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11.22.63, Stephen King


            The first Stephen King book I read was Cujo, and I have been in love with his writing ever since (“I’m your number one fan” and all that). A friendly Saint Bernard dog gets bitten by a bat, becomes rabid, and goes on a killing spree—that’s Cujo in a nutshell. But the novel’s much more than that. Stephen King is Stephen King, not because of the horror and the gore, but because of the way he writes his characters. Anyway, Cujo’s for another day. Today, I’d like to talk a little bit about 11/22/63. Too late to the party, but I finally read it. 

So far, I have breezed through about seventy percent of King’s books (I’m so glad there are more to read). If you’d asked me five days ago what my top favourite was, I’d have said It without missing a beat. But now, 11/22/63 takes the top spot for many reasons. 

The premise is simple enough: The year is 2011. Jake Epping is an English teacher and a recent divorcee. Al Templeton, who runs the local diner Jake frequents, has discovered a time portal in the pantry that takes you back to September 9, 1958, at exactly 11:58 a.m. No matter how long you stay in the past—two days, two years, twenty—only two minutes will have passed when you return. But every time you go back, the past resets. In other words, whatever changes you make, you can only make them once for them to take effect. Al has cancer and has only days left. He tells Jake about the portal (rabbit hole, as he calls it). He convinces him to go back in time and prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy, often considered a watershed moment in American history. Jake creates a life for himself in the years leading up to 11/22/63—the day Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated JFK. 

In “The Land of Ago,” everything is good. Root beer tastes better. The milk is fresher and creamier. The food is delicious. The music is great. Life is simpler. Neighbourhoods are safe. But more than anything, what Jake finds more appealing is the beautiful Sadie Dunhill, who shows up after 250 pages or so. A clumsy meet-cute moment, a dance, a date. Then, things happen as you’d expect (not a complaint), and they fall in love, which in turn makes things complicated for Jake’s purpose. The research bits on Oswald, followed by the planning and the waiting, were surely interesting, but most of the time, I wanted to rush through those details and get back to Jake and Sadie’s lives. 11/22/63 is at once a science fiction, a mystery thriller, and a historical fiction. But at its core, it’s a romance novel. The best one I’ve read. 

 

(Spoilers ahead)

 

King’s writing is sometimes straight to the point. Sometimes it’s lurid, complete with all the gory details—Harry Dunning’s family massacre, the attack on Sadie, the attack on Jack. The details are precise. And as usual, King’s characters come alive, including the secondary characters. Everyone gets at least one memorable scene. However, what fascinated me more was how King treats the past as a character. (“The past is obdurate.”) In the beginning, Al tells Jake that the past doesn’t want to be changed and that it can try to prevent him from disturbing it. Jake experiences this plenty of times. He faces unexpected challenges every step of the way, sometimes as simple as the flu. The bigger the change he seeks to effect, the greater the challenges he faces. The past pushes back. Always. 

This is also a science fiction novel, as I said before, but without all the science-y stuff. No fancy gadgets, no scientist character to give you a detailed analysis of the portal, no grandfather paradox (watch Looper or Predestinationfor that), none of the cliches you’d expect in a book about time travel. King simply opts out of all these, which is simply brilliant. Questions pop up from time to time: Every time you step into the past, it resets, right? But the money you made during your last travel remains with you. How? And why? I didn’t care, I didn’t mind. Because it doesn’t matter. Al owns a diner. The diner has a pantry. The pantry has a hole that takes you into the past, to a specific time of the day and year. Al wants Jake to go there and change the past. Jake agrees. That is all. King doesn’t bother to explain the phenomenon. What he seems to say, instead, is: “Well, sit back and relax, Constant Reader. I’ll take you back to the late fifties and the early sixties of America. Just enjoy the ride.” And I did.   

Once Jake is in “The Land of Ago,” it’s a delight to watch him set up a life. It is 1958, and JFK died in 1963. So he has five years to kill. He creates a fake identity (George Amberson), bets on sporting events he knows the outcome of (thanks to Al), buys his dream car, which is dirt cheap in ‘58, gets a teaching gig at a local school, meets Sadie, and falls in love with her. If someone should get more curious about him, especially during his travels to Fort Worth and Dallas, where he surveils Oswald, he is a writer working on a novel. He also has pages to prove, should they go through his things. In the meantime, he also visits Derry. Derry in 1958—wink, wink, to those who’ve read It. Expect plenty of Easter eggs. Let me leave it at that.

Preventing the assassination of JFK seems like a major plot point, but as I read on, I didn’t care much for it at all. I just wanted to keep reading and didn’t want the book to end. There’s a lot to admire in this book. But let me point out an interesting thing. The first time Jake goes back into the past, he goes to Kennebec Fruit, a local fruit shop, where he encounters the teenage son of the Fruit’s owner. The boy says that he recently read a short story by Shirley Jackson (“The Summer People”) and that he didn’t “get” it. To which Jake replies: “Sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and a story’s just a story.” I couldn’t help smiling at that. It’s King’s way of saying not to read too much into stories. (I remember him making a similar argument in It through Bill Denbrough.) Be as it may, Mr. King. The keyword is “sometimes,” anyway. But every good story is about something, regardless of whether the author intended it or not. 

11/22/63 might seem like it’s about a man traveling back into the past and preventing the assassination of JFK, thereby paving the way for a better future (or present, in this case). But at its heart, it’s about a man who just wants to dance with the right person. “She takes my hand like a woman in a dream. She is in a dream, and so am I. Like all sweet dreams, it will be brief … but brevity makes sweetness, doesn’t it? Yes, I think so. Because when the time is gone, you can never get it back.” This is the narrative throughline. Between 1958 to1963, Jake makes a whole new life, goes through ups and downs like any other person, makes friends with some lovely people, loses some, encounters a few not-so-nice people, falls in love, and finally, together with the love of his life he succeeds in stopping the assassination of JFK (and learns the deadly consequences of meddling with the past the hard way). For five years (two minutes in 2011), he lives a life filled with adventures and romance. 

You come into a life you didn’t ask for. You hear the music you didn’t ask for. Now that you are here, regardless of the kind of music that’s blaring in the background, all you can do is dance. So you dance. And while you do, find someone you can match your steps with and keep dancing away until the music dies, or it dies within you. 

Because “Dancing is life.”

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