The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King

This review is old, having originally been written back in 2005. I want to review a book about the Giants or Rangers. Anyone know of anything?

It doesn’t take a whole lot to see where Stephen King’s sports loyalties lie while reading The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, does it? You know, Tom Gordon the Red Sox closing pitcher? And of course, there’s an unwritten law in Red Sox Nation that makes it illegal for one to talk about the Boston Red Sox without bringing the New York Yankees into the conversation at least three times.

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon stands out as one of Stephen King’s more unusual books. One of Early King’s trademarks was his use of more supernatural, unexplained, and fantastical stuff in his books: The ghosts from The Shining, the vampires in Salem’s Lot, the aliens from The Tommyknockers, and just about everything from The Eyes of the Dragon. The only supernatural elements of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon come in the form of a scary dream, perhaps a vision, induced by main character Trisha McFarland’s vivid imagination and fear from her situation. Even the parts of the book when the appiration of Tom Gordon is described as “seeming very real,” the ultimate decision of whether or not the Tom Gordon angel is real is more left up to the reader.

Instead of relying on beheaded zombies to scare us, King opts for a more plausible idea: The big, bad, dark, scary woods. Then he goes into overdrive by making the story of the novel getting lost in the woods. If you’re an urbanite like myself, that’s not a fun thought, is it? Finally, the kicker: Our main character is just nine years old, and she has almost no supplies to survive on. Throughout the book, King attacks a very primal fear: That of the unknown. That’s really all The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is about. Little girl gets lost in the woods and gets scared because she’s not related to Elmer Fudd or Cletus the Slack-jawed Yokel.

If this sounds like a simplistic idea, that’s because it is. Just nine-year-old Trisha McFarland, lost and left to survive on her own devices in the woods. There’s no villain, and no real scare or climax. There’s a voice, probably Trisha’s subconscious, which is always there to bug her about how she won’t survive, how some guy is going to come along and find her body one day far from now. Really now – a voice? He was scary in Trisha’s vision, appearing as a face made of wasps, but he’s nothing but an amusing, mischievous little devil other than that. Trisha’s mother and brother are more villainous than the voice – they are, after all, the ones who were too busy fighting each other to notice that Trisha slipped off to go on a bathroom break during a hike in the woods, leaving the poor girl to att\empt the shortcut that got her lost.

Of course, being nine, Trisha is scared to death when this happens. While Stephen King does his usual excellent job in getting what Trisha is so afraid of and why across to the reader, his sight through a nine-year-old girl’s eyes fails to scare us for that very reason: It’s through a nine-year-old’s eyes, and an adult would probably know what was going on in the woods. It’s tough to find fault with Trisha’s improv survival abilities, though. Ironically, had an adult been with Trisha, I firmly believe that while Trisha would have been less afraid, she probably would have starved more. An adult would have been scared of the food Trisha dared to try: Berries and raw fish.

Since an appiration of Boston Red Sox (now New York Yankees!) closing pitcher Tom Gordon plays a crucial role, I should talk about him. Among the supplies Trisha has with her during her time in the woods is a walkman with a radio. She finds solace listening to Red Sox games (including matches with the Yankees, of course, since this book was written by one of Boston’s nutcase fans) and imagining her favorite player, Tom Gordon, is there with her to ward off the unseen evil. Tom sometimes appears as kind of a guardian angel, and he actually does show Trisha the way. Unfortunately, this plot device is underused. It could have been a lot more than it was. Maybe that’s why the Red Sox got rid of him. Through much of the book, Trisha is comparing her situation to a save situation in a baseball game, but like a baseball game, her closer doesn’t really get to do anything until the last inning.

Much has been made about how short The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is. Well, you have one girl who’s lost in the woods. It would be a stretch for any author to flesh a one-character concept out to King’s average novel length, and considering how much shorter it could be in the hands of a worse writer, King did a damn good job with it. With just one character and no one for her to talk to, the majority of the book is descriptions – woods, psychoanalysis, and a couple of times, descriptions of what her family is thinking. It’s excellent writing, and it’s easily appreciated.

My biggest problem with The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is with Trisha’s mentality. She’s nine years old, but many of heer thoughts and expressions are far beyond her years. In a flashback scene, Trisha asks her father if he believes in God, and dad responds with some talk about a “Subaudible.” Trisha acts confused when he mentions it, but throughout the book, she appears to have a full, complete understanding of this concept. This is beyond the limits of suspension of disbelief because most nine-year-olds don’t know what the word subaudible means, let alone an ability to grasp any meaning of the word which could possibly be used as a substitute for any kind of deity.

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon attempts to play on a very primitive fear. It fails because too many people know enough about the woods to make a complete fear of them plausible. I like Stephen King, and I appreciate the new ideas he’s been attempting as of late. But nothing he writes these days can compare to his older, more imaginative, more supernatural work. What can I say? I’m unusual. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon isn’t. That’s the problem.

Tags: Curses, Fans, Pitchers, Rivalries, Very Strenuous Connections to Baseball