I find out what Stephen King thinks about the Kennedy assassination

11/22/63 ****
by Stephen King

I like reading Stephen King, and now that The Nation has said he's one of the most underrated writers living today, thus giving him a nod from the "intellectual community," I don't have to care who knows it.

King has a genius for making up good stories with multiple strands and juggling characters enlivened with human quirks. I even like his style and will forgive certain unidiomatic usages because the rest of the story is so damn good.In "The Stand," for instance, a character is "playing pocket pool with his wallet." Everybody knows that "playing pocket pool" means someone is playing with his balls with his hands in his pocket and looking stupid and vacant when there is work to be done. You do not "play pocket pool" with your wallet. But all that seems beside the point when the character playing with his wallet is standing on the verge of a world wide epidemic about to wipe out 99.4 percent of the world's population.

That King's stories are good enough to make me forget my English teacher fussiness about these types of blunders is testimony to the power of his writing.

"11/22/63" is a tour de force time travel novel that focuses more on what we can learn from the past than on getting bogged down in the kind of science gibberish that some speculative fiction does. The plot is fairly simple: A guy born ca. 1976 is tapped by a dying friend to go down a time tunnel to stop Lee Harvey Oswald from killing President John Kennedy. That leads to some exciting and interesting moments as Jake comes face-to-face with Kennedy's assassin. But the real interest lies in Jake's confronting what America was in 1963.

Jake is, of course, King's alter ego, and you have to suspend your disbelief a bit to believe that a GenXer like Jake really cares about the Kennedy assassination. It's really the Boomer generation that that event still haunts (and most of us remember being in school the day the news was announced, and perhaps coming home to weeping mothers and worried fathers).

King explores with fresh new insights the ways in which Kennedy's survival might have (or might not have) affected our society today. King also recreates 1963--right down to the fact that nobody wore pantyhose then--with great detail and accuracy. However, "the past is obdurate"--this phrase crops up more times than "with great power comes great responsibility" in the Spider-Man movies; King ain't no Henry James in the subtlety department--and Jake is faced with thrilling and interesting roadblocks to his efforts to thwart Oswald.

***SPOILER ALERT*** It would have been easy (and incredibly unsatisfying) had King ended with some sort of smarmy lesson a la "everything happens for a reason." Instead, his ending underscores that, in this life, it's better to play the cards we're dealt than to yearn after some alternate history that could have gone wrong in ways we are unable to see. It is a sad ending in many ways, but King does allow his protagonist a bittersweet moment before the book's close that is moving and satisfying.