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.

THE OUTLAW ALBUM
By Daniel Woodrell.
Little, Brown and Company, 167 pp., $24.99.

Reviewed by Conrad Bibens

Daniel Woodrell has been a well-regarded novelist for years, but it took a movie to give his name greater prominence.

Winter’s Bone was an Oscar-nominated production, and one of the reasons it was so good was that it followed his book closely in dialogue and plot — a backwoods teenager searching for her missing father, a drug suspect perhaps killed by his peers in the meth trade.

Like Winter’s Bone and many of Woodrell’s other novels, the scene is his native Missouri Ozarks, an area of great beauty with pockets of stubborn poverty. These aren’t cliched hillbillies for the 21st century. Their lives aren’t so different from other demographics where the opportunities are limited, the luck is usually bad and the reflexes are way too quick.

As one character puts it: “These were not men lamed by any sorts of doubts about anything they did. Or might do yet — hear me?” In such a setting, the women are often fatalistic about the consistently bad choices that are made: “… her face suggested she’d yet to be pleasantly surprised by life.”

The 12 tales in The Outlaw Album are not feel-good stories. People die, and there’s no refuge from the violence, especially for affluent outsiders who disrespect the locals. Veterans of wars, whether in Iraq or along the Missouri-Kansas border during the Civil War, never find peace. One story, “Woe to Live On,” is a sort of sequel to Woodrell’s earlier Civil War epic, another of his novels that became a good movie, Ride with the Devil.

It’s not that Woodrell doesn’t have humor. One of his novels, Give Us a Kiss: A Country Noir, is a comic masterpiece. But he’s not looking for laughs in this book.

Despite all the sadness, these stories draw you in. Woodrell’s prose can be as good as a beautiful song, tragic lyrics and all: “They tell me Dad committed suicide for reasons he dreamed up. His mind was too active. He had a round mind and it roamed. He could imagine any kind of hurt. He could imagine the many miseries of this world flying over from everywhere to roost between his ears, but he couldn’t imagine how to get away.”

Conrad Bibens is a business wire editor and copy editor for the Chronicle.

ASSUMPTION
By Percival Everett.
Graywolf, 272 pp., $15 paperback.

Reviewed by P.G. Koch

Widely published, postmodern-ish writer Percival Everett toys with the crime genre in his three-part novel Assumption, set in the New Mexico desert and featuring deputy Ogden Walker, son of a black father and white mother, an anomaly in redneck country.

After interviewing an old woman who fired her gun through her door at a prowler, Walker is uneasy. So he waits, then sneaks back into the house to find it eerily empty; later the woman’s body is found. Once her daughter arrives, the investigation proceeds through ever-reversing revelations to a curiously suspended shootout ending.

In part two, winter is now summer, and a young woman from Ireland is seeking her cousin who seems to have disappeared from wherever she was living in the mountains near San Cristobal. As Walker racks up a lot of road miles, reality once again slowly torques until we reach yet another gunplay denouement.

In the last part, things get positively hallucinatory.

At first, Everett lays in a pretty convincing southwestern world — from the big-bellied sheriff Bucky and lanky fellow deputy Felton, to laconic chitchat among colorful locals, to Walker’s own ruminative interior narrative and easy affection for his mother.

Then he upends it — presumably just because, as the author, he can. The bait-and-switch, though, is not so much virtuoso and entertaining as it is annoying. It’s as if Everett wants to see how long readers will hang onto the compelling reality of his creation before his insistent, unearned U-turn forces their fingers to let go. And who wants to be messed with like that?

P.G. Koch reviews mysteries for the Chronicle.

“I’m sometimes asked if I’m ashamed of making a living by making snide and underhanded remarks about respectable public officials,” Calvin Trillin writes in his new collection of essays, “and my only defense has been ‘It’s not much of a living.’ ”

A staff writer for The New Yorker since 1963, Trillin is also a “deadline poet” for The Nation. No subject is off limits for the 75-year-old humorist: food, family, foreigners, holidays, high society, criminals, politics — it’s all part of the buffet.

Although he hails from Missouri (which he pronounces Missour-uh), Trillin often finds himself writing about Texas — so much so that he published an essay collection, Trillin on Texas, earlier this year. His latest book gathers his best efforts from the past four decades: Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin: Forty Years of Funny Stuff.

While his commentary can be pointed, Trillin maintains a genial breeziness that keeps the bleeding to a minimum. He is one of the guests at the Chronicle’s Book & Author Dinner on Nov. 13. We caught up with him by phone at his home in Greenwich Village.

Q: You’re a “deadline poet” for The Nation and your new book has funny poems about politicians, from “If You Knew What Sununu” to “Obama’s Temper.” When you’re home alone, do you think of yourself as a poet?
A: I’m a versifier. Or a doggerelist. We call it deadline poetry, but we don’t make any claims to poetry.

Q: In the new book, you write about another guy who’s a deadline poet, a Canadian who isn’t publishing his deadline poetry any more. Do you miss the company?
A: I’ve always suspected he’s a real poet.

Q: Can you give me your thoughts on political correctness? I’m wondering if you’ve ever gotten any push-back from humor that cut too close to one group or another.
A: I haven’t found it to be a problem. You can say anything you want to say — it’s not as if they’re going to take your house away …

Q: Are you ever so ticked off about something — maybe something in the news, something political — that it’s hard to pull the humor from it when you sit down to write?
A: Yes. I wrote a column once about some people in the FBI harassing a black special agent. I had cause to reread it recently and I realized it wasn’t funny because the whole situation struck me as so puerile and offensive. And there’s one poem in the new book about people coming to the defense of Roman Polanski. I was so offended by the support of him. I think that this is the one piece in the book where the anger shows a little bit. [The bottom of the first stanza reads: He’s suffered slurs and other stuff./Has he not suffered quite enough? /How can these people get so riled? /He only raped a single child.]

Q: Who or what makes you laugh?
A: Chris Rock makes me laugh. What he said about the arrest of Roman Polanski was something like ... It’s okay for him to rape a child because he made a good movie 30 years ago? Even Johnnie Cochran didn’t have the nerve to say, ‘Did you see O.J. against New England?’ Of the old comedians, the one who really made me laugh was Jack Benny. He only had about five jokes — his own chintziness, Dennis Day’s ditziness — but they were good jokes and he worked them very well.

Q: I was shocked to learn that you go by the name “Bud” — that no one actually calls you Calvin. On the spectrum of names, Bud seems as far from Calvin as one can possibly get. Can you explain?
A: Well, I think my parents were willing to name me Calvin but not willing to call me Calvin. My father grew up in St. Joseph, Missouri, in an immigrant family and didn’t go to college. He read a book called Stover at Yale. He wanted me to go to Yale …”

Q: Which you did, right?
A: Yes, I did. But I’m guessing he believed, incorrectly as it turns out, that Calvin would be a good name to have at Yale. I told him he should have taken on Episcopalian airs rather than Presbyterian airs. Anyway, I was Buddy for a long time. I think a lot of parents in the Midwest called young boys Buddy… The editor of The New Yorker has pointed out that the magazine has two Calvins and neither is called Calvin. The other is Calvin Thomkins, and he’s called Tad.