A man discovers a portal to 1958 at the back of his failing diner. At first he just uses the portal to buy beef at 1950s prices and sell it back as cheeseburgers for a 2010s markup. Then one day this aging man thinks to himself, If I stay there for five years, I can save JFK.
This phenomenal premise shows you both of the two sides of 11/22/63. You get the unexpected quirks and canniness of humanity; and you get the way those weird, zigzagging people believe in the big sweep of History with a capital H. And those aspects of our lives interweave. One way of talking about why I did love this novel, even though I was also bored or annoyed by long stretches of it, is to say that I found myself imagining my own alternative 1960s and the futures I imagined spiraling out from them. The diner guy makes his case that saving Kennedy might also have saved Martin Luther King, Jr. You’ll have your own opinions about that, but I found myself staring out the window on the 70 bus and thinking about 1987 in the world where King was still alive. I’d go for that time travel story, I can tell you. Call it Mountaintop: A Spike Lee Joint.
That’s the thing about Stephen King’s 1950s. There’s always a golden haze in the air, as the sun descends… and the smell of blood and rot is always moving slowly through that heavy summer afternoon. He loves the times and places of his childhood, but because he also remembers the cruelty of that time (universal cruelty and characteristically 1950s American cruelty), his nostalgia can be anybody’s. Everybody loves to remember the bad old days. Everybody wonders whether we could have had all the joys without all the misery. What’s it like in a 1987 of double Dutch but not crackhouses? The cover of Newsweek proclaiming 1987 the End of the Buppie Years? Time exposing “Scandal in America’s Biggest Ujamaa Village”? Maybe Marion Barry works hard as mayor, then descends into (let’s say) alcoholism, resigns in disgrace and never gets reelected; when DC people say “the Mayor-for-Life” they mean Blelvis, the Black Elvis. And then again maybe DC never hemorrhages population, and my parents can’t afford a mortgage in the city limits because DC real estate gets to 2023 prices in 1979. Like the man said as he tried to pay his bus fare in pennies, “Ain’t nothing ever worked in this city except the Plan.”
That’s the kind of mix of hope and fear, awe at individual greatness and cynicism in the face of systemic forces, that 11/22/63 works with and evokes. It’s got four big sections and a coda. The first two sections are among the best things King has written. That first section gives you the absolutely fantastic premise, and then takes you back to the Fifties with writing that’s almost a sensory overload: the industrial stink of the past, the full-fat flavors, the noise of the factories and the little veils on ladies’ hats. Our narrator, Jake, is a middle-class white guy, so the introduction to the social mores of the American past is gradual and often charming—although the first scene where Jake encounters virulent racism is subtle and disturbing. King calls up his own memories, which makes these scenes feel really personal, and yet it’s also important to the tone of the novel that Jake himself wasn’t born in 1958, and you feel like he’s encountering the past for the very first time.
The second section takes us back to Derry, Home of IT. 1958 was a big year for the killer clown, but Jake isn’t interested in any of that stuff. This section isn’t about what fannish types might call “lore.” We get glimpses of IT things, like the Kitchener Ironworks, but what makes this section so scary is really that it’s not tied in to IT too tightly. Jake is pursuing his own purposes, trying to save several lives in an experiment to see what happens to the present if he drastically changes the past—there are multiple such “experiments” early on in the book and they all feel important and natural, building tension as the changes to the past get bigger. Derry feels raw and real (and not for nothing, there’s a terrific Jewish character who is the furthest thing possible from IT’s well-intentioned stereotypes), and you can feel not just the oncoming violence Jake hopes to stop, but a kind of current of violence pulsing underneath the city, rising up from the submerged canal. This section brought tears to my eyes—and kept me awake, wondering what was moving there in the shadows outside my bedroom window. I roared into the third section, where Jake finally heads to Texas, feeling like maybe I was reading a top-five King novel.
Well, and then we get to Jodie :/ Our hero stops first in a dilapidated Dallas neighborhood. Here we get an interesting balance between writer and narrator. King’s very good at describing how poor and hated places make the people who have to live there angry, chaotic, hard-bitten and hard-biting. Jake has a lot of contempt for these people and their places. This would-be American hero is generous in some circumstances, but self-impressed and self-absorbed in many others; that’s an authorial choice I allowed myself to like. But Jake hates Dallas, so he settles down in a small town called Jodie, which he/King describes as an idyll. King’s not good at idylls! Why are we spending hundreds of pages on how wonderful it is to teach high-school theater to jocks-with-a-heart-of-gold? (Especially when we already know how beautiful teaching can be, because of the novel’s opening, which explains why Jake is so desperate to stop a family annihilator in a town he’s never visited.)
Everybody felt blandly good, nobody ever whipped out some casual bigotry the way I guarantee at least some real kind country people eventually would; the tension leaks out of the narrative in spite of fairly artificial attempts to pump it back up through foreboding nightmares.
There’s an appealing story hiding inside this one. By the end of Jake’s time in Jodie, the people he loves and respects have figured out that he’s hiding his identity. He’s begun to look scuzzy to them; they mistrust him and make him feel like a lowlife. I enjoyed this! King’s good at describing how a place can warp its residents. I would have liked him to lean a lot harder on the possibility that living in the dark back alley of the past is sullying Jake and making him semi-criminal. More guilt about the lies, more shame about the inability to fit in, more awareness of his exposure and inadequacy! Where’s a Tim Powers hero when you need one, I ask.
There’s also a love story, which I cordially disliked for a long time, and the story of what Lee Harvey Oswald is up to, which again is fairly rote. AT LAST we reach 11/22/1963 and its aftermath. The novel rises again. There’s suspense, the love interest comes into her own, the weird glitchy aspects of the time travel get (maybe over-)explained and reveal their sinister power, there’s catastrophe and salvage… and at last, in the first of the novel’s two excellent codas, the hero of King’s most unabashedly Boomer novel learns the great Boomer lesson: You can’t always get what you want.
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I contributed a piece on St John the Beloved for a book of art and brief reflections reimagining saints for our own time. I also reviewed two recent European novels about social media, and did brief write-ups of four movies—including Threads, whose titular metaphor is unexpectedly resonant with 11/22/63.
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“Дорогой длинною”: Those were the days, my friend.
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An interview with Erika Bachiochi about her book, The Rights of Women. ALSO I think I’ve turned on rewards for referring this newsletter to new readers. Rewards are basically me recommending weird stuff I like, linked by a theme chosen by me. Why not?
Kennedy campaign button from anonymous photographer, via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license. The title of this post is from the Mountain Goats.