**SPOILER ALERT** Don’t read this review if
you have not read the book! Unless you’re like me and don’t give a damn.
As I’ve said in this blog a few times, I love
me some Stephen King. It is the banked love of a long time couple for whom the
passion has since faded but for whom the affection and fondness is still strong
due to a lifetime of shared experiences. When I first discovered him I was
insatiable and couldn’t get enough, many times reading until late in the night,
unable to stop. I would talk about him to anyone who would listen and search
out interviews because I found his thoughts fascinating, plus reading his odes
to “constant reader” made me feel so special like he was talking just to me. I
read his entire back catalog and when new books came out, I’d try to be first
to the book store to pick me up a copy in the days before Amazon. Any project
with his name attached would capture my interest from short-lived series like
Golden Years and Kingdom Hospital to the excellent graphic novel adaptions of
his work to the mountain of movies (for the big and small screen) both good and
bad. If anyone is listening and has some pull, IT would make a great graphic
novel, get on that please!!! I enjoyed his later work but I felt that he lost
some of his mojo after that terrible accident (for which I am grateful for his
recovery) and when I wanted to remember our love when it was young and full of
fire, I’d pull out his older work and reread it, like a forlorn wife reading
the old and faded love letters that her husband no longer bothers to write. SK
has had some clunkers and I was very disappointed by the Ouroboros conclusion of The Dark Tower
series, but usually his writing was never dull, so when I tried to read Under
the Dome, I was dismayed to find it was just that. I could only get through the
first 5 chapters and then had to give it up as a lost cause. I feared the
worst… had we become just friends?
When I heard he had a new book coming out, I
ordered it from my book club, more out of loyalty than anything. The thought of
reading it didn’t excite me and I found subject strange, and was turned off by
the premise that Oswald was the only shooter the day JFK was assassinated (I am
a conspiracy theorist here and believe Oswald was what he said he was, “a
pasty”). Here is the description offered on Amazon:
On November 22, 1963, three shots rang out in Dallas, President
Kennedy died, and the world changed. What if you could change it back? Stephen
King’s heart-stopping dramatic new novel is about a man who travels back in
time to prevent the JFK assassination—a thousand page tour de force.
Following his massively successful
novel Under the Dome, King
sweeps readers back in time to another moment—a real life moment—when
everything went wrong: the JFK assassination. And he introduces readers to a
character who has the power to change the course of history.
Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher
in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED
program. He receives an essay from one of the students—a gruesome, harrowing
first person story about the night 50 years ago when Harry Dunning’s father
came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his two brothers with a
hammer. Harry escaped with a smashed leg, as evidenced by his crooked walk.
Not much later, Jake’s friend Al, who
runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He
enlists Jake on an insane—and insanely possible—mission to try to prevent the
Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson and his new
world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner
named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie
Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake’s life—a life that transgresses all the
normal rules of time.
A tribute to a simpler era and a
devastating exercise in escalating suspense, 11/22/63 is Stephen King at his epic best.
Knowing how I felt about Under the Dome, when
the book arrived I put it in my night stand with the dozen or so other books I
eventually planned to read but had not gotten to yet and went on with my life. Upon
finding reviews nearly unanimous in praise for this latest opus, I decided to
pull it out and just try a few chapters and test the waters. I settled into my
bed one evening resting against my plumped pillows, a bed-hogging dog curled
next to me, and cracked it open. What happened next was a shock, after reading
the first paragraph I sat bolt upright in bed and said “holy shit”! It was like
coming home one day to find that husband of yours had made you dinner and
brought you flowers and then told you to get dolled up so he could show you off
and take you dancing. I was being wooed again and it felt just fine. The fire
was always there, it just needed some tending to come fully alight and when it
is a fire built by the master it becomes a blaze visible from space.
The story started like a shot from a gun. I
liked Jake from the start, and he seemed so real as all of King’s best
characters do. His life was fascinating and the concept of a portal to another
specific time opened up so many possibilities. The book was very like an
episode of Quantum Leap with Jake playing Sam trying to put right what once
went wrong, his Al is portal guardians who are being driven slowly insane by
their task. But, unlike in that show, here the past or AGO is almost a
character in itself and it does not want
to be changed or as SK says, “the past is obdurate.” It uses all the forces at
its disposal to thwart Jake’s plans including insane stretches of “coincidence”
and almost having him beaten to death. King’s protagonists never have it easy
and it seemed that the last half of the book takes place in too many hospital
rooms with first Sadie and then Jake, who is now George, becoming longtime
residents. But, the heart of the book is the love affair between George/Jake
and Sadie, the shy soon to be divorced school librarian, with a dark secret of
her own. I’m not ashamed to say it, I grew to love her. Funny, charming, brave,
clumsy (or as King says haunted, being this way myself that word fits
perfectly), and sweet, it is easy to see why he fell for her. She is full of
good qualities but she is not without her faults, a weakness for alcohol and
cigarettes being some of them. For all of her wonderfulness, she is still
recognizably human as we all are with both the good and the bad parts of our
personalities. Sadie is no Mary Sue. She is a living breathing person although
her physical body is made up of individual letters, a literary Frankenstein’s
monster stitched together with words and given the breath of life by the
lightening of Stephen King’s mind.
I found this book both beautiful and
heartbreaking. It amazes me how SK seems to have access to a time machine of
his own as he so skillfully takes a modern man back in time and captures the
culture shock. How does he know it all so well? I know he grew up in that time
but still. I was born in the late 60’s, grew up in the 70’s and 80’s. I can
remember those times and certain things will bring back strong feelings of
nostalgia, but I couldn’t sit down and write all the differences to make
someone who didn’t live then understand what it was like, how the times have
changed, to immerse them in a time they have never lived. King manages it
though, it is breathtaking. The most interesting concept for me seemed to be
King’s idea about how changing the past, ostensibly for the better, always
makes things worse and the bigger the change the worse things become. Is it
that things really do happen the way they are supposed to, no matter how
horrifying it may seem? That changing those paths will in the end only lead to
more heartbreak, disaster, or death? This to me is such a sad thought. Who
hasn’t looked at their past and wished they could go back and change this or
that or just fix that one mistake from which all the other bad things seemed to
flow from, the first domino in a chain of mistakes that end up draining all joy
out of life. I think we all want to believe that this would give us the happy
ending we all long for. Stephen King is not known for his happy endings though
and this book is no exception. It is a softer ending then some but still made
me cry, bittersweet is the best way to describe it. For all the pain and
struggle, Jake is not allowed to be with the one he loves. I can’t explain it
all as it is long and convoluted, involving resets and aging. All it means is
that Jake is separated from his Sadie by time. He sees her again but she is an
old woman and does not know him. I don’t know which is worse, his heartbreak to
remember their love and not be able to be with her again or her not having the
opportunity of knowing their love at all. Although King hints that some love is
so strong it can transcend time, and some heartbreak never truly heals.
Sometimes time does not heal all wounds, it just dulls the ache. The story puts
me in mind of a beautiful little movie called “Somewhere in Time” with Jane
Seymour and Christopher Reeves.
Oh yeah, this book does deal with Oswald and
his wife Marina and the assassination but for me this was the weakest part of
the whole book. I would have been happy with Jake/George staying in Jodi, TX
making tons of little changes from finding an actor among the football heads of
the local high school (one of my favorite scenes in the book is the performance
Of Mice and Men), arranging for a sweet girl to get her face fixed after an
accident, preventing a horrible murder, to opening up a librarian to the
wonders of love and sex, that divert the path from the way things were supposed
to be. The question is how these changes would upset the balance of the future,
one compounded upon the other. In the end, Jake realizes that his happiness
cannot be had at the expense of so many and his choice is hard, so hard and
bitter.
There is a lot to love here, especially a
short detour back to Derry where we meet up with a couple of old friends, some
amazing town folk, and a fascinating story that will have you thinking about it
long after you have closed the book. This whole story is tinged with the fantastic
but in the end it is the all too real people who live in this world that will
reel you in, make you love them, and leave you crying when you have to say
goodbye.
So thank you so much Stephen for asking me to
dust off my dancing shoes. I had a great time and we sure did dance didn’t we?
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