Review by New York Times Review
IN all of Stephen King's work there is an admixture of the ordinary and the supernatural - call it the weird quotidian. In his new novel, "11/22/63," it is a rabbit hole into the past that pops up in Lisbon Falls, a woebegone corner of Maine. On one end is 2011. An unpopular diner has finally been bought out by L. L. Bean. The diner - and the time portal inside it - may last a few more weeks in the footprint of a burned textile mill. On the other end is America under Eisenhowen. The mill churns out white smoke. "Vertigo" is showing at the outdoor movie theater - on its first run. The Kennebec Fruit Company isn't a curio for tourists; it sells oranges. And John Kennedy, the young senator from Massachusetts, is still alive. The rules of the rabbit hole into the past are outlined in the first pages of the novel. Al Templeton, the owner of the diner, explains them to Jake Epping, an English teacher at the local high school. Walk to the back of the pantry. Mind the 60-watt bulb overhead. Expect the smell of sulfur. And keep walking until you feel your foot fall. Suddenly you're back on Sept. 9, 1958. It's 11:58 am. There are, Al says, only two conditions. One, it's not a one-way trip. It doesn't have to be. But when you return, no matter how long you've stayed in the past - two days, five years, whatever - only two minutes have gone by in the present. Two, each time you go back to the past, there is a reset. Like a Magic Slate. It's 11:58 am, and everything you did on your previous trip has been erased. With that, King dispenses with many of the mechanics of time-travel - and thank God for it. There is no extended discussion of the "grandfather paradox." ("What if you killed your grandfather?" "Why on earth would you do that?") The rules are simple. There is a reason for this: King is after something bigger. "11/22/63" is a meditation on memory, love, loss, free will and necessity. It's a blunderbuss of a book, rife with answers to questions: Can one man make a difference? Can history be changed, or does it snap back on itself like a rubber band? Does love conquer all? (The big stuff.) Al - the scuttlebutt is that he is serving burgers made of dog, or cat - is dying of lung cancer. Coughing up blood into a pile of maxi-pads. He enlists Jake to do what he couldn't: stop Lee Harvey Oswald. It's a fabulous pitch. "Save Kennedy, save his brother. Save Martin Luther King. Stop the race riots. Stop Vietnam, maybe. ... Get rid of one wretched waif, buddy, and you could save millions of lives." Jake Epping is a burned-out teacher with a seriously alcoholic ex-wife and nothing better to do than disappear into the past. The guilt trip works. And Epping falls into the past with a new name, George T. Amberson - as if time-travel required a new identity - and a clear mission. Correct the past. Undo some of the evils of the 20th century. Once in 1958, however, Amberson is immediately confronted by a double mystery: the mystery of what really happened then, and the mystery of what might be otherwise. Before George/Jake can alter the course of history, he has to know what actually occurred. Was it Oswald, shooting from the depository? Was it a conspiracy? Another shooter on the grassy knoll? How about George de Mohrenschildt, one persistent minor character in conspiracy thinking? They are the nightmare uncertainties of an event that has been overexamined, and never understood. Jake is a good person. He cannot kill Oswald without first knowing whether he was the responsible party, and a good part of the adventure is the investigation. Once in Dallas, Amberson has years to get to know Oswald, but he can't just bust down the door. History is fragile; he has to peer around corners. He buys tape recorders and long-distance listening devices, moves into grubby neighborhoods, trails Oswald as he stashes his rifle. What he learns is no surprise. Oswald was unpleasant in ordinary ways. Emotional, violent with his wife, unsure of himself and desperate to change a broken world. Did he kill Kennedy? It's easy to see King, the writer and researcher, as a fellow time-traveler, hopelessly curious about what Oswald might say on tape or reveal while strolling around Fort Worth. But the past, the novel repeatedly reminds us, is obdurate. Under interrogation, it guards its darkest secrets. Weeks before the 22nd, Amberson is living below the Oswalds, and he still can't be sure: "I tried the distance mic, standing on a chair and holding the Tupperware bowl almost against the ceiling. With it I could hear Lee talking and de Mohrenschildt's occasional replies, but I couldn't make out what they were saying." In "11/22/63," we get glimpses of a nimbus of evil that surrounds the world. There are no single crimes. Each act of cruelty or violence is somehow associated - harmonized, King would suggest - with every other act. Inside the past, Amberson learns there are no accidents, no inadvertencies. Just an infernal machine. (Tick, tock.) He says: "Coincidences happen, but I've come to believe they are actually quite rare. Something is at work, O.K.? Somewhere in the universe (or behind it), a great machine is ticking and turning its fabulous gears." There is a darker what-if. What if history is too forceful to redirect? What if jiggering the engine produces no favorable outcome - merely a postponement of the inevitable? If he had lived, Kennedy might not have escalated the war in Vietnam, and might have kept America out of a bloody mire. But we don't know. What if we were headed there anyway? Then our tampering might only make things worse. It is not historical inevitability, but something close. YET Amberson's own story is poetic and moving. It's complicated by romance: he falls in love with Sadie, the new school librarian in Jodie, Tex., his new hometown. The real events aren't historical, they're very small - giving advice to a football player, staging the school play, doing the Lindy Hop with Sadie. We are brought back to the weird quotidian, endlessly surrounded by the detritus of civilization: Kresge's, Ban-Lon, Aqua Velva, Studebaker. At first I found myself mildly irritated by the endless swirl of products. But I came - honestly - to love it. The past is full: of slogans and fry cooks and beautiful cars. And King has an excellent feel for how all of that transpires within the forward roll of history. In my favorite passage, King writes: "For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don't we all secretly know this? It's a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. ... A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark." King has said that he struggled with the idea for this book for more than 30 years. One can see why. In fiction, we can decide who did or did not kill Kennedy. Writer's choice (and King chooses.) But he pays his debts to history in other ways - by showing the machine and, at the same time, the simplest human knots, the love stories behind history: Sadie and George, Jack and Jackie. It all adds up to one of the best timetravel stories since H. G. Wells. King has captured something wonderful. Could it be the bottomlessness of reality? The closer you get to history, the more mysterious it becomes. He has written a deeply romantic and pessimistic book. It's romantic about the real possibility of love, and pessimistic about everything else. In King's earlier, more overtly supernatural novels, the quotidian is interrupted by some unspeakable horror. In "11/22/63," the quotidian contains the horror, something real and familiar. It's indifferent to human lives, and it is inescapable. It is time. The past, this novel reminds us, is obdurate. Under interrogation, it guards its darkest secrets. ONLINE Errol Morris interviews Stephen King at nytimes.com/bookreview. Errol Morris is a filmmaker and the author, most recently, of "Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography." He is working on a documentary about the Kennedy assassination.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 13, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
Like the similarly sprawling Under the Dome (2009), this novel was abandoned by King decades ago before he took another shot, and perhaps that accounts for both novels' intoxicating, early-King bouquet of ambition and swagger. In this distant cousin to The Dead Zone (1979), Jake Epping is living a normal schoolteacher's life when a short-order cook named Al introduces him to a time warp hidden in a diner pantry leading directly to 11:58 a.m., September 9, 1958. Al's dying of cancer, which means he needs a successor to carry out his grand mission: kill Lee Harvey Oswald so that the 1963 JFK assassination never happens. Jake takes the plunge and finds two things he never expected: true love and the fact that the obdurate past doesn't want to change. The roadblocks King throws into Jake's path are fairly ingenious some of them are outright gut-punches while history buffs will dig the upside-down travelogue of Oswald's life. This doesn't loom as large as some King epics; on the other hand, did we appreciate It in 1986 as much as we do now? Leave it at this: fans will love it. High-Demand Backstory: King is his own backstory: demand for anything new will be loud.--Kraus, Daniel Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this audio edition of King's latest novel, which uses time travel to re-examine the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, both the author and narrator Craig Wasson deliver the goods. In what proves to be an adventurous, thrilling, thought-provoking, and romantic story, English teacher Jake Epping travels back in time and works to stop Lee Harvey Oswald from assassinating Kennedy. Wasson embodies the good-natured and honorable Epping, while creating accents and speech patterns for the supporting cast, capturing the twang of smalltown Texas high school students, Marina Oswald's struggle with the English language, and Kennedy's Boston accent, which the narrator doesn't overdo. Wasson is even able to provide a credible voice for George de Mohrenschildt, a friend (and possible co-conspirator) of Oswald who speaks English and Russian with a German accent. The audiobook includes an afterword featuring King discussing the book and a little-known vignette his research turned up about Oswald's assassin, Jack Ruby. A Scribner hardcover. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In King's latest, his first full-length novel since 2009's Under the Dome, the horror master ventures into sf. Maine restaurant owner Al tells high school English teacher Jake Epping that there's a time portal to the year 1958 in his diner. Al has terminal cancer and asks Jake to grant his dying wish: go back in time and prevent the 1963 assassination of JFK. Jake's travels take him first to Derry, ME-the fictional (and creepy) setting of King's 1986 blockbuster It-to try to stop the horrific 1958 murder of a family. Later, he heads to Texas, where he bides his time-teaching in a small town, where he falls for school librarian Sadie Dunhill-and keeps tabs on the thuggish Lee Harvey Oswald. It all leads to an inevitable climax at the Book Depository and an outcome that changes American history. VERDICT Though this hefty novel starts strong, diving energetically into the story and savoring the possibilities of time travel, the middle drags a bit-particularly during Jake's small-town life in Texas. Still, King remains an excellent storyteller, and his evocation of mid-20th-century America is deft. Alternate-history buffs will especially enjoy the twist ending. Film rights have been optioned by Jonathan Demme (of Silence of the Lambs fame). [See Prepub Alert, 5/23/11.]-David Rapp, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Under the Dome, 2009, etc.) adds counterfactual historian to his list of occupations. Well, not exactly: The author is really turning in a sturdy, customarily massive exercise in time travel that just happens to involve the possibility of altering history. Didn't Star Trek tell us not to do that? Yes, but no matter: Up in his beloved Maine, which he celebrates eloquently here ("For the first time since I'd topped that rise on Route 7 and saw Dery hulking on the west bank of the Kenduskeag, I was happy"), King follows his own rules. In this romp, Jake Epping, a high-school English teacher (vintage King, that detail), slowly comes to see the opportunity to alter the fate of a friend who, in one reality, is hale and hearty but in another dying of cancer, no thanks to a lifetime of puffing unfiltered cigarettes. Epping discovers a time portal tucked away in a storeroom--don't ask why there--and zips back to 1958, where not just his friend but practically everyone including the family pets smokes: "I unrolled my window to get away from the cigarette smog a little and watched a different world roll by." A different world indeed: In this one, Jake, a sort of sad sack back in Reality 1, finds love and a new identity in Reality 2. Not just that, but he now sees an opportunity to unmake the past by inserting himself into some ugly business involving Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, various representatives of the military-industrial-intelligence complex and JFK in Dallas in the fall of 1963. It would be spoiling things to reveal how things turn out; suffice it to say that any change in Reality 2 will produce a change in Reality 1, not to mention that Oswald may have been a patsy, just as he claimed--or maybe not. King's vision of one outcome of the Kennedy assassination plot reminds us of what might have been--that is, almost certainly a better present than the one in which we're all actually living. "If you want to know what political extremism can lead to," warns King in an afterword, "look at the Zapruder film." Though his scenarios aren't always plausible in strictest terms, King's imagination, as always, yields a most satisfying yarn.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
