A time traveler goes back to save JFK from a bullet
BY RENE RODRIGUEZ - McClatchy Newspapers
“11/22/63” is Stephen King's first novel about time travel.
'The past is obdurate. It doesn't want to change.“ The past is also a dangerous, fickle place - and woe to anyone who dares alter it. That's the mantra coursing through “11/22/63,” Stephen King's mammoth and thrilling novel about a man who travels back in time to prevent the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
He is Jake Epping, who discovers a time-travel portal in the pantry of a neighborhood diner.
Surprisingly, “11/22/63” is the first time-travel novel King has written, but he is more interested in history than in “Back to the Future” antics. And although he takes occasional liberties with the facts, readers steeped in the details of the assassination will get a rush out of following Jake, who goes by the alias of George Amberson in the past. As George, he spies on Oswald and his wife, Marina, even moving into the apartment below theirs at 214 W. Neely St.
First, Jake performs a test run to make sure his actions in 1958 will impact the future. Once Jake is convinced he can alter the course of history, he sets out on his mission, which will require him to spend several years in the past. Eventually, he moves to Texas and begins to plan for his pre-emptive murder of Oswald in 1963.
“Possibly later that April, more likely on the night of the tenth - why wait? - I would kill the husband of Marina … If you saw a spider scuttering across the floor toward your baby's crib, you might hesitate. You might even consider trapping it in a bottle and putting it out in the yard so it could go on living its little life. But if you were sure that spider was poisonous? A black widow? In that case, you wouldn't hesitate. Not if you were sane. You'd put your foot on it and crush it.”
“11/22/63” is really King's ode to his youth (he was 16 when JFK died), a book that re-creates the era of sock hops, 10-cent root beers, inescapable cigarette smoke and “the heyday of Jayne Mansfield, (when) full breasts are considered attractive rather than embarrassing” with such affection and detail that you are swept along on a huge wave of nostalgia regardless of your age.
The book doesn't neglect the segregation, racism, repression, hypocrisy, chauvinism and nuclear fears of the era. But as Jake acclimates to life before cellphones and Google and meets a librarian who becomes the love of his life, “11/22/63” draws you into the lives of ordinary people and their problems with the pull that has always been the secret to King's success. By the time the eponymous date draws near, and the novel hurtles toward Dealey Plaza and that awful Texas School Book Depository building, you're more worried about the fate of characters you've grown to love than how the world will change if Jake succeeds.
This addictive, heart-stopping and ultimately moving novel is really a distillation of what King has always done so well, without the third-act problems that have plagued so many of his recent books and featuring a monster - time - that is most certainly not make-believe. At one point, Jake laments the fact that “We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why. Not until the future eats the present, anyway. We know when it's too late.”
Fortunately King, who is now 64, has long been aware of how much his faithful readers love him, and “11/22/63” is, in many ways, a gift from him to us. Rene Rodriguez is The Miami Herald's movie critic.