Four Seasons is a book that contains four novellas, or stories that are longer than short stories but shorter than novels. They include for Spring, "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption"; for Summer "Apt Pupil"' for Fall, "The Body"; and for Winter, "The Breathing Method". While King is often known for writing horror novels, this book is not a collection of horror stories it is a collection of human stories.
In "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption" subtitled "Hope Springs Eternal" Andy Dufresne was sent to Shawshank Prison for killing his wife and her lover even though he didn't do it. It would take Red, the man who could get you anything within reason a little while to realize that Andy was truly innocent of the crimes he had been convicted of. This is the story of hope and of a man who tries to change things in prison by building a larger library and getting some of the men their GEDs in hopes that they will change their lives around when they leave. And all Andy had to do is be the financial wizard pet of the guards and the warden. But when a young man comes to stay at Shawshank and has information that would help Andy's case, hope becomes a dangerous thing. Will Andy give up the hope he has held on to all these years? And what will become of Red who knows that one day they will let him out who believes that he is an institutionalized man who only belongs in prison and doesn't believe he can make it on the outside. This is truly a story about how hope is the best thing there is. Sometimes as adults we become cynical and forget about how good it is to hope. If Andy can still have hope after decades in prison than I suppose we should be able to as well.
In "Apt Pupil", subtitled "Summer of Corruption", Todd Bowden a thirteen-year-old boy was interested in the Holocaust. Imagine his surprise when he discovers that one of the bus riders is an elderly man who looks just like the head of the Patin Concentration Camp which killed over 90,000 people. He goes by the name Arthur Decker now but his real name was Dussander. Todd dusted his mailbox and his door handle for prints with a professional kit and compared them to the ones the Israelis have one file for him and they had twelve points of comparison in common. He tells Decker that he has left a letter with a friend to be opened if something happens to him and all of his evidence will go to the friend who will send it to the authorities. What does he want? He wants to hear old stories about the camps. Decker is an old man who no longer is that man. He's weak and lonely and has even considered suicide on occasion. The nightmares don't come as often as they used to. He leads a boring life. Until now. Todd awakens something inside of him. The nightmares come back and so does the Nazi, but the nightmares hit Todd as well and he begins to change. Who is corrupting who here? While the two stop seeing each other on a regular basis as Todd grows older, both begin to travel down a violent path that there's no coming back from.
In "The Body" this is a story of the fall of innocence among four twelve-year-old boys about to enter junior high. There's Vern who is dumb as dishwater and has an older brother who hangs out with the notorious older kid Ace Merrill. Teddy is crazy and always doing dares. His father, a war vet, burned both his ears and wound up in the mental hospital. Chris is the peacemaker who comes from a family of brutal alcoholics who beat on him. He lives in a shack with no indoor plumbing. Gordie writes stories and has parents that have forgotten he exists because their favorite son Denny died in a jeep accident and they can't move past it. Of course, when Denny was alive they didn't pay him much attention either. Vern hears that the boy from a few towns over that's been missing and presumed dead was found by his brother and his friend but they have boosted a car that night and therefore weren't going to tell the police about it because that would mean telling about the stolen car. So Vern tells his friends and they decide to tell their parents that they're camping in Vern's backyard and to go and look for the body of the boy themselves and become heroes and get their names in the paper. This is a story of their adventures getting there. I think that the first short story that is included in there shouldn't be there. I get that it is Gordie as an adult looking into the time of his family with Denny's death but in disguise, but it really has no place in the story. Otherwise,this is a touching story of friendship.
In "The Breathing Method", subtitled "A Winter's Tale", there is a club of men where you can play pool, bowl, read books that are found nowhere else, or enjoy a nice drink. But on Thursdays, it is storytelling night. And on the Thursday before Christmas, it is the time for an uncanny story. Mr. Adley, the narrator goes to the club and mentions a few of the stories but has one in mind he wants to tell. A Christmas story told by a doctor who said it took place in 1935 when being an unwed mother was disastrous. Sandra Stansfield found herself in this position with the father having runoff. She was a shop girl who was taking acting lessons in order to have a career on the stage. But once her condition was revealed she would lose her job. Luckily she had saved up some money and she went ahead and paid the doctor for all the visits and the hospital stay. She buys a wedding band at a pawn shop in order to find a new place to stay when she loses her apartment. The doctor gets her to take prenatal vitamins and teaches her the breathing method which she takes to like a duck to water. These are radical things for the time. She says it helps her to stay calm and keep from saying or doing things when she is angry that she shouldn't. Sandra is determined to have this baby no matter what and the circumstances of the birth will be on Christmas Eve and be a Christmas miracle to behold.
These stories are beautifully written, except for "Apt Pupil" whose material wasn't beautiful but whose story was powerful. They get to the heart of the human condition and what makes one a person in the society of days past and makes you wonder if much has changed. Does institutionalism still occur? Would Todd have become a skinhead today? Would the trip have been the same if the boys had had phones with GPS? I prefer them set in their original settings. They seem to speak to me more there. I really loved this book. This is my second time reading it and I give it five out of five stars.
Quotes
You ever have a
con come up to you and offer you a contract?” I nodded. It’s happened a lot of
times over the years. You are, after all, the man who can get it. And they
figure if you can get them batteries for their transistor radios or cartons of
Luckies or lids of reefer, you can put them in touch with a guy who’ll use a knife. “Sure you have,” Andy agreed. “But you don’t do it. Because guys like us, red, we know there’s a
third choice. An alternative to staying simon-pure or bathing in the filth and
slime. It’s the alternative that grown-ups all over the world pick. You balance
off your walk through the hog-wallow against what it gains you. You choose the lesser of two evils and try to
keep your good intentions in front of you. And I guess you judge how well you’re
doing by how well you sleep at night…and what your dreams are like.
-Stephen King (Different Seasons “Rita Hayworth and the
Shawshank Redemption p 43-4)
But it isn’t just a piece of paper that makes a man. And
it isn’t just prison that breaks one, either.
-Stephen King (Different Seasons “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank
Redemption p 72)
When you take away a man’s freedom and teach him to live
in a cell, he seems to lose his ability to think in dimensions. He’s like that
jackrabbit I mentioned, frozen in the oncoming lights of the truck that is
bound to kill it. More often than not a con who’s just out will pull some dumb
job that hasn’t a chance in hell of succeeding….and why? Because it’ll get him
back inside. Back where he understands how things work.
-Stephen King (Different Seasons “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank
Redemption p 75)\
For all I know, Sam Norton is down there in Eliot now,
attending services at the Baptist church every Sunday, and wondering how the
hell Andy Dufresne ever could have gotten the better of him. I could have told him,
the answer to the question is simplicity itself. Some have got it, Sam. And
some don’t, and never will.
-Stephen King (Different Seasons “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank
Redemption p 84)
I sort of disgusted him, the way a cringing, servile old
dog that crawls up to you on its belly to be petted will disgust a man. Christ,
I disgusted myself. But…I couldn’t make myself stop. I wanted to tell him: That’s
what a whole life in prison does for you, young man. It turns everyone in a position
of authority into a master, and you into every master’s dog. Maybe you know you’ve become a dog, even in
prison. But since everyone else in gray is a dog, too, it doesn’t seem to matter
much. Outside, it does.
-Stephen King (Different Seasons “Rita Hayworth and the
Shawshank Redemption p 96-7)
This was in the early April of 1977, the snow just
starting to melt off the fields, the air just beginning to warm, the baseball teams
coming north to start a new season play in the only game I’m sure God approves
of.
-Stephen King (Different Seasons “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank
Redemption p 97)
Remember that hope is a good thing, Red, maybe the best
of things, and no good thing ever dies.
-Stephen King (Different Seasons “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank
Redemption p 100)
But there’s really no question. It always comes down to just
two choices. Get busy living or get busy dying.
-Stephen King (Different Seasons “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank
Redemption p 100)
My dad thinks kids should find out about life as soon as
they can—the bad as well as the good. Then they’ll be ready for it. He says life is a tiger you have to grab by
the tail, and if you don’t know the nature of the beast it will eat you up.
-Stephen King (Different Seasons “Apt Pupil” p 117)
He had been lonely—no one would ever know just how
lonely. There had been times when he thought almost seriously of suicide. He
made a bad hermit. The voices he heard came
from the radio. The only people who visited were on the other side of a dirty
glass square. He was an old man, and although he was afraid of death, he was
more afraid of being an old man who is alone.
-Stephen King (Different Seasons “Apt Pupil” p 145)
“|There will be water too if God wills it, and we will
find it if God wills it, and we will drink if God wills it.” What happens is
not up to us.
-Stephen King (Different Seasons “Apt Pupil” p 205)
The most important things are the hardest to say. They
are the things you are ashamed of, because words diminish them—words shrink
things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living
size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever
your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would
love to steal away. And you make revelations that cost you dearly only to have
people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all,
or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were
saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not
for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.
-Stephen King (Different Seasons “The Body” p 301)
Love may be as divine as the poets say, he thinks, but sex
is Bozo the Clown bouncing around on a spring.
-Stephen King (Different Seasons “The Body” p 325)
I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when
I was twelve. Jesus, did you?
-Stephen King (Different Seasons “The Body” p 351)
I learned how you can pick out someone who is just learning
to smoke: if you’re new at it you spit a lot.
-Stephen King (Different Seasons “The Body” p 397)
The only two useful artforms are religion and stories.
-Stephen King (Different Seasons “The Body” p 411)
Speech destroys the functions of love, I think—that’s a
hell of a thing for a writer to say, I guess, but I believe it to be true. If you speak to tell a deer you mean it no
harm, it glides away with a single flip of its tail. The word is the harm. Love isn’t what these asshole poets like
McKuen want you to think it is. Love has teeth, they bite; the wounds never
close. No word, no combination of words,
can close those lovebites. It’s the
other way around, that’s the joke. If those wounds dry up, the words die with
them. Take it from me. I’ve made my life
from the words, and I know that it is so.
-Stephen King (Different Seasons “The Body” p 440)
Friends come in and out of your life like busboys in a restaurant,
did you ever notice that?
-Stephen King (Different Seasons “The Body” p 447)
At seventy-three hot blood isn’t even really a memory; it’s
more of an academic report.
-Stephen King (Different Seasons “The Breathing Method” p
456)
The heat radiated all the way across the room—surely there
is no welcome for a man or woman that can equal a fire on the hearth.
-Stephen King (Different Seasons “The Breathing Method” p
456-7)
Birth is wonderful, gentlemen, but I have never found it
beautiful—not by any stretch of the imagination. I believe it is too brutal to
be beautiful.
-Stephen King (Different Seasons “The Breathing Method” p
481)
Homesickness is not always a vague, nostalgic, almost beautiful
emotion, although that is somehow the way we always seem to picture it in our
mind. It can be a terribly keen blade, not just a sickness in metaphor but in
fact as well, it can change the way one looks at the world; the faces one sees
in the street look not just indifferent but ugly…perhaps even malignant.
Homesickness is a real sickness—the ache of the uprooted plant.
-Stephen King (Different Seasons “The Breathing Method” p
493-4)
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