Strange...I know I answered a question like this from another in the past...but when I click on the Hearts link...four threads only? My avatar is not there signifying that I have posted there. Go figure.
Hearts is the reason I found this board...Hearts and an afterword in Bones where King writes about Hearts, says let me know what you think. And here I am again on my own...going down the only road I've ever known.
Growing up in a small town in Michigan's Upper Peninsula the war in Vietnam was ever present. It was either the Tet Offensive or the assassination of JFK when I learned what it meant to be a child. Grownups gathered in front of the TV at Grandma's, winter, the propane heater on one wall holds my fascination and I watch the blue flame within and exclaim to the room. QUIET! We're watching the news! Walter Cronkite and the CBS Evening News was the only game in town unless you had cable. The footage from Vietnam and the footage from the streets of the country influenced us...younger kids...like Gene and Phineas in A Separate Peace, or perhaps like the kids in Lord of the Flies. We were too young...though the war dragged on that it seemed like that would be our destiny.
Until then, like Gene and Finny and their friends, we prepared for war...though we didn't realize that that is what we were doing. The four-gable school where we spent our fourth and fifth grades, situated as it was near the mills of Tamarack, the trestles and half-bridges, all that played a part. Climbing down the ironwork of a railroad trestle was one game we played...and I doubt any mothers knew about our Super Suicide Society of the 1968. But if we prepared for war, we were also influenced by the other reporting we watched...students...hippies...fire-hoses and dogs. This was also the time of race riots, Detroit and other places. The world was in turmoil.
One of our group thought it would be a good idea to march around the schoolhouse, our arms across the shoulders of the two guys on either side, chanting Down with Nixon! Heh! Yeah, who would think to do that? We made about two passes and called it good. Winter, one of us saw two or three rolling a large snowball...that became a snow boulder...and naturally Mrs. Erva's big blue Buick seemed like a good place to park the boulder...one in front...and another in back...rolling them across the patch of dirt buried under the snow in the flat below the hill that was like the stands on one side of a football field...or an area that passed for a football field when the older boys played rough games of football. Not the touch variety...these were knock-down drag-out competitions that went on long into the summer night when the streetlights flickered on and began buzz...their muscle cars parked below in the gravel turn-around where they'd lay rubber before and after games...some or many of them eventually going to Vietnam...at least one never to return...others returning with pieces missing...or metal in their body and the world forever changed.
So reading Hearts...having read A Separate Peace and Lord of the Flies...I came away with the belief that here is another story that has a place on the shelf next to those stories. There is that sense of being alone in each story, being alone and then coming together, a kind of awakening to the idea that though one is alone and faces a multitude of conflicts...the classes...the girl...the roommate...the grade-point average...that sense of leaving one time and entering another time...that sense of the larger conflict, the war...over there...the growing awakening to the idea that though alone one is also a part of a whole. And the sense that one has to make a decision. What to decide? School. War. Protest. Pennants? Penance? Playing Hearts is one decision. Classes another. A girl another. Being separate, not playing Hearts another. There's a character for each decision. Who made the right decision? Is there a right decision? Is going along to get along a decision and is that the right decision?
There's that line from...Easy Rider...I think, at the get-go, We blew it. And for what it's worth, some of the same kind of questions posed by at least one character in Hearts are repeated in Under the Dome.