Stephen King is not only one of the great popular writers of all time, but arguably the greatest writer of his generation. There’s a reason he’s been so damn popular; he is able to write terrifying and thrilling novels and has also affected popular culture more than perhaps any other writer. He never ceases to amaze me, mostly in how much writing he does. 11/22/63 is one of his latest novels and like Under the Dome and The Stand and many of his other works, it is very long. But like The Shining and The Dead Zone and many of his other works, it is also very good.
The plot is that Jake Epping comes across a portal that leads back to 1958 from his friend Al Templeton. Templeton is now dying of lung cancer after spending years in the past and he urges Epping to go back to stop the Kennedy assassination. I have a lot to say about this particular premise. Templeton argues that the Kennedy assassination is the most negatively influencing event in that time period, which is probably true. But he also says that if Kennedy was not assassinated, the world would be completely different; he argues that Vietnam would not have escalated, and both Bobby and MLK would not have been killed. I think this is a little naïve, considering Kennedy was the one who initiated our involvement in Vietnam. Plus there seems to be a split among historians as to if Kennedy would have stopped Vietnam or gone at it just as Johnson had. It’s a coin-toss, really. Now I like Jack Kennedy, always have, and I think he was one of the best post-FDR presidents. But I actually personally believe that his premature death may have prevented some mistakes that instead got blamed on LBJ.
Also with the time travel, there’s this sense that the past doesn’t want to be changed. This comes off as a bit cheap, but it adds to the tension and makes everything much more exciting. How exciting could this be if Epping could easily get to Oswald and kill him? Plus there’s the fact that if you go to the portal back to 2011 and then come back, everything resets. I guess that makes sense for the story. Really this isn’t about the time travel so much and King makes that clear by not telling you much about how it works; he leaves it shrouded in mystery.
What convinces Epping to go is his friend who was nearly killed by his father who killed the rest of his family back in 1958. So once Epping, now going by the name George Amberson, gets back, he has a few things he wants to change. The early pages of the novel serve as exposition to explain that the past can be changed, though it is quite difficult. I found this very interesting. In fact, I’d say the first 200 pages or so were borderline brilliant.
This is not the typical Stephen King novel. It’s not horror, though it has some horrifically violent parts. It deals more in humanity than most of his previous work. While Under the Dome attempted to show how easily corrupted people could be, it was all unrealistic because every other character in that town was a psychopath. While the premise of 11/22/63 isn’t believable, it works because the characters feel like real people. There are some rather crazy people King feels like including, but they’re few and far between, and they add to and not take away from the novel’s themes. Also this film includes a mysterious character known as the Yellow Card Man, a character that reminds me a great deal of Randall Flagg in The Stand and the Raggedy Man in Cell. He’s mysterious, strange, somewhat non-human it would seem, etc. I did not care for this character much but he did pay off at the end of the novel. Keeping with King tradition, Epping/Amberson is indeed a writer, as Paul Sheldon, Jack Torrance, and countless other King protagonists. He’s more of an English teacher than a writer, but whatever.
I’d have to say my favorite little piece of the novel comes when Amberson is in Derry, Maine, a fictional location featured in numerous King works. He appears in 1958 shortly after It had supposedly been killed in King’s novel of the same name. He even comes across Beverly Marsh and Richie Tozier, two of the characters from that novel, and he feels It’s presence. This little moment of self-referencing was quite enjoyable because it appears as if King was having a lot of fun with it. But my favorite part of the whole Derry section was just the way the town treated Amberson. It was a mysterious town haunted by a series of murders consistent with those described in It, not just in 1958 but dating back to when it was a Roanoke-like colony. The sense of foreboding is so strong and brilliant that it seemed more like a nightmare than an actual town, and that’s where its strength was. And it paid off when Amberson came across his friend’s murder-intending father.
Eventually Amberson moves to New Orleans and then Texas to monitor Lee Harvey Oswald, his family, and those close to him. There are plenty of plot twists that are blamed on the “obdurate past” that keep his final goal seemingly impossible, making it quite an enjoyable read.
For a good part of the middle portion, the novel becomes a love story, more or less, and this works surprisingly well. While George Amberson is working as a teacher in the small town of Jodie, Texas, he meets a young librarian named Sadie Dunhill and they fall in love. Both characters are very interesting and while this novel was quite long, it never seemed to drag, because there was always something going on with them. Plus King is always teasing you with the impending threat of Lee Harvey Oswald.
Oswald himself is presented as an antagonist but Amberson rarely comes in direct contact with him. He’s shown as a wife-beating, semi-insane, communist, slimy jerk, all of which might be accurate. He’s not a villain so much because of his character, but rather what the reader and the protagonist knows he will do. While Amberson spies on him, he begins to see him as a human being. A contemptible human being perhaps, but he does have a family.
This is also a rare Stephen King novel that didn’t let me down with the ending. It usually strikes me that King writes such a good plot and puts so much time into it that he can’t think of an ending. That’s been my problem as a writer multiple times before, so it’s understandable. However, the ending here was very good and resolved just about everything.
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