11/22/63 by Stephen King

Jake Epping couldn’t cry.  His wife left him because of his “nonexistent emotional gradient.”  He didn’t cry at his father-in-law’s funeral, not even at his parents’ funerals.  But he cried when his collie, Rags, was killed because he felt responsible for the dog’s death, and when he received the news of his mother’s sudden death.  He cried when he read a paper written by a disabled student in his adult education class, Hoptoad Harry.  With this introduction, Stephen King in his latest novel, 11/22/63, set the emotional mood in this novel filled with sentimentality and reflection surrounding the pivotal event of John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas.

This introspective novel started with the musing of the precariousness of fate.  “Life turns on a dime.” The plot began with Jake reading Harry’s paper, “The Day That Changed My Life.”  In one fateful night, Harry, born a normal, happy child, became a cripple whose best achievement is being able to maintain his janitorial job at the high school.  Harry’s poignant account of the night his father murdered his family and crippled him brought “real tears, the kind that come from deep inside” out of Jake.  Changing Harry’s circumstance formed the initial motivation for Jake when Al, of Al’s diner, bequeathed the time portal in his pantry to him.  This time portal took him to the exact same time in1958 each time.  Each trip to 1958 is a reset.  Al had made frequent trips to buy cheap hamburgers for the diner.  But the trip to get hamburgers turned into missions.  It started with the urge to change the life of a woman Al had a crush on, then included the  attempt to prevent John F. Kennedy’s assassination.  Unsuccessful in his attempt and dying of cancer, Al chose Jake as the best replacement for the job to save JFK.

Throughout this lengthy novel, questions were raised about the morality and impact of disturbing the events of history, hinging on the chaos theory of the butterfly effect.  In the butterfly effect, a small initial condition can snowball into a huge event, as in the fluttering of a butterfly’s wing causing atmospheric change, thereby producing a tornado elsewhere.  However, this is not a science fiction novel, but a novel about treasuring and living with what you have, and making the best of what fate has given you, even if at any moment fate can change on a dime. It is also about the realization that all our lives are tenuous and changeable, “Who can know when life hangs in the balance, or why?”  Perhaps King’s latest novel was brought about by his reflection on his own life, his near poverty as a low-salaried teacher and unknown author, to his fame and wealth as a highly successful author, screen writer and director, to his near-fatal accident.  The dime turned often in his life.

This enjoyable book was filled with vivid and sentimental description as Jake, now as George T. Amberson, left the pantry into a world where everything tastes good and natural, and people are polite and reserved.  But it is also a world where the politeness masks a deep racism and hatred of anything that is different.  George was torn between loving the homey, innocent feel that is rare in the 21st century, and hating the underlying ostracizing of society’s fringe groups.  Most of this thick book was not focused on the assassination, but George’s loving interaction with the people in the town of Jodi and a love affair with a librarian, while he awaits for Oswalt’s movement.  This is where King is at his best, as each of his characters come alive.  They can be your neighbor down the street with real, human dialogues.  Mixed in with interactions that warms the heart and creates tears of sadness, is the foreshadowing that made King such a master of horror.  We are given ominous warnings of possible terrible things to come from George messing with time, with cautions about the butterfly effect,  that the past is obdurate and will do whatever it will to prevent change, even horrible things.  Harmonic echoes abound as obvious similarities are repeated in people and places George encounters, each echoing becoming higher in pitch, much as the air disturbance caused by the fluttering of a butterfly’s wing evolving into a tornado, as the music from the harmonic echoes reaches an ear-piercing pitch.

With his skillful approach to storytelling full of realistic human interaction, his usual way of making each interaction full of emotions, whether it be anger, fear or tears, his ability to foreshadow so that the little flutterings end in a stormy climax, and his vivid detailing, King made 11/23/63 an entertaining, solid read that does not disappoint.  Get yourself a nice cup of tea.  You might not want to put the book down until you’re done.  Well, you might want to pause and flutter your arms a bit to see whether you can cause a tornado in Thailand.