I picked up Stephen King's Hearts in Atlantis because of the Dark Tower connection, but I finished it because it's an engrossing treatment of the American Baby Boomer generation, especially the effect the Vietnam War has had on that generation. (I'm on the younger edge of Gen X myself, so I tend to think sorting people into generations is kind of dumb, but I feel like I gained some insight into Baby Boomers, which is King's and my parents' generation).
Besides, I've become a big fan of Stephen King in recent years and here you see him doing a lot of what he does best: reflections on childhood and adulthood à la IT or "The Body," his patented skillful characterization, and a few weird things just because, well, he's Stephen King. Hearts in Atlantis is also not a "novel" in any conventional sense: really it's a short novel, a novella, and a few short stories that are linked in ways that are not always immediately obvious.
The Dark Tower connections are really only in the first part ("Low Men in Yellow Coats") and the last part ("Heavenly Shades of Night are Falling"). The connections are prominent enough for Tower junkies to notice but not at all central enough to detract from the enjoyment of anyone who has never read the Dark Tower. That is: having read the Dark Tower books will slightly enhance one's enjoyment, but not having read the Dark Tower books won't make it impossible to enjoy or understand. A character from the later Dark Tower books is present and the "low men" are lurking and generally being creepy (case in point: they communicate via lost pet posters), but that's about all I should say. As a Dark Tower fan I found that this enhanced my appreciation of the Dark Tower series and this book, but I would easily love the Dark Tower and this book without these connections. They're just more icing on the cake of the Stephen King multiverse.
This is King's "Vietnam book," but that doesn't come totally into focus until the second part, the eponymous "Hearts in Atlantis." I enjoyed this tale of a late 60's college kid who becomes addicted to the card game Hearts and comes to terms with the way his life and the world around him are changing. He learns what a peace symbol is for the first time, falls in love with a peace activist, and worries about having to go to Vietnam if he flunks out of college. There are some connections to the first part, but it's not obvious at first. It's interesting that none of the stories actually take place in Vietnam, except partly through a few flashbacks later. Come to think of it, none of King's books take place outside the United States, at least when they take place on Earth.
This isn't a typical war book; rather, it's about the war inside, or how the war affected an American generation. At some point in one of the later stories ("Why We're in Vietnam") a character notes, decades later, that the war was being fought in some sense for decades after the last helicopter evacuated Americans from Vietnam. Characters also wonder why America was involved in Vietnam at all. King is not really a "political message" kind of author, but the anti-war sentiment is obvious to me, anyway.
The book ends with three short stories. I found "Blind Willie" to be the weakest of the bunch. I think I saw what King was trying to do with PTSD and mental illness, but it didn't quite come together for me. "Why We're in Vietnam" comes at the Vietnam experience from a few decades' distance, as characters in 1999 reflect on the ways in which the war continues to haunt them, both literally and figuratively, veteran soldiers and veteran peace activists alike. The last story, the shortest and most beautiful, finally reunites us with the main character of the first part and provides a subtle Dark Tower nuance on top of it all.
Aside from "Blind Willie," which didn't work for me, the two longer parts did occasionally drag on, but as is often the case with Stephen King, I didn't entirely mind spending time with these characters even if they were just hanging out talking about books or playing cards (note to self: read Lord of the Flies and learn how to play Hearts).
Overall, Hearts in Atlantis is a far more complicated work than it first appears. Much like war itself, the effects it has and connections it makes are unpredictable and at times horrific. There's a lot going on here -- Dark Tower stuff, growing up stuff, war stuff, etc.-- but I'd like to think one of King's major points is to encourage the reader to reflect on the unintended consequences of wars fought in far-away nations, far-flung dimensions, or in our own minds. What philosophers call the doctrine of double-effect (when is "collateral damage" permissible?) runs much deeper and longer than we think -- into the very fabric of our societies and minds for decades to come. If anything, maybe this should make us think more carefully about which wars we should fight, both inside and out.
See also my Goodreads review.
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