Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption
— 1982 —
New York: Scribner, 2020; 111 pages
FIRST LINES
There’s a guy like me in every state and federal prison in America, I guess—I’m the guy who can get it for you. Tailor-made cigarettes, a bag of reefer if you’re partial to that, a bottle of brandy to celebrate your son or daughter’s high school graduation, or almost anything else… within reason, that is. It wasn’t always that way.
PLOT SUMMARY
Andy Dufresne, a once-respectable young banker, is serving a life sentence in Maine’s notorious Shawshank prison for killing his wife and her lover. Like most convicts, he maintains his innocence while trying to negotiate an unforgiving world of brutal prison violence, corrupt guards, and malevolent wardens.
When Andy befriends Red, the veteran prisoner who narrates this story, trust slowly develops between the two men. Over decades in jail, Red will come to hold Andy in special regard among the rest of the inmates. “In all my years at Shawshank,” says Red, “there have been less than ten men whom I believed when they told me they were innocent. Andy Dufresne was one of them.”
A prison fixer, Red smuggles in all the things that the other prisoners want—for Andy, a small rock hammer, an occasional whiskey bottle, and a movie poster of Rita Hayworth. A money man, Andy gains the confidence of guards and prison officials with investment and tax advice. Yet while Andy’s prison life gets easier over the years, he is still behind bars. And there is no way out.
Then comes a game changer. A new prison inmate may have the evidence that will set Andy free. But the warden is going to make sure Andy remains exactly where he is. The story becomes a classic of the prison-breakout genre.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: STEPHEN KING
If any writer in this collection needs no introduction, it might be Stephen King. Unless, perhaps, you are from another planet. Or have lived in a cave since the 1970s.
One of the most prolific and successful novelists in recent publishing history, King has written more than sixty books, many of them international best sellers. You may have seen a movie or television miniseries—even a Broadway play—based on one. Carrie? The Shining? Stand by Me? Misery? It?
Ring a bell?
Now some facts. First of all, Stephen King informs visitors to his website, he is not dead. Nor is he going blind. Or retired. “Not yet,” he says.
Born in Portland, Maine, on September 21, 1947, Stephen King is the second son of Donald and Nellie King. When Stephen was two, his father left the family. Stephen and his older brother, David, were raised by their mother, moving in with various relatives around the country.
When King was eleven, the family returned to Maine to live with King’s aging grandparents. Attending public schools, King graduated from high school in 1966 and from there went to the University of Maine in Orono, where he wrote a weekly column for the campus newspaper.
He met his future wife, Tabitha, on campus and, after graduating in 1970, they married in 1971. With plans to teach, King had to take a job at an industrial laundry until he was eventually hired to teach high school in Hampden, Maine. By then he had already published some short stories in magazines, like Startling Mystery Stories, and he continued to write as he taught classes.
His breakthrough came when he received a modest advance for Carrie, which was published in 1974. A six-figure paperback reprint sale allowed King to quit teaching for full-time writing. ’Salem’s Lot followed, and on its heels came a long succession of enormously successful horror novels and thrillers. King describes his early life in entertaining style in On Writing (2000).
The Kings lived for a time in Boulder, Colorado, during which King wrote The Shining (1977), the story of a writer struggling with alcoholism who is hired as a caretaker for a hotel during the off-season. King recalls being inspired by a visit to the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, near the end of the season. “They asked me if I could pay cash because they were taking the credit card receipts back down to Denver,” King told the Paris Review. “I went past the first sign that said, Roads may be closed after November 1, and I said, Jeez, there’s a story up here.”
A best seller, the book became the basis for Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film of the same title, an adaptation that King told an interviewer did not please him. “So where is the tragedy if the guy shows up for his job interview and he’s already bonkers? No, I hated what Kubrick did with that.”
Returning to Maine, King completed The Stand, a postapocalyptic novel that describes a world decimated by an influenza pandemic. Initially published in 1978, it had been edited down by some five hundred pages. In 1990, The Stand was reissued with the editorial cuts restored and other changes in the chronology. At 1,153 pages, the revised edition is his longest book, and considered by many his best—although, of course, not a candidate for this collection.
Space does not allow a full tally of all his works, including those written under pen name Richard Bachman. It was an identity he used because he believed he could write more than one book per year, but his publisher balked at the risk of saturating the market. In one of those books, Thinner, a man is cursed to uncontrollably lose weight. Based on the book’s style, an astute fan figured out that Bachman was King and blew his cover.
The recipient of the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and the 2014 National Medal of Arts, King has demonstrated convincingly, with sales of more than 300 million books worldwide, that “popular fiction” and “serious fiction” can coexist. King lives in Bangor, Maine, and Florida.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ IT
Unlike many of King’s books, this one may not keep you awake, listening for things that go bump in the night. No ghouls, vampires, scary cemeteries, or little girls with the power to set fires. It is about something even scarier—reality. Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption is a taut, riveting story of an unjust world in which innocence is no defense.
Let me first point out that this King novella has been made into one of my favorite films, The Shawshank Redemption, a Best Picture nominee in 1994. With some plot and character deviations, the movie is a largely faithful adaptation that has become a popular modern classic. If you have never seen the movie, see it.
But don’t skip the novel. Read it for its sharp characters, intriguing plot, and small, brilliant scenes, such as Andy getting the guards to provide a prison work gang with some “suds”—bottles of beer—on a hot day. The book spotlights Stephen King as a master storyteller with larger ambitions than creating page-turners.
Part of King’s appeal, and his genius, is to take the ordinary or commonplace and make it extraordinary. Teen angst becomes a story of telekinesis (Carrie). A junkyard dog becomes a satanic beast (Cujo). A cell phone becomes an object of dread (The Cell).
But here, with prison as his metaphor, King addresses innocence and guilt, justice and injustice, in a muscular, inventive story, rich in character despite the short narrative. Ultimately, Stephen King is interested in morality—good and evil. He often investigates commonplace malevolence in his fiction, whether on a grand scale, as in The Stand, or in the compact gem of Rita Hayworth.
“So whether you talk about ghosts or vampires or Nazi war criminals living down the block, we’re still talking about the same thing, which is an intrusion of the extraordinary into ordinary life and how we deal with it,” he told an interviewer for the Paris Review. “What that shows about our character and our interactions with others and the society we live in interests me a lot more than monsters and vampires and ghouls and ghosts.”
The theme of imprisonment is at the core of several other selections in this book—One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, If This Is a Man, The Nickel Boys, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Stranger. All of these examine, in some respect, the plight of the falsely accused and the possibility of justice. And as settings, the prison camp provides a backdrop for a visceral exploration of the human condition and the potential for depravity in the world. King’s tightly packed and captivating story joins that august company.
WHAT TO READ NEXT
Where to begin? If you are new to Stephen King, maybe at the beginning. Start with his first published novel, Carrie (1974), the story of bullied teenager Carrie White who exacts revenge on her schoolmates and fanatically religious mother. King’s second published novel, ’Salem’s Lot (1975) is also vintage King, offering his take on the classic vampire genre.
His memoir and advice on the craft of writing, On Writing, is enlightening and a lot of fun to read.
Two of my other top choices from the King catalog are The Dead Zone, about a high school teacher who can see the future and confronts the threat of a politician who may become a dangerous autocrat; and Firestarter, the story of a young girl with remarkable destructive powers and the attempt by the government to weaponize those powers.
And then there is The Stand, all 1,153 pages of it. I suppose after a year of short books in a time of pandemic, maybe it will be time for a very long one about another plague.