Review: 11/22/63: A Novel by Stephen King

[lemming]

sports almanacs and the butterfly effect and JFK add up to more than I expected. There's more going on here - the main character Jake has been left by an unfaithful alcoholic wife who complained that he doesn't know how to express grief. He's also haunted by a horrible childhood story he reads in an essay written by one of his students, and he learns a friend is in the late stages of lung cancer - but although Jake has "never been what you'd call a crying man", crying is only one of the stages of grief. Another is going over what we could have done differently, and when we realise the answers don't matter because we can't change the past, we cry. So it makes sense that Jake cannot resist the opportunity to change the past, especially tragedies that seem senseless like the waste of life that scarred the mature age high school student or the actions of Lee Harvey Oswald who is portrayed as a random wife-beating loser who lacks JFK's "sense of humor; a sense of the absurd. The man in the sixth-floor window of the Book Depository had neither. Oswald had proved it time and again, and such a man had no business changing history." The theory is that stopping JFK's assassination would prevent Martin Luther King's death, the Vietnam War, and bring about a quicker end to the Cold War. But are we sure that undoing a horrible happening in the past will have only positive consequences? Seeming digressions about Jake's new love and the evil in Derry that seems to infect everyone who lives there (the original title for "It" was "Derry" and several of the same characters from that novel about childhood trauma make an appearance in this novel) belong in the same story because it is really about what it takes to let go of a painful past. If "Dallas is Derry" as Jake says in his sleep, then might JFK's death have been not only about Oswald's delusions of grandeur but something about the place and time that required the release of negative energy? While this is billed as a departure into a "mainstream time travel novel" for King, he cannot escape his own past - at times the story felt like sort of an inverted version of "The Dead Zone" - right down to the school teacher main character - and a lot of King's bigger themes are here, especially the idea that evil is sometimes in the air and takes hold of suitable hosts to make them do things they might not do in a different place and time. This new novel explores the idea that these seemingly senseless and horrible things in our past might somehow have been necessary.

[Fran]

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