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11/22/63
by Stephen King
Scribner
What if you had an opportunity to change history, but you had to uproot your life to do it?
That’s the question facing Jake Epping, the high-school teacher/hero of Stephen King’s intriguing new novel, “11/22/63.” For readers too young to know it, that’s a date that once rolled off the tongue as easily as 9/11 does today — when President John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas.
Epping, a 35-year-old English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine — one of King’s favorite locales and where he went to high school — is put in this dilemma by his old friend Al, the owner of a local diner.
Al, who’s dying of lung cancer — one of many references to the ills of smoking — shares a whopper of a story about time travel. Jake can go back to the past through a portal in the pantry in the back of the diner.
Al wants Jake to prevent JFK’s assassination. Of course, it’s not as easy as setting the wayback machine to Nov. 22, 1963, and bopping Lee Harvey Oswald on the head before he shoots.
The portal, which they call a rabbit hole, only leads to 1958, so if Jake agrees to Al’s request, he has to stay in the past for five years. And when he returns to the present day, if he travels back in time again, everything from the first visit to the past is reset. And then there’s “the butterfly effect,” which ,in essence, is a lot of unintended consequences.
It may sound silly, but King manages to make it plausible — with concrete theories and rules about time travel.
Jake’s first, brief trip back in time is an eye-opener. While the root beer at the local soda shop tastes better, pollution spewing unregulated from the local mills fouls the air.
When he returns to 2011, he’s got an idea to test the whole changing-the-past theory. The school janitor is in Jake’s GED class, and has written a terribly sad essay about the day his father murdered his mother, sister and bother and left him crippled, on Halloween night, 1958.
After that test, Jake finally agrees to the big mission.
Taking on a new identity as George Amberson, Jake makes his way to Texas, where he settles in All-American small-town Jodie and signs on to teach English at the local high school. At the same time, he rents a series of shabby apartment in nearby Fort Worth and Dallas, in order to spy on assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.
But, as Jake and Al point out many times, the past does not want to be changed. It throws up roadblocks. The biggest of these is Jake falling in love. Tall, slender Sadie, who’s fled a bad marriage in Georgia, becomes the school librarian, and the two become a couple, beloved by almost everyone in town.
King spends an awful lot of time on the mundane daily life of Oswald and his family. Maybe it’s his way of showing the horror that can spring from the most unexpected sources. Still, we hardly need a description of Oswald’s overbearing mother, Marguerite, like this one: “This evening she was wearing blue slacks that were unfortunate, considering the generous spread of her butt.”
But the days and hours leading up to events we now know as unfortunate history read like a great thriller.
King also peppers his pages with funny time-travel references. Sadie, for example, is aghast when Jake/George absentmindedly sings the 1969 Rolling Stones’ hit “Honky Tonk Woman” and its raunchy (for 1962) lyrics.
And when he reveals that in the future, “the president is a black man,” a disbelieving Sadie says, “Are you telling me there’s a Negro is the White House?”
As we all know, and as King illustrates, time changes everything.