11/22/63

"The past is obdurate," is the refrain heard often in Stephen King's magisterial novel 11/22/63. King, a genre writer who has cracked the glass ceiling of literary fiction many times, puts a hole in it with this novel, which though engaging one of the main tenants of science fiction, time travel, accomplishes something much richer and deeper with meaning about one of the worst days in American history.

The narrator is Jake Epping, a typical schoolteacher in a small town in Maine. He hangs out at greasy spoon run by an old guy named Al, who serves hamburgers so cheap the locals think they must be cat meat. One day Al looks years older, and tells Jake his story--there is a portal in the pantry of the diner that takes one back to a specific moment in time, just before noon on a September day in 1958. He invites Jake to try it out for himself, and sure enough Jake finds a different America, where root beer tastes better, and "To my right was a rack of comic books with their covers torn off--Archie, Batman, Captain Marvel, Plastic Man, Tales from the Crypt. That hand-printed sign about this trove, which would have sent any eBay aficionado into paroxysms, read COMIX 5 cents EA THREE FOR 10. NINE FOR A QUARTER PLEASE DON'T HANDLE UNLESS YOU INTEND TO BUY."

Al had traveled through the portal often, buying meat at a substantial discount, which he passed on to his 2011 customers. But he finally got the idea that he had a chance to alter history. He could stay in the past for five years and attempt to stop Lee Harvey Oswald from killing Kennedy. But he had come down with lung cancer, and couldn't make it. So he has enlisted Jake to do it for him.

King lays out the time travel rules clearly. One can stay in the past for several years, but when they come back through the portal only two minutes have passed in 2011. Also, each visit to the past is a reset, so this avoids the running into one's self problem. Jake decides to do it, but he wants to prove to himself that he can alter the past, and knows the story of a janitor at his school whose family was murdered by his father in a drunken rage with a hammer. The janitor survived, but with a dented skull. Jake's first stop is the town of Derry, where he will try to stop that murder.

Derry, as anyone who has read multiple books by King, is a favorite place of his, a town of malevolence. He even throws in a few mentions of other books, notably It, and its serial killer dressed as a clown. "On that gray street, with the smell of industrial smokes in the air and the afternoon bleeding away to evening, downtown Derry looked only marginally more charming that a dead hooker in a church pew." Jake accomplishes what he set out to do, but the build up to it is fraught with tension, as only a horror master like King can do. Once he proves to himself that the past can be changed, he takes on Oswald.

The book is highly detailed, and we follow Jake as he whiles away the time between 1958 and 1963. He keeps his finances afloat by careful betting, as he knows the results of sporting events. This was how Biff, in Back to the Future, Part II, made a fortune. But King points out that when dealing with bookies, who are not legal entities, constantly winning on long shots can be a problem.

Eventually Jake arrives in Dallas, but is turned off by the bigotry of the city and takes a teaching job in a small town about an hour away. There he will fall in love with the school librarian, Sadie, which will enrich his time in the past but complicate things immeasurably. The past is obdurate, and there are forces that seem to conspire to keep him from accomplishing his task, whether it be illness, car trouble, or the specter of Sadie's crackpot ex-husband.

I won't go too much more into detail. King has done his homework on Oswald's coming and goings in the years before the assassination, and Jake spies on him, trying to determine whether he was in on it alone (King's determination is that he was--no grassy knoll shooter). The sequence on the morning of the dastardly day, with Jake and Sadie trying to make it to the book depository in time despite numerous obstacles, is white-knuckle stuff.

Beyond the suspense, though, 11/22/63 is a rumination on the nature of time itself, and whether the past should be left alone. The "butterfly effect" is mentioned often (fitting, now that the first author to use that, Ray Bradbury, has just died). Just the slightest change may have unforeseen and even worse consequences. A man spared from the draft by having his head caved in may not die in Vietnam, as he might if he were fully healthy. And an uninterrupted two terms of President Kennedy may not lead to the paradise some people believe--but I'll let you find out for yourself.

But this book really turns out to be a love story. Jake, though sticking to his mission, finds his love for Sadie, as time-crossed as it is, to alter his strategy. For King, a humanist and deep down a sentimentalist,  this is as it should be. The ending, which I certainly won't spoil here, is as touching as anything he has written.

There are also numerous and typical King touches of pop culture. At one point, Jake almost blows his cover by breaking into the Stones' "Honky Tonk Woman," about a decade before it was written. He also displays his typically dry sense of humor: "Here is one of the great truths of the human condition: when you need Stayfree Maxi Pads to absorb the expectorants produced by your insulted body, you are in serious fucking trouble."

I recommend this book highly, not only for King fans but anyone interested in a gripping read, especially Americans who remember the title day and have wondered, what if?