IMHO, an underrated King gem, a return to the glory days of 'Salem's Lot and The Shining. a twisty, well imagined time-travel tale about preventing the JFK assassination.
let's face it, if you have a hardcover and a paperback on the best-seller lists for decades, some of them have to clunkers, like Christine and The Tommyknockers, which he self-admittedly wrote in a coke-fueled frenzy. King said he was going to give up writing novels since his horrendous car accident, but he seems to be more prolific than ever.
11/22/63 starts out as a poetic, Bradybury-esque, finely-observed evocation of King's 50s Maine boyhood with tons of good period detail, then turns into a page-turning thriller about whether the protagonist can stop Oswald before it's too late. King, or his researchers, really did their homework. the novel is chockfull of fascinating information about Lee's marriage, his slum housing, his pathetic career, how he beat his Russian wife Marina and his lonely, oddball Marxism in reactionary Texas. there are street addresses, job sites, a chronology of when Lee married Marina, the name of the ship they on which they sailed back to America, a chronology of his peregrinations through Forth Worth, Dallas and New Orleans.
no spoilers here, but the conclusion verges on the ridiculous. time-travel stories, with few exceptions, tend to fall apart because there are just too many possible contradictions. King posits that each time you visit the past, it creates a new "thread"--the same idea William Gibson uses in his more obscure The Peripherals, in which you can't figure out what's going on until about two-thirds of the way in.
guess this is the "in" thinking on time travel these days, which I personally think is impossible because of the second law of thermodynamics--highly organized systems tend towards entropy--so time is a one-way arrow, at least in our dimension. if other dimensions do exist, all bets are off, but nobody yet has given an explanation of how they work, so time travel stories are pure conjecture. H.G. Wells never even addressed multidimensionality in his groundbreaking Time Machine, but his images of the fluttering effect of day and night as time sped by was so cool. in general, I find time-travel stories and movies like "The Butterfly Effect" not be entertaining, because the creator is in charge of all the rules, and you can't second-guess him or gainsay him. can you exist in the same time frame as your past self? does the butterfly effect have consequences on everything you do? who's to say? it only works when it's truly clever Marty McFly's solo in Back to the Future, when he starts out with a Chuck Berry lick and traces the history of the electric guitar all the way up to Hendrix in front of a stunned high-school audience. truly lol.
this ground has been gone over many times, many ways, but it's worth mentioning simply because King dismisses it entirely in the context of a 1,000 page novel. it's plain almost from the git-go that King buys into the lone nut theory of the JFK assassination, which even as a child I thought made no sense, simply because of the ballistics.
bullet entry wounds are small and exit wounds are big--it's an inviolable physical law. the bullet enters making a tiny hole because of its high velocity and the permeability of human flesh and bone, does a lot of internal damage and thus blows out a big chunk of flesh as it exits. JFK's case was just the reverse, according to the official story. the entry wound did all the damage, blowing off the top off his skull like a pumpkin. in a blind panic, Jackie even tried to retrieve pieces of her husband's skull and brains from atop the trunk of the Lincoln. the exit wound was tiny, more like a bullet hole.
furthermore, his necktie was nicked, which may indicate that the bullet entered through his throat and blew out the back of his head, which makes more sense physically. of course the only existing film frame is ambiguous, but kennedy's head does appear to snap backwards, rather than forwards, more consistent with a front-entry wound than a shot from above.
imagine if it the killing had occurred in today's era of full television coverage, multiple surveillance cameras and innumerable cell phones with video capacity!
the so-called "pristine bullet" is pure baloney from a ballistics perspective. no bullet could have penetrated as much flesh as the Warren Commission claimed it did--passing through Gov. Connally's chest, wrist and injuring his thigh without showing some ( a lot of, actually) deformity, yet the Warren exhibit bullet was as clean as if it had just popped out of the rifle magazine. it happened to be found in mint condition by some spook at Parkland Memorial.
King addresses none of that, yet still spins a pretty good yarn, as is his forte. King's style frequently verges on being sloppy, scatological and overly reliant on a tin ear for the true vernacular. he uses slang and specializes in regional pronunciation, but it's not an insight into American speech like Huckleberry Finn or The Sun Also Rises.
he's just not anywhere in the same league, and is overrated by publications like The New Yorker and Esquire for being so, just because his name on the cover is guaranteed to sell copies. where's the symbolism, the subtext, the philosophical framework? there ain't one, pal.
nonetheless, King remains one of best pure storytellers working in American letters today, no mean feat in itself, and one which snobbish literary critics tend to overlook. honestly, have you tried to wade through some of the works by the giants, like Henry James? it takes him half a page just to say the characters moved from one place to another. talk about lack of pacing! what a snooze! that style may have been alright at the turn of the century, when people had the time for a four-hour opera, but Hemingway threw that all out the window going on a century ago, and now we are even more distracted with electronic communication, IMs and texting. if the medium is the message, the computer is going to have a more radical impact on reading than the Gutenberg press did.
in the unfortunately titled 11/22/63, which may have contributed to its lack of wider public recognition, King glances upon larger conspiracy theories, like the mob connections of Jack Ruby and Louisiana crime boss Carlos Marcello, but draws no conclusions from them. also, Oswald may have been "sheep-dipped" to look like a Red, and was actually being run by somebody. it was far too easy for him to get into the USSR and return to the USA with no impedance at the apex of cold-war tensions. Ruby's murder of Oswald on live television goes back all the way to the Romans, assassinate the assassins so there is no trail to who was really behind it. even if Oswald did act alone, which as King says is an Occam's Razor that cuts straight across many confusing variables, it does not mean that his motives have been explained or if someone was in fact running him. conveniently, he never testified in a court of law.
to his credit, King does cast a shadow on the role of Hoover and the DPD, who plainly bungled the case. Hoover hated JFK, and quashed myriad death threats originating from dallas before the assassination. the FBI even had a tail on Oswald, but did not follow through. this fact is used to good effect in our hero's fate in 11/22/63.
my advice is to put aside your personal beliefs about who did--whether it was the biggest coverup since the Manhattan Project, or some schnook on his lunch hour happened to get off a lucky shot and pop the Prez--and just enjoy the ride. it's a good one.
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Top reviews from other countries
jim dentrey
Didn't expect anything less from Stephen King!
Reviewed in Canada on December 14, 2023
Colleen Hough
Mix of time travel and historical fiction
Reviewed in Canada on January 18, 2016