If you're one of the unlucky people who recently asked me what I've been reading, I apologize. I just cannot shut up about Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men.
What? You've already read it? That's nice. I'm sure you got everything you could out of it when you were 17. There couldn't possibly be anything left for you to take from it now, could there?
I didn't get this book less when I was younger as much as I got it different. For starters, that seventh chapter, the one that builds the backstory of protagonist Jack Burden and Anne Stanton, his mathematically exact, foxy-as-hell love interest. I know it's supposed to be high school girls and not boys that swoon, but I'm pretty sure that's exactly what I did when I first read that chapter. At 29, the whole chapter – which has way more to do with missed opportunity in general than it does with high-falutin' crap like love – comes off instead as devastatingly sad.
More importantly, though, I got exactly how much of a factory-wrapped-douche Jack Burden really is. From start to finish, one thing after another. He's a terrible son. He's a nihilist. He's a shitty husband. He's unaccountable for anything at all.
And damned if I didn't eat it up this time.
The cool thing about re-reading books from your teen and pre-teen years is that you're not just bringing a boatload of personal experience to the table. You've also got a whole arsenal of pop-culture references to fling around. Jack Burden solidified the mold for every brooding, introspective, whiny, white guy since. (I mean, his name's Burden for chrissakes.)
Which leads me to the point that inspired this post in the first place. Another thing that changed in my reading: I'm bothered by the tidyness of it all. As my wife pointed out, this is a story of its time (which, I would argue, accounts for Jack's casual racism, never addressed in the book, even when major plot points could support it), and as such, open-ended finales are hard to come by. The kind of half-way epiphanies bittersweet disappointments that close much modern fiction just didn't appear in full force until a decade or two later.
So I've got a suggestion. Can someone re-write the ending for me? My way, you'll only have to redo a few pages. It's simple (WARNING – eensy little spoiler here): let Jack tell Sugar Boy about Tiny's ploy to kill the Boss. It's a dirty little moment, the last we see of Jack's dark side, and best of all, Jack is self-aware enough to think through the consequences as he makes the decision. It'd be the perfect cynical little twist. Plus, Jack would still get the girl, and Sugar Boy would get to realize his destiny.
Huh? You've got better things to do than mangling classic American fiction? I'll just have to rewrite it myself.
Whaddya think?