11/22/63

Summary (from the publisher): On November 22, 1963, three shots rang out in Dallas, President Kennedy died, and the world changed. What if you could change it back? The author's new novel is about a man who travels back in time to prevent the JFK assassination. In this novel that is a tribute to a simpler era, he sweeps readers back in time to another moment, a real life moment, when everything went wrong: the JFK assassination. And he introduces readers to a character who has the power to change the course of history. Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program. He receives an essay from one of the students, a gruesome, harrowing first person story about the night fifty years ago when Harry Dunning's father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a hammer. Harry escaped with a smashed leg, as evidenced by his crooked walk. Not much later, Jake's friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He enlists Jake on an insane, and insanely possible, mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake's new life as George Amberson and his new world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake's life, a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time.

 

Review: Jake Epping is a thirty-five year old English teacher in Maine in 2011 when his friend Al suddenly reveals a secret: his diner contains the portal to 1958. Al wants Jake to go back to 1958 and prevent the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy, in hopes that it will prevent the resulting chain of negative historical events that follow in the wake of JFK's death. Jake, who is divorced and lonely, is curious and decides to give it a shot and thus begins his alternate life as George Amberson, high school teacher in the late 1950s who is on a secret mission to hunt down Lee Harvey Oswald.

 

The plot of this novel immediately reeled me in as a reader. I was curious to see not only if Jake would save JFK, but if he would save his former student Harry from being the victim of his father's violence or change the course of history in other ways.  With knowledge of tragedies to come, Jake is in a unique position to act to change the sequence of events. King does a great job of making a clear distinction between 2011 and 1958. "I began to learn the verbal geography of 1958. I learned, for instance, that the war meant World War II; the conflict meant Korea. Both were over, and good riddance. People worried about juvenile delinquency, but not too much. There was a recession, but people had seen worse. When you bargained with someone, it was absolutely okay to say you jewed em down (or got gypped)" (177).

 

And yet it seemed difficult to believe that Jake wouldn't have a single person in present day he would miss if he permanently traveled to the past. He doesn't seem to miss any modern conveniences, disparaging modern technology, saying, "After a period of withdrawal from my computer, I'd gained enough perspective to realize just how addicted to that fucking thing I'd become, spending hours reading stupid email attachments and visiting websites for the same reason mountaineers wanted to climb Everest: because they were there. My cell phone never rang because I had no cell phone; and what a relief that had been" (219). Perhaps a greater problem is that I'm not sure that I really like Jake - he seems distant from those he claims to care about and doesn't seem particularly bothered by killing others (even if their death is to save others), which I find odd in someone who is supposedly so moral they will sacrifice several years of their life to save the president's life.

 

But my greatest complaint is how significantly this book dragged in the middle, principally because Jake gets distracted from his mission by the life he is building in the past. Jake spends significant time teaching, directing school plays, and pursuing his girlfriend rather than focusing on saving the president;  "At that moment I cared more about Of Mice and Men than I did about Lee Harvard Oswald" (324). And while I understand that he delays killing Oswald to see if he acted alone or with others, he spent a whole lot of time spying and following Oswald rather than actually acting. While that allowed an action-packed ending on the day of JFK's would-be assassination, it also meant hundreds of pages of relative inaction in the middle of this book.

 

The principle question this book asks is this - if you could change one event from the past, would it positively impact the future? While I don't want to spoil the ending, the novel certainly gives its own answer to this question in a very dramatic recreation of what might have been if Kennedy had lived.

 

Stars: 4