Lyn's Reviews > 11/22/63

An excellent Stephen King novel.

I think many of us probably have an experience that is some variation of this story: English teacher and / or writer condescendingly dismisses King’s work as trite and spectacular, opining that their own work suffers from an artistic perception lacking in mainstream literature.

I was in a college class where our teacher (an otherwise fun and engaging lecturer and knowledgeable professor – and published author) said something to the effect that King’s work was “good enough for the working class”. The professor’s own novels would be prized by a more discerning literary palate and he would savor his peer recognition.

I’m not sure to this day who he thought he was fooling. What had gotten his goat was that Stephen King was wallowing in C-notes the way a hog wades in mud. He was jealous of his success and he played the Hemingway to King’s Mickey Spillane and played the only card he had, losing (again) to King’s Ace high royal flush.

Wine and roses are fine, but I’m a beer and pizza guy (yes, a working-class reader you smug prick) and I gotta say that King’s 2011 time travel novel is the cat’s meow and he earned every coin.

I’m also a fan of the time travel sub-genre, being a student of Bradbury and Poul Anderson. King takes the Mark Twain A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court time machine idea of a strange occurrence that is never thoroughly explained or understood. But this is Stephen King after all and he mixes in some mysterious elements to keep the story moving. I also liked that we have a thorough examination of the butterfly effect and even mentioned Bradbury’s seminal time travel story A Sound of Thunder.

What’s it all about? A guy from our time (from New England of course) learns of a “rabbit hole” though time. King allows for an unusual magical setting rule: the traveler goes back to the same date every time, in September 1958. And so the plan is hatched to go back to save Kennedy. It then stands to reason that our intrepid time traveler will spend five years in the past waiting for his rendezvous with destiny.

Obdurate. ob·du·rate adjective: stubbornly refusing to change one's opinion or course of action. King uses this word over a dozen times in the book to describe how the past does not want to change and makes it difficult for our hero to save the day. This kind of unleveling of the playing field is first rate King and his almost personification of time is one of the elements of this story that makes it so appealing. ** Coincidentally, I made a similar observation about Kennedy’s book Profiles in Courage where he repeatedly uses the word vituperative.

What also makes this succeed is what makes King’s horror stories work so well – his uncanny ability to find the unusual in everyday life. King, in much the same way that Steven Spielberg does in film, finds the horrific and exciting in the ordinary. The monster is not just under the bed or in the closet, but in the laundry room, and buried inside a stack of old magazines – or in a pantry in a greasy spoon diner. **Harken back to the comments about King writing for the working class. Hell yeah, elitist literary types, pay attention and you might learn something.

At the end of the day, this is a very good book – a great story told by a master storyteller.