11/22/63
By Stephen King.
Scribner, 864 pp., $35.
Reviewed by Dwight Silverman
There’s a what-if, time-travel game commonly played by college students, drunks and wannabe science fiction writers, and it goes like this: If you could go back in time and kill Adolph Hitler when he was a child, would you do it?
The answer is not simple. Sure, you might save millions of people, but in so drastically diverting the course of history, you’d likely change other things. You could change them so drastically that your parents might never have met… which means you would not have existed… which means you could not have gone back in time to kill Hitler the child.
Oy.
In his latest novel, 11/22/63, Stephen King plays this time-travel game across 850 pages, but the target instead is Lee Harvey Oswald, the man presumed to have killed President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. The time traveler is Jake Epping, a high school teacher in a small Maine town in 2011, and he’s been convinced by a dying friend to stop Oswald from assassinating Kennedy.
There’s just one catch, and it’s a tasty twist that keeps King’s big book from being one big eyeroll. Step through a “rabbit hole” in the back of Al’s diner, and you’ll always end up at the same starting point in time: 11:58 a.m. on Sept. 9, 1958. Diner owner Al has been diving back into time to buy beef at 1958 prices; his customers wonder why he can charge so little for his hamburgers.
When you return to 2011, it’s only a few minutes from the time you departed, even though you may have spent years in “the Land of Ago”, as Epping calls it.
Stephen King (Chronicle illustration: Ken Ellis)
But that’s not all. If you step through again, and you’re back at that same time and date, the universe resets, as though your previous visit never happened. Any changes to history you affected must be undertaken again if you want them to stick.
Al also has spent considerable time in the Land of Ago stalking Oswald, his wife Marina and other players in the tragic saga of JFK’s death. He becomes convinced that killing Oswald would make the world a better place, paradoxes be damned. But he’s no longer healthy enough to do the deed himself, and sets out to convince Epping to do it.
As a test, Epping goes back in time to stop a crime that left a family dead and one of his students mentally impaired. He succeeds and returns to find that the resulting, unintended consequences are minor compared to the benefits. With this, he agrees to take a shot at stopping Oswald, knowing he has the unique reset feature of the rabbit hole as a safety net. If the consequences of success outweigh the benefits, he can always step into 1958 and immediately return to 2011, and all will be well.
One of the pleasures of reading King’s fiction is watching him dance with the conventions of popular culture. In many of his novels, society’s quirks are bent and twisted as a foundation for King’s horror. While this book isn’t a horror novel — though there are moments of fear and revulsion, to be sure — he gleefully juxtaposes two versions of pop culture.
There’s the relatively innocent, optimistic and yet often repressive America of 1963, seen through the eyes of Epping, who was born eight years after the Kennedy assassination. He must fit in for at least five years, until November 1963 rolls around, and he doesn’t always do it well. Folks in the Land of Ago don’t quite know what to make of him when he uses phrases like “kick out the jams” or accidently sings raunchy rock songs that would never be played on ‘50s- and ‘60s-era AM radio.
Epping also finds the past doesn’t want to be changed. “The past is obdurate,” he says again and again. The bigger the event, the harder it is to prevent. Needless to say, time throws a lot of obstacles in Epping’s way — some deadly, some lovely.
One is Sadie Dunhill, a librarian he meets while working at a high school in the fictional Texas down of Jodie, set near Dallas. Their relationship is both idyllic and complicated, and her presence in his life helps and hinders his ultimate goal.
As is usually the case with King’s longer books, there’s a lot of self-indulgent fat in 11/22/63 that could have trimmed. For example, King spends way too much time exploring Oswald’s relationships with Marina and his mother. OK, Steve, we get it: Oswald was an abusive husband and his domineering mom contributed to his instability. You probably didn’t need to spend more than 100 pages on this.
Of more interest is the relationship between Epping and Dunhill, two of the better-drawn characters in King’s universe. The moments they have together are genuinely touching.
As a Texan, it’s also fun watching King explore ‘60s-era Dallas, though he makes some major geographical gaffes. Killeen has two Ls — he spells it Kileen throughout — and at one point he talks about being able to smell the refineries and oil fields of the Permian Basin in Dallas. Uh, no.
Still, this is one of King’s best books in a long time, certainly a better read than his last overlong work, Under the Dome, which I found to be unnecessarily mean. King often scores better when he’s eschewing shock and gore for a rollicking plot, sympathetic characters and cultural musings. He does it so well here that you won’t even notice that 850 pages have flown by.
Dwight Silverman is the Chronicle’s computer columnist and interactive journalism editor. Contact him at dwight.silverman@chron.com, blog.chron.com/techblog or twitter.com/dsilverman.