The Book Corner: "11/22/63" by Stephen King

I continue to be amazed at the number of people who are not aware that Stephen King has written about other things than monsters and horror. You would think that after literary works like "The Body" (filmed as "Stand By Me"), "The Shawshank Redemption" and his recent 1950's baseball novella "Blockade Billy" that people would have finally caught on to the fact that one of the best-selling writers of our time is far more versatile than is often imagined. But every person I've described this book to has reacted with some variation of "That doesn't sound like a typical Stephen King book", and when I bring up "The Shawshank Redemption" I generally get "I didn't know he wrote that." I really REALLY hope that this is the book that will finally make people realize the wide range of subjects and styles he's capable of.

Jake is a teacher in New England whose friend Al reveals a big, big secret that he discovered one day in the back of his store... a literal portal into the past, specifically to 1958. You can go and return, but each time you go it's the first time... meaning nobody you met before will remember you, to them it's the first time. Al is dying, but he desperately wants to use this miracle to prevent the JFK assassination, and Jake agrees. Traveling back to 5 years before it took place and armed with every bit of information known on the subject, Jake figures it will be a breeze to be ready when the time comes. But it turns out that time does NOT want to be messed with or changed, and is capable of some mighty nasty responses when somebody tries...

Science fiction writers have used premises much like this many times over the years... preventing assassinations, preventing wars, whatever. But Stephen King doesn't settle for what others have done before him (which should not be a surprise for anyone familiar with his work). What we have here isn't a mere adventure story about a guy traveling straight to the event so he can grab the assassin before he shoots. Jake has to literally live in the past and become a part of his environment in order to pull off the task. Trouble is, Jake becomes very emotionally attached to the people he meets: as a teacher he becomes a surrogate father figure to several students, he even falls in love with another teacher and thinks about marriage. But talk about things that would change the past as we knew it... and you know how dangerous THAT can be. He knows he'll have to leave the people he's become attached to, but it will be one of the most difficult things he's ever done. How much would YOU be willing to sacrifice as far as happiness you COULD have, so that things will work out better for the world at large? Mighty interesting food for thought, and King makes the most of it in a very involving way.

And of course Jake will have to know for sure whether he's even CAPABLE of changing the past, so he first has to try to change a murder that happened in 1958 as a kind of a trial run. King has fun exploring the nature of time and the notion of guilt: both for what you've done and what you haven't done (even for things you COULDN'T have done but feel like you should have been able to). Obviously, most readers (I would ASSUME all of them) have not traveled back in time to prevent any sort of killings, but nearly all of us have had to deal with this kind of guilt as a fact of everyday life, and as he so often does King takes emotions and situations we've all been through and works them into a suspenseful tale that both entertains and involves the reader deeply. No surprise there.

King has clearly done his research (well, either King or the research assistants he sometimes employs on major projects, and at nearly 850 pages this qualifies as a major project for sure). Unless you're a real obsessive about the Kennedy assassination it's likely you'll learn a lot you didn't know about before, and get an intense, sometimes shocking portrait of the place, time and people of 1963. The fact that the hero is trying to CHANGE history also adds a strong element of suspense as the event creeps closer and closer... none of that complaint (which I don't really understand, anyhow) that you already know what happens or what can't happen. Indeed, the last dozen or so pages before the assassination itself are so intense as to be very nearly unbearable... but you won't be able to put it down.

For all of that, with all its suspense and shock and action, what "11/22/63" winds up being is a work filled with the compassion for fallible humanity that King has so often used but which also tends to sometimes be forgotten in the midst of all the shock and horror. King truly feels for his fellow humans and the suffering they often have to endure, and at the end of "11/22/63" I found myself shedding a few tears for the bittersweet events of Jake's journey. What we have to do is often what is the hardest to do and what causes us to feel the most pain, but we generally go ahead and do what must be done, and things work out for the better even though they're by no means perfect. That's a lesson Jake learns in no uncertain terms and that we are reminded of during the course of this story. And while "11/22/63" might not be a perfect novel, it isn't far off.