Characters of ‘Survivor’ are shallow

Kissy Mellors is driving home from her evening swim when two young women suddenly step in front of her. She swerves and slams on her brakes, just missing her Sowerwine University classmates. But the drunken student in the car behind her does not. Passing Kissy on the right, he hits the young women head-on. One of them dies instantly, the other lingers in a coma for years.

This is the crisis that begins Tabitha King’s latest novel, “Survivor.” It is a radical departure in style and substance from her Nodd’s Ridge series — “Caretakers,” “Pearl,” “One on One,” “The Book of Reuben.”

King sets out to tell the story of how this horrific accident intertwines and affects the lives of the survivors. But her plot quickly slips into melodrama best suited to a daytime soap opera. And King’s use of language and descriptions of her characters’ sexual encounters are so graphic that they often cross the line and become crude.

The great strength of her previous novels is the depth and familiarity of her characters, and the ordinariness of their daily lives. The greatest flaw of “Survivor” is the fact that the main characters are so shallow that readers do not care what happens to them or why. When plot fails to capture readers’ imaginations, the characters must, if the novel is to succeed on any level at all.

Kissy is the young ingenue, bright and beautiful, who makes bad choices about men. James Houston is the premed student responsible for the fatal collision. Out of pity and curiosity, Kissy beds him just before he is sent off to prison. Junior Clootie, the ex-boyfriend of the dead coed, is the hockey star she marries, divorces, then takes as her lover. Mike Burke is the young cop called to the scene of the accident, who makes Kissy his lifelong obsession.

Kissy hides from her own life behind a camera lens. She spends years photographing Ruth Prashker, left in a vegetative state because of the accident. Whether Kissy is motivated by survivor guilt or morbid curiosity, King never makes clear. Kissy aimlessly bounces from man to man, situation to situation, like the silver ball trapped inside a pinball machine. The question never answered is why.

Hockey star Junior Clootie is a Saint Bernard of a boy who grows into a Saint Bernard of a man. As a pup, he nearly destroys his promising future on ice. Then, as a grown-up, he settles into the routine of loyally and lovingly rescuing Kissy from her own bad judgment. While hockey becomes his career, Kissy becomes his vocation.

James Houston disappears from the novel and Kissy’s life when he enters prison. At the end of the story when he is released, however, Kissy eagerly beds him in a sick search for closure on the accident. Houston appears essentially unchanged by his eight years inside.

Cop-turned-lawyer Mike Burke is King’s most fascinating character, perhaps because his motives are so clear. Essentially, he is an ambitious loner who sees Kissy as a challenge and a prize to wear on his arm. Burke is the kind of character that lives in King’s Nodd’s Ridge — flawed in ways that are frighteningly recognizable.

And that is one of the problems with this book. Kissy and Junior live lives far removed from King’s usual characters. Also missing from the characters in “Survivor” is a sense of humor. They take themselves far too seriously, something King rarely does.

The other problem is one of readers’ expectations. Admirers of King’s work expect to find flawed but fascinating, even lovable, characters in her novels. Kissy Mellors is neither. It is difficult to like and admire a work whose main character is so shallow, so emotionally inaccessible.

The most enjoyable thing about the book is its familiar setting. The Hornpipe Stream cuts through the Valley and empties into the Dance River. The Dance divides the city of Peltry on a northwest-to-southeast diagonal. For a time, Kissy is employed by the Peltry Daily News, a “pink stucco building” located across from the Civic Center.

King describes the Civic Center as ” … a notably ugly construction that looked like it was built of garish playing cards, behind a thirty-foot statue of a mythical logger named Peter Gallouse. The statue bore a striking resemblance to Charles Manson and figured in the nightmares of many of the children of Peltry.”

King set “Survivor” in a place she knows like the back of her hand, Bangor. She did not write her characters, however, as if she knows them down to their bones, as she did in her previous novels. Ultimately, the novel fails to capture readers because Kissy Mellors, the survivor, fails to capture their hearts.