Christine Recaps: Part Five
by thethreepennyguignol
Just a quick note that this recap contains discussion of specific suicide methods, if that’s something you’d prefer to avoid.
Rev up your engines, turn up your radios, create a psuedo-sexual relationship with your vehicle of choice: let’s get back into Christine!
We left off last time with the death of Roland LeBay, and an encounter with his brother that led Dennis to a visit at the Rainbow Motel (happy Pride month, everyone!), where we start this chapter, along with Roadrunner by the Modern Lovers:
Of course, the first thing Dennis is struck by is the age of the residents at the motel – “blooming with the soft fat of post-fifty and no hope”. As Christine is coming into her full power, the real threat this early on in the book is Dennis facing the reality of ageing, and being really, very, exceptionally mean about everyone he meets who happens to have made it past forty.
Dennis meets with George LeBay, who shares some blatant exposition backstory about growing up with Roland (“Rollie”, as he calls him) and the difficult childhood he and his three siblings faced with an alcoholic father.
While this is obviously a really important scene for Roland and, by extension, Christine’s backstory, it’s also the first time in the novel I’ve found myself clunking over the dialogue here – the way George talks is just so, so obviously thematic groundwork and exposition, and coming out of someone’s mouth, it reads as completely unnatural. It’s the curse of doing so much character introduction via dialogue. It’s not that it can’t be done well, but it so often reads exactly as this does – clunky and functional.
There’s a lot to get through with Roland – his difficult, violent childhood, his time in the army as a mechanic, and then his marriage to a Southern woman named Veronica which resulted in the birth of his only child, a daughter, Rita. Shortly after she came along, he purchased Christine – his brother received a luridly-detailed letter recounting every inch of her “measurements”, as Dennis describes them, his obsession even then beginning to emerge.
And then, George reveals, Rita died when she was six – in the front seat of Christine, no less.
Now, much as I don’t love what’s come before in this chapter, this is probably one of the most memorable moments of the book for me. George describes Roland and his daughter stopping off on a regular Saturday at a roadside stall for burgers, when Rita began to choke:
“He tried to save her, I believe that. And it was only ill luck that she died. He had been in a ruthless business for a long time, and I don’t believe he loved his daughter very much, if at all. But sometimes, in mortal matters, a lack of love can be a saving grace…”
I fucking love this scene as a character moment for the late Roland, and for the very-much-not-late Christine. George is right – it could have just been nothing more than bad luck that Rita died in the car, that George wasn’t able to save her, despite what appeared to be his best efforts. Did this horrific event define Christine, or did Christine’s malevolence define it? Was Roland’s love for Christine – far more than that for his daughter – the ultimate decider on how this went down? Was Christine jealous, did she instigate this in some way? Or was it just a pure act of fate that Roland, who loved that car more than he loved anything in his life, watched his daughter die a “filthy, frightening” death inside of her? This is exactly the right kind of ambiguity for me, the questions that could be answered in either direction depending on how you interpret the book. It’s a tragedy no matter which way you slice it, but the specific malevolence of that tragedy is up for debate.
Less up for debate, though, is Roland’s callous behaviour in the wake of his daughter’s death. When George asks him if he’ll get rid of the car after the funeral, Roland is nonplussed:
“I’d be crazy to trade her, George, she’s only got 11,000 miles on her. You know you never get your money out of a trade until she’s at least three years old”.
This detail is so fucking good – there’s a brutality in Roland’s practicality, a complete inability or unwillingness to engage with the impractical emotional implications of keeping Christine around. Why would he get rid of her, just because his daughter died there? He’s not going to get his money back. Roland is one of King’s best banal evils, and, sure enough, it doesn’t take long for his wife to follow her daughter – six months after Rita’s death, Veronica kills herself, feeding Christine’s exhaust through the window and dying in the same car her daughter did.
While George claims not to believe in anything supernatural, he does believe that “events and emotions can have a certain…lingering resonance”. This psychic fingerprint is something we’ll see a lot more of through the rest of the book, and it’s something to keep in mind going forward. Dennis ends the chapter reflecting, once again, on his age – “I would not have granted you the power of the past to reach out horrid dead hands towards the living. But I’m a little older now.”. It’s an interesting comparison to the beginning of the chapter, his disdain towards the aged people at the motel – perhaps a reflection of how just this story that George shared had already begun to change him in some way.
Anyway, we start off the next chapter, later that same evening, with some Chuck Berry:
Dennis arrives home after his meeting with George to find that Arnie has asked him to give him a call – Dennis, though reluctant, does as he’s asked, and Arnie lets him know that Repperton, his bully, has been removed from the garage he’s working on Christine at. As he gushes about everything that still needs to be done to her, Dennis decides to wander off down a notably misogynistic mental alleyway about a relationship an old friend, Freddy, got into with a young mother:
“Then he met some slut from Penn Hills – and I mean a real slut, one more than happy to stoop for the troops…I know they say a stiff dick has no conscience, but some cunts have teeth, and when I looked at Freddy, looking ten years older than he should have, I felt like I wanted to cry”.
Firstly and most foremostly: cunt with teeth, hey, vagina dentata mention! Secondly – fucking hell, if this entire segment isn’t just the most unpleasant Dennis has been in the book so far. I mean, it tracks, given how dismissively he’s talked about women and especially sexually-active women in the book so far, and it’s so interesting to me how brutal Dennis is about girls his own age versus the boys he’s friends with. There’s an almost punishing lack of sympathy for the woman in question here – who, again, doesn’t even get a name, a girl who has a lot of sex and gets pregnant young, who’s reasons for doing so are limited to Because She’s Just the Type. Dennis compares her to a cow, calls a cunt and a slut – and then the nerve to, in his inner monologue, wonder why she looks at himself and Freddy’s friends with “dead, contemptuous eyes”. I don’t know, man, maybe because you’re talking about her like a hateful little misogynist and she’s not entirely ignorant to that fact?
It’s an interesting character detail for Dennis, but at the same time, I wish there was another perspective to balance it out at this point in the book, to underline his hypocrisy and misogyny a little more clearly. It’s also an interesting character detail for me that, when I first read this book in the height of my shithead edgelord teenage Not Like Other Girls phase, none of Dennis’ internal monologue registered as misogynistic or unreasonable to me in any way. Horrendous!
Either way, it’s interesting to see him comparing Christine and Arnie’s relationship to that of Freddy and his unnamed “slut”, especially as Arnie begins to express deeper care for Christine.
After his phone call with Arnie, Dennis talks to his father about Darnell, the owner of the garage where Arnie is renting space, who Dennis’ father worked for as an accountant for several years. His father reveals that Darnell offered him a chance to get in on some good money via underhanded means, which his father dismissed: “I’m no fucking crook, Dennis.”
This line makes Dennis feel as though his father is seeing him as an equal for the first time – and his reaction to this is enough to give psychoanalysts everywhere a raging, rock-hard…lot to think about.
“In that moment I think I could have imagined him making love to my mother, both of them sweaty and working hard to make it, and not have been embarrassed.”
The psychosexual layers to this chapter are too fucking much! That Dennis associates this moment of being seen as an adult by his father, in a positive sense, with considering his father’s sexual activities, as proof of their equality as men, while earlier in the chapter he wouldn’t even give a name to the “cunt” who dated his friend…there’s a lot to unpack here, and I don’t think it’s any coincidence that all of this comes so soon before Leigh makes her arrival in the story.
But we’ll be getting to that in the next recap – I’m going to keep this one to just two chapters, as they’re pretty meaty (uh, no pun intended).
The Cutprice Guignol 