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Title: 11/22/63 by Stephen King
Details: Copyright 2011, Scribner
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "ON NOVEMBER 22, 1963, THREE SHOTS RANG OUT IN DALLAS, PRESIDENT KENNEDY DIED, AND THE WORLD CHANGED. WHAT IF YOU COULD CHANGE IT BACK?
In this brilliantly conceived tour de force, Stephen King—who has absorbed the social, political, and popular culture of his generation more imaginatively and thoroughly than any other writer—takes readers on an incredible journey into the past and the possibility of altering it.
It begins with Jake Epping, a thirty-five-year-old English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching GED classes. He asks his students to write about an event that changed their lives, and one essay blows him away—a gruesome, harrowing story about the night more than fifty years ago when Harry Dunning’s father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a sledgehammer. Reading the essay is a watershed moment for Jake, his life—like Harry’s, like America’s in 1963—turning on a dime. Not much later his friend Al, who owns the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to the past, a particular day in 1958. And Al enlists Jake to take over the mission that has become his obsession—to prevent the Kennedy assassination.
So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson, in a different world of Ike and JFK and Elvis, of big American cars and sock hops and cigarette smoke everywhere. From the dank little city of Derry, Maine (where there’s Dunning business to conduct), to the warmhearted small town of Jodie, Texas, where Jake falls dangerously in love, every turn is leading eventually, of course, to a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and to Dallas, where the past becomes heart-stoppingly suspenseful, and where history might not be history anymore. Time-travel has never been so believable. Or so terrifying."
Why I Wanted to Read It: You might remember last year's challenge where I talked about Stephen King's work and the fact about a third of it or more, I've not read. This was one of the unread.
How I Liked It: What's the point of a time-travel story? Making a trenchant commentary about our current "present"? For laughs, to provoke thought, or both? Or how about just to imagine if you could? What if you could drastically change history?
That's generally the idea behind King's 11/22/63, at least superficially.
We're introduced to our hero, Jake Epping, a divorced high school (and adult education) English teacher. Epping's favorite diner is apparently harboring a secret, along with its proprietor. It's a portal to the past, specifically fall of 1958, and no matter how many years you may stay, when you return, you've only been gone two minutes. Every time you go back? A reset to everything, like you never went in the first place. Like most of King's bendings of reality, he doesn't waste a whole lot of time on hows and whys since that's not really the point.
Turns out the proprietor has been trying to prevent the JFK assassination (other, more recent turning points of history, like Bush v Gore and 9/11, are too far off from the portal of 1958 to attempt) and now dying, the proprietor wants Jake to carry out his mission of preventing the assassination.
Along the way, Jake sets out to right some wrongs of his own (as mentioned in the flap summary, one of his adult students for an essay told a horrifying story about his abusive alcoholic father murdering his entire family and almost killing him; as this takes place during Halloween 1958, Jake first uses stopping it as a trial run for the Kennedy assassination) which leads him to have to make another trip, this one more successful.
Unfortunately, he wasn't counting on falling in love on the way which considerably complicates his mission (but fortunately since this is a Stephen King novel, is mostly free of the trite tropes that might surround such a plot twist).
Ultimately, Jake learns what we pretty much expected him to learn, that you can't really change the past, at least not without serious, unintended consequences to the present, and thus, all things apparently happen for a reason.
He learns the error of his ways and we get a surprisingly tender, bittersweet ending.
People (including me) have noted King's writing can lean towards maximalism. People (including me) have noted that sometimes he really needs a better editor (or several).
But this book, though possibly one of his longest or at least his longer, doesn't feel bloated or in any way padded. Every bit of the writing feels necessary to the stories he's telling and the time is well spent developing characters and places and settings for maximum impact. We feel connected to these characters and the ways in which Epping (or rather, his mid 20th century alter ego George Amberson) changes and impacts their lives matters both to us and to the story. As he winds his way from Derry, Maine (of course) to an imaginary suburban Dallas small town, to Dallas to stop Oswald, all the characters he and we meet along the way feel real and consequential.
Also worth noting is King's handling of Oswald and his wife, as well as several real-life characters with whom they interact, which in no way feels separate from the fictional characters and maintains the flow of the story. You might be surprised to find yourself actually compelled by King's Oswald and his motivations rather than rolling your eyes at yet another rehashing of well-tread historical events. Oswald and his mentors and enablers truly become a part of the story rather than cameos.
Slightly surprisingly for a King novel, maybe, the ending in which Epping does not change the past (save for one little thing for someone he cares about, not a historical figure) is considerably more heartfelt than you might be expecting, and it makes for a better, stronger story than a more flatly or bleakly shocking or O. Henryesque twist (as King has sometimes favored in the past) would.
I feel confident in putting this book among the best of King's entire work that I've read, which is not all of it, but is still a considerable amount.
What's the point of a time-travel story? According to 11/22/63, it's the human connections we make along the way.
Notable: Given that the protagonist finds himself in Derry, Maine, where King has set a considerable amount of his stories, there's bound to be a cameo or callback somewhere. It comes in the form of Richie and Bev from It making the acquaintance of Epping and it's just this side of a bit too cute (particularly when Epping quotes the kids' catchphrase back to them).
Similarly a little too winking is one of the more complex issue of anachronisms. King had the idea for this story (a time-traveler who sets out to stop the Kennedy assassination) back in the 1970s, before he found fame and success with Carrie, but at the time, didn't have the resources nor time to research the history (he also noted it felt too raw barely a decade after).
So in the then-current 2011 novel, in order for King's protagonist to be a thirty-something high school teacher, he's a Gen Xer rather than a Boomer like King. King's written for Generation X successfully before (in at least short story form) but on a story that hinges on time and place, how does this work?
Before he even starts time-traveling, a woman with whom Epping works (and with whom there's been the promise of a relationship) at the school casually makes a Laugh-In reference to him, which of course isn't impossible for Gen-Xers to do to one another in 2011, but kind of strange without some sort of comment on it.
Epping, like anyone plucked from the 21st century and flung more than fifty years into the past, is going to drop some anachronisms. Epping hugs other men, has to quickly replace "hippie" with "beatnik" when getting a haircut, and naturally drops some slang that hasn't been invented yet. Most tellingly (and this is where it gets a bit too cute), he absentmindedly sings a song with obscene lyrics which leads to an argument (and eventually, a revelation). So what song would a Gen-Xer be absentmindedly singing with lyrics unacceptable in the early '60s? Grunge? Rap? Alternative?
"Honky Tonk Women", the 1969 hit by the Rolling Stones. Again, it's not impossible, particularly to the past-inured generations that followed the Baby Boom. But it's something that jolts a little all the same, and it's not helped by Epping's companion's angry confusion that he couldn't have heard the song on the radio as he claims since the FCC would never let it on the airwaves (those times, they sure are a'changin', huh?).
Lastly notable is one of King's credits (in the afterward-- ALWAYS read the afterward!) to how he developed the dystopia Epping finds in a world where Kennedy was not assassinated. No less than Doris Kearns Goodwin and her husband Kennedy aid and speechwriter Richard Goodwin apparently helped King and one of the most unthinkably nightmarish concepts (at least in 2011 or any time before the 2016 Presidential election), a President George Wallace, was their idea.
Final Grade: A
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