In Los Angeles, the man driving the car I am sitting in the backseat of wants to tell me how much he likes my name. I nod. It’s a powerful name, he tells me. A friend of his son has the name. He asks me if I am Muslim, and then asks me if I know what my name means. This happens often: I am in a car, being driven by someone who perhaps has a name close enough to my name for them to ask me if we are of a shared faith. The question “Do you know what it means?” is both test and icebreaker, and the answer is yes, I do know what it means. Although some days, depending on the eager energy of the car’s driver, I might pretend that I don’t, just so they can have the satisfaction of telling me.
In Los Angeles, though, I say that I know what it means. Today I would like to be the one unboxing my own complications. The name Hanif, in so many words, translates to “true believer.” I tell the driver this and he nods with a satisfied approval. “The one true believer,” he tells me. “What do you do with that burden?”
I imagine the question to be rhetorical.
Then the questions started. Sergeant Clipboard asked me if I understood that all my responses would be documented. He asked me to state my name and address, where I attended high school and whether or not I was enrolled in the University of Illinois, Navy Pier Campus. I answered affirmatively and the typist recorded my words almost as fast as I spoke them. His speed was impressive. For my college papers, I used the “hunt and peck” system on an old Smith Corona.
The questions, which seemed banal and routine, continued for almost half an hour. I was a bit surprised because they already had all this information. Then Sergeant Clipboard asked a question that almost knocked me off my seat.
“When did you become a member of the Communist Party?”
In retrospect, it all felt in line with my Soviet past: reading books for the invisible other-books they contained. I’ve always had a taste for writing that stimulates language on both a narrative and metaphysical level. Within the act of storytelling, I want to feel like language is becoming and the content can walk through walls (my own, cellular, and the four walls of the room).
I don’t believe that censorship guarantees this experience, nor that it is a prerequisite. But when the space between the lines is activated, language can move in every direction.
A theme of the age, at least in the developed world, is that people crave silence and can find none. The roar of traffic, the ceaseless beep of phones, digital announcements in buses and trains, TV sets blaring even in empty offices, are an endless battery and distraction. The human race is exhausting itself with noise and longs for its opposite—whether in the wilds, on the wide ocean or in some retreat dedicated to stillness and concentration. Alain Corbin, a history professor, writes from his refuge in the Sorbonne, and Erling Kagge, a Norwegian explorer, from his memories of the wastes of Antarctica, where both have tried to escape.
What endures in this final book, though, is a fixation with the past as a portal to present misères, whether persistent gender inequalities or economic disparities as extreme as those of the industrial age. Images, she taught us over decades, have a unique capacity to indict those wrongs, and, as artists’ representations of others’ misfortunes have lately occasioned protests and even calls for destruction, Nochlin reminds us that there is nothing ethical in closing your eyes.
But The Outsider gives King fans exactly what they want at the same time as cramming in new ideas, proving the least surprising thing of all: that his novels are as strong as they ever were.