploration of that which is inherently unknowable and indescribable.

Nine-year-old Trisha goes with her mother and older brother for a short hike on the Appalachian Trail. When she steps off the path for a pee break, she realizes that she’s fallen behind and tries to take a short cut to catch up with them. One easy-to-make mistake leads to another, and Trisha is soon lost in the woods. Very, very lost.

That’s the entire book: the extraordinary journey of an ordinary girl. But Trisha is extraordinary too, in the way that anyone may become if they hit the exact right— or wrong— circumstances to bring out their full potential, whether to do right or wrong or simply endure.

If you’ve been following my King reviews and thinking, “Man, these books sound interesting, but so dark! Does he ever write anything that wouldn’t traumatize me if I read it?” Unless you’re very sensitive to children in danger, this could be the one.

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is way more emotionally realistic (and so harrowing) than something like Hatchet, but it’s more like that than it is like Carrie, and it’s a lot less traumatizing, to me anyway, than Julie of the Wolves. (No rape, no deaths of sympathic animals.) It’s a character and theme-driven adventure/survival novel with ambiguous fantasy elements and some scary moments, not a horror novel. There’s some snippets of Trisha’s family freaking out, but they get little page time. Trisha suffers, but she’s also very resilient. [If you just want to know if she survives, rot13.com for the answer: Vg’f n pybfr pnyy ohg fur qbrf, naq irel gevhzcunagyl ng gung.]

Trisha has no special woodsy knowledge. Brian from Hatchet she’s not. Very unusually for a wilderness survival novel with a child hero, Trisha doesn’t do anything that a smart and resourceful but untrained kid couldn’t plausibly have done. The average kid wouldn’t have survived as long as she did, but that’s just statistics. She doesn’t build her own snowshoes, start fires with flint, befriend wolves, or trap rabbits. She eats stuff she finds, she makes a primitive lean-to from fallen branches, and she walks. And walks. No matter how bad things get, she doesn’t stop.

She does it all with nothing but a little bit of food and water, plus her Walkman, which picks up the broadcast of a Red Sox game in which her favorite baseball player, Tom Gordon, is playing. As she gets more and more lost, and is forced to reach deeper and deeper into her mind and body and soul to survive, she calls upon others to help her out: her memories of her family and her parentally disapproved-of friend Pepsi Robichaud, who could only be considered a bad influence if you’re nine and sheltered, her crush and idol Tom Gordon, and various conceptions of God or Godlike forces.

As time goes on, Tom Gordon becomes Trisha’s imaginary companion, becoming more and more of a presence as she goes from simply needing him more to outright hallucinating from hunger and illness. So another of King’s perennial themes comes into play, the relationship of the fan to the fan-object, and how real and important it can be, for better or worse. (You do not need to know or care about baseball to read this book. I don’t. Technical details are minimal, and King tells you everything you need to know.)

But there are other things in the woods which Trisha didn’t call, except in the sense that she attracted them by being there and vulnerable. Maybe it’s whatever animal predator happens to be around. Maybe it’s a specific animal that’s tracking her. Or maybe it’s supernatural. This part of the story is exceptionally well-done and comes to a very satisfying conclusion.

Back to God, King’s perennial question of “Does he exist and if so, where is he and why does he let bad things happen?” is prominent in this book. While lost, Trisha considers and possibly encounters multiple concepts of God. One is the mainstream idea of an interventionist God, whom Tom Gordon petitions with a gesture during games; if that God answers an athlete’s prayers to win, will He answer Trisha’s to live? Another is the Subaudible, which Trisha’s father explained to her when she asked him if he believed in God:

"It had electric heat, that house. Do you remember how the baseboard units would hum, even when they weren't heating? Even in the summer?"

Trisha had shaken her head.

"That's because you got used to it, but take my word, Trish, that sound was always there. Even in a house where there aren't any baseboard heaters, there are noises. The fridges goes on and off. The pipes thunk. The floors creak. The traffic goes by outside. We hear those things all the time, so most of the time we don't hear them at all. They become... Subaudible.

“I don't believe in any actual thinking God that marks the fall of every bird in Australia or every bug in India, a God that records all of our sins in a big golden book and judges us when we die— I don't want to believe in a God who would deliberately create bad people and then deliberately send them to roast in a hell He created— but I believe there has to be something.

“Yeah, something. Some kind of insensate force for the good.

“I think there's a force that keeps drunken teenagers— most drunken teenagers—
from crashing their cars when they're coming home from the senior prom or their first big rock concert. That keeps most planes from crashing even when something goes wrong. Not all, just most. Hey, the fact that no one's used a nuclear weapon on actual living people since 1945 suggests there has to be something on our side."

Much of the book interrogates the idea of a Subaudible, particularly the question of just how conscious it is and if we're our own Subaudible. It also introduces the idea that the Subaudible may have a less benevolent counterpart. This is the God of the Lost, which may be the thing (if there is a thing) stalking Trisha through the woods. If so, is it malevolent or simply dangerous? Is it another insensate force, or conscious and concrete?

What will determine Trisha’s fate? God and the Devil? The Subaudible and the God of the Lost? No supernatural forces at all, just human beings and nature and Trisha herself? Or some combination of those?

I normally find religion the most boring topic on Earth. I did not find it boring in this book. It comes up naturally, and it’s in the form of open questions rather than preaching. I excerpted the part about the Subaudible because it’s easier to quote than to summarize, not because it’s presented as the One Truth.

The prose, which swings easily from King’s usual not-quite-stream-of-consciousness interspersed with bits of omniscient narration to some passages of striking beauty, doesn’t try to imitate a child’s speech. But though the language is adult, the content of Trisha’s inner world did mostly feel convicingly nine-year-old. That’s an age when many kids are thinking about God and why bad things happen. I’ve had children that age talk to me unprompted about those issues in simple language but using pretty sophisticated ideas. The Subaudible isn’t Trisha’s idea, it’s her father’s, but I believed that once he told her about it, she’d keep on chewing over it.

Cut for spoilers. I would not read these if you might read the book; they spoil the climax, which is quite beautifully orchestrated.

A few bits I didn’t want to spoil but I wanted to mention because they felt so emotionally realistic: the bit early on where Trisha packs her scraps because she was taught not to litter, never thinking that she should leave them as markers. That was so believable as a kid’s mindset. Also, go King, you finally wrote a poop scene that actually felt like it needed to be in there. Trisha gets sick and has a miserable night, then comes to the consoling realization that if she never mentions it, no one will ever know. I think a lot of us have had some humiliating bodily issue followed by that exact thought. I had so much empathy for poor Trisha on that one. And there was just enough detail to show what was going on and why she felt that way about it, without tipping into shit-weasel unreadable grossness.

The use of omni was also very well-done, with King dropping in to explain what would have happened if Trisha had gone in the other direction, missed the fence post, etc. He does it just enough to satisfy curiosity, provide a plausible mix of good and bad luck, and give us some “Arrgh, go the other way!” moments.

The ambiguity of the fantasy/supernatural/spiritual elements really worked for me, mostly because the emotional meaning was consistent regardless of how you interpret them. Because King sometimes drops into omniscient, we know something is sniffing around Trisha. But what? An animal? Different animals? Or something else?

My interpretation is that the Subaudible and the God of the Lost are real, but they’re not quite as personal or anthropomorphic as Trisha sometimes sees them. I think the bit where they and Tom Gordon’s God actually talk to her is Trisha putting a human-understandable face and voice on forces that are not really within human comprehension.

When she finally meets the bear-demon, yes, I think it was sent by the God of the Lost… but I think it was a regular bear that got a nudge to go there, get her. Her perceptions are real, but she’s seeing the spiritual truth beneath the surface, not a literal physical demon-bear with literal bugs for eyes. I think both she and the God of the Lost were working with and through natural forces, so the Walkman scared off the bear because you can scare off bears by throwing things at them. But she also defeated the God of the Lost on a spiritual plane, and that’s why the bear fled rather than getting pushed into a second try. The guy with the gun only saved her by getting her to a hospital; Trisha took out the bear all by herself.

I’m with Trisha’s Dad on the existence of the Subaudible as a real thing existing in the world of the book, with the extension that it includes Trisha herself and all of humanity, from the real Tom Gordon to her fannish relationship with him. So it’s mostly the sum of what’s good in humanity. But the Walkman’s possible but unlikely ability to pick up a signal, and its suspiciously long battery life? I think the Subaudible gave that one to her. (Or possibly Tom Gordon’s God. But as King hilariously points out, God does not appear to be a Red Sox fan.)

Similarly, I think the God of the Lost is real, but not as anthropomorphized as Trisha perceives it to be. It’s amoral in the sense that morality does not apply; it goes after her not out of evil or cruelty or any personal desire to get her, but because she stepped into a situation that was inevitably going to kill her if she didn’t escape first. It’s the embodiment of “nature will kill you because that’s what nature does.”

Then again, there’s Trisha’s brief but unsettling perception that the Subaudible is the God of the Lost. But even if that's correct, it still doesn't settle things: maybe the only goodness is us, or maybe the universe consists of us, a vast inimical force of questionable consciousness, and a conscious benevolent God. Ultimately, the book refuses to take a stand on things that are inherently unknowable, and I think that’s the right way to go.

Trisha’s final confrontation is beautifully written, perfect in prose and theme. She faces a bear and a God and the random machinery of death, and her response is to move from having Tom Gordon as a companion and inspiration to taking what she needs from him and making it her own. She’s a dying little girl squared off against a God, a demon, or maybe just (just) a fucking huge hungry bear— but she’s got icewater in her veins, the words of her fannish love in her mouth, and the willingness to give everything she has in this last fight, spit in the face of her greatest fear, and live or die on her feet.

Throwing the Walkman as a pitch was satisfyingly heroic— a perfect story climax— while still being something a kid could plausibly do. It brings together all the themes and plotlines— baseball, Tom Gordon, the Walkman itself, the forces against her, the forces protecting her, the entire question of spirituality, civilization versus nature, the idea that fannish love can literally save your life, and her own indomitable spirit even at death’s door— and makes the same crucial points no matter what interpretation you take of exactly what she faced or did.

Was it an ordinary bear that had been stalking her from hunger? A new bear that turned up then for the first time? A bear sent by the God of the Lost? A supernatural being? An incarnation of Mid-World’s Shardik? A hallucination? (The last is unlikely, because there was a witness… but he’s not the most reliable witness.) Or some combination of those, like a regular bear with added hallucinatory details?

Whatever it was, Trisha exerted the utmost heroism to save herself with the tools she had, and that’s true even if it was purely hallucinatory: she thought she fought it, and she certainly saved herself by walking that far.

The same coherence of theme with ambiguity of interpretation goes for the forces that help Trisha. The guy who finds her: was he sent in some way? By God? By the Subaudible? Or was he just an ordinary guy who happened to be there because she’d gotten far enough to hit a place where people were? And the times when she gets lucky: is luck alone, or did she get a nudge from the Subaudible or God? Any interpretation is satisfying, because none of them could have helped her if she hadn’t already gotten so far out of sheer persistence.

But in the end, when even her extraordinary determination isn’t enough by itself, even when her spiritual perception, whether right or wrong, is that the universe is nothing but teeth, she still doesn’t go down. Instead, she takes a battle that has never been on her turf and that she could only ever survive by going somewhere else, and drags it to a place where she belongs. After an entire book of trying to bring Tom Gordon into the wilderness, Trisha wins by taking the God of the Lost out to the ball game.

Comments

[nestra]

I haven't read a ton of King, but we listened to this one as an audio book, and it made a great listen.

[rachelmanija]

Oh, I should get it for my next long car ride. It's written in a very oral storytelling style, so I bet it's great with a good narrator.

[adrian_turtle]

I'm tempted to try it as an audiobook. Your description of it as "intense encounter with a vividly depicted natural environment" is reminding me of the Aubrey Maturin books, which are gorgeous with Patrick Tull narrating them.

[scioscribe]

Oh, this is great. I loved what you said about the double-play between the sane, comprehensible perception (sometimes real, as in the case of the bear, and sometimes not... quite on that same plane, as when Trisha sees the three figures) and the larger, wilder thing underneath. It's a really good woods story in that way. I don't know if you've read King's short story "The Man in the Black Suit," but he talked about it as being part of the American tradition of "person goes out into the woods and meets the devil," and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon seems to me like the more generous, fuller version of that. Trisha's time in the wilderness brings her face-to-face with things larger than herself, but with good as well as with evil, and she proves able to withstand it all, endure, and even triumph.

Also, and not related at all, while King's sometimes-habit of peppering his novels with characters citing the origins of every homespun expression they use can irritate me, this is one case where that actually really works. Like you said, she's drawing on her memories of her family and friends, and their linguistic tics and her notation of them ends up seeming like one more resource she's hanging onto as a way to give herself company and keep herself sane.

[rachelmanija]

No, I haven't read that! I should do a post soliciting King short story recs that I would enjoy. (No pure horror. He's too good at that in short length, leading me to avoid his shorts entirely for fear of reading something I will then be unable to get out of my head for all time. That fucking surgeon on a desert island story! Why did I read that?)

Yeah, the cite-the-catchphrase thing works really well here. She's very young and all alone, so she'd be more likely to both recall the origins of things and to want to recall them. One I didn't mention but I liked a lot was the variations on "What do you do when your windshield's busted?"

[scioscribe]

Ladyfingers. /shivers

"The Man in the Black Suit" might admittedly tread too close to pure horror, but I would certainly enthusiastically dive into my memory of all his shorter workers I've read were a recommendation post to spring into being.

[luzula]

Huh, maybe I'd like this (I've never read any King). And also you might like Wild Life by Molly Gloss? I really recommend it, if you haven't read it.

[rachelmanija]

Yes! I think you specifically would like this one, even if you don't read anything else by him. The entire book is an intense encounter with a vividly depicted natural environment.

I haven't read the Gloss book yet. It's been on my to-read list for ages. I bounced off her Quakers in Space book but I gather that her books are all pretty different from each other.

[luzula]

I have put it on my list of books to check out. : )

I have read all of Gloss' works, and she was pretty experimental in the beginning, but her last three books are fairly similar, I'd say. They're all non-SF/F historical novels set in the American West, often featuring horses. I like them a lot! But I do wish she'd write SF/F again, too.

[cloudsinvenice]

I've been curious about this one for years; I haven't come across King writing a female protagonist that young before, and I like a good survival story. I like the way you managed to put across so well what's interesting about the book without spoiling it (I skipped the under-the-cut bit, but not the Rot13 part); it sounds worth reading without knowing every twist and turn!

I'm going to have to go back and read your Dark Tower reviews too - it's one of my favourite series but it's been years since I read them, and a friend was just asking today whether she ought to try them, which made me remember that I've been looking for other people's perspectives on how certain things are handled...

[rachelmanija]

He does a very good job of it, I think. The other one is in Firestarter. The story would have been really similar with a boy protagonist, though he would have been more gender-conventional in terms of the baseball obsession and less in that his crush-object would have been the same gender, so I liked that King just chose to have his young hero be female. I would have really appreciated it as a younger reader, and I still do now.

I would tell your friend that if she hates The Gunslinger, to skip ahead to the next book and read the summary of the first. It's a really polarizing first book and so different in tone that it won't tell you if you'll like the rest of the series.

[cloudsinvenice]

Good point. The Gunslinger just has a really odd, arid quality to it that may not be bad, but is no real preparation for the rest of the series. I read it after books 2 - 4 and it was a bit of a surprise, though nice for getting Jake's full backstory.

[dhampyresa]

This sounds amazing.

[rachelmanija]

Let me know what you think if you read!

[dhampyresa]

Will do!

[havocthecat]

I'm torn as to whether this is one I'd like or not. I love Stephen King and his way with words, but I have a hard time with children in danger. I think I might have to spoil myself on the book and then give it a try.

[rachelmanija]

I would read my rot13.com spoilers and if that's not enough, maybe some general spoilers. My spoiler-cut covers stuff that's not upsetting but is cool to not know about or at least not know in detail if you do read it.

[havocthecat]

Thanks for the suggestion! I haven't read your spoiler-cut yet - been a busy weekend full of car repairs and family fun (not sarcastic), so I haven't had a chance to read everything that I've got in tabs.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I didn't like this one much when I read it (years ago), but your review is so good I feel I should give it another chance!

The way it's so scarily easy for Trisha to get lost has very much lingered with me. I read a real-life story recently about a hiker who died in the same way (left the trail to go to the bathroom, couldn't find the trail again) and it's really reaffirmed my determination not to go off into the wilderness without lots of cell phones, maps, and compasses. :D

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I think it's a love it or hate it book - it and Lisey's Story (and Dark Tower as a whole) show up a lot on both Best Of and Worst Of lists. But if you do give it another try, I'd love to hear what you think.

That RL story was the poor woman who survived for MONTHS, wrote a diary including a final note, and was eventually found dead something like one mile off the trail, right? Scary stuff.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Yep, that's the one. It really does resonate with your description of how much of survival in these situations is a matter of random choices and a bit of good or bad luck.

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

That was also on the Appalachian Trail in Maine, but in a much more remote part (and she went farther off the trail to start with).

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

This sounds like the Stephen King for me, for lots of reasons. I'll give it a try. You are really heaping books onto my to-read pile these days!

PS unusually for me, I have *not* read the spoilers beneath your cut.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Yes, you should give it a try. (Don't read the spoilers. They describe the climax in detail that's much more satisfying to just read in the book.)

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I love this book so much. It's my favorite singleton King novel, and it's such a perfect singleton. No more is necessary, or desirable.

Had to be talked into reading it, though, because of the baseball, which I initially thought was going to be a much larger element than it was because of the title. Ever since, I have gone around reassuring people that no, you do not have to know anything about baseball or even care about the sport, really, you do not.

If I were Tom Gordon, I have no idea how I would feel about this book. I have no idea how the real Tom Gordon feels, or could possibly feel. Unfortunately, my Google skills have so far been unable to determine whether anybody has asked him.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Yes. It's so perfect and succinct: everything needed is there, and nothing is there that's not needed. And it is the only King book I've ever felt that way about. Normally even the ones I love are kind of messy and flawed.

I don't know how Tom Gordon felt about the finished product but King got his permission before writing the book. I assume he gave him some sort of outline of how he (or rather, a kid fan's imaginary version of him) would appear in it.

I also avoided the book for ages because I thought it would require being into or having knowledge of baseball. Nope.

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

I actually just read this based on your earlier recommendation to me. I liked it a lot. (It was much shorter than I was expecting - I had this idea that all of King's later books were doorstops.)

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm glad you liked it!

Most of them are doorstops. Early ones too. This is an exception. Though he does also have some novellas.

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is way more emotionally realistic (and so harrowing) than something like Hatchet, but it’s more like that than it is like Carrie, and it’s a lot less traumatizing, to me anyway, than Julie of the Wolves.

Man, I haven't thought about Julie of the Wolves in YEARS. Or Island of the Blue Dolphins.

Apparently there are now two sequels to Julie of the Wolves. One retells the book from the wolves' viewpoint.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Considering what happens to the wolves, I am picturing an ending a la Elizabethan drama: "I die, I die, oh--!"

Or, I guess, "Awooooo!"

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

Director's Indulgence Theatre presents:

A VERY WOLFY MACBETH

Act II, Scene II

Enter Lady Macbeth (a wolf).

Lady Macbeth: Aroo aroo aroo.

Macbeth (off): Aroo?

Lady Macbeth: Aroo.

Enter Macbeth (also a wolf).

Macbeth: Aroo!

Lady Macbeth licks the blood off of Macbeth's fur.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Why do I suspect that some director somewhere has actually done this (in furry suits?)