11/22/63 by Stephen King

Synopsis from goodreads.com:

On November 22, 1963, three shots rang out in Dallas, President Kennedy died, and the world changed forever. 

If you had the chance to change the course of history, would you? Would the consequences be worth it? 

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 50 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. 

Explore the Possibilities...

Review:

I am not American, so I won't pretend to get the hype Americans feel about JFK's death even after reading the sentiments about how different things could have been had he not died. I would  imagine it'll be like how Filipinos feel about Jose Rizal's or Ninoy Aquino's deaths. Still, Filipinos are psyched a different way, and I would not expect for many of us to have the desire to go back and save any one of them in want of a different future.

Setting that aside, I do know Stephen King (who the hell wouldn't?). His books used to be interspersed with Robert Ludlum's and J.R.R. Tolkien's in the mess of books near the bed when I was in college. But then life went ahead of me and in trying to run it down, I'd left a lot of things behind--including reading my favorite writers. And it feels so good to read a Stephen King again, even if I had to do this in compliance to a job. Hehe. Great job, eh?

*There might be spoilers so read at your own peril*

It's been a long time... and it's worth going back! The book is great and unputdownable. Following two plot-lines in a story (Jake Epping's personal journey and finding love unexpectedly; and the time travel plot-line) would have been confusing for any other book or any less-experienced but Stephen King managed not to confound. I was engaged the whole time (reason why all work stopped for the day), as the world stopped for a while until I finish this book. The way the world turned out after Jake meddled in the past is just as reasonable for readers of this present era after everything that's known now  about physics, metaphysics, and nature's physics, so his  premise about the past being "obdurate" feels right, that it fights back, because it should. Events happened, has naturally had consequences, and then someone went back and changed it, therefore  consequences got magnified--this methodology, this argument makes sense to me. Then his meticulous research resulting to the '50's and '60's being described so faithfully and artistically made it feel like I'm there. Every little detail felt like a gift given by a kind perfectionist to his beloved readers. 

Characters from his other books ("It", "The Langoliers") made me want to go back to those books again. 

And the romance that Jake finds was the most wonderful surprise! Stephen King writes romance! He's romantic! The ending is just simply sensitive and heartbreaking and so satisfying. It wasn't pretentious at all. It made me sob my way out of the story--soo embarrassing. So nostalgic. Thank you, Mr. Joe Hill, for the inspiration and for convincing your dad to use that ending. It is beautiful.

Literary snobs get snobbed. Stephen King is great in this book even when it's a genre the "Master of Horror" didn't use to write. He'd said in an interview that his greatest desire as a writer is to entertain. He's an entertainer. Why write horror? As if he's had a choice, he'd answered. But the one time he's tried to choose another genre, he proved once and for all he's got what it takes to be king.

Highly recommended book not just for loyal SK readers, but other readers, Americans and non-American alike.   

A Few Quotations to Share...   

1. Kennedy entered, waving to the standing audience, an elderly gentleman in an Alpine hat and lederhosen struck up “Hail to the Chief” on an accordion bigger than he was. The president did a double take, then lifted both hands in an amiable holy shit gesture. For the first time I saw him as I had come to see Oswald—as an actual man. In the double take and the gesture that followed it, I saw something even more beautiful than a sense of humor: an appreciation for life’s essential absurdity.

2. “...stupidity is one of the two things we see most clearly in retrospect. The other is missed chances.” 

3. For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don't we all secretly know this? It's a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.

4. “I know life is hard, I think everyone knows that in their hearts, but why dos it have to be cruel, as well? Why does it have to bite?” 

5. I had been hobbled, perhaps even crippled by a pervasive internet society I had come to depend on and take for granted... hit enter and let Google, that twenty-first century Big Brother, take care of the rest. 

       

     In the Derry of 1958, the most up-to-date computers were the size of small housing developments, and the local paper was no help. What did that leave? I remembered a sociology prof I’d had in college - a sarcastic old bastard - who used to say, When all else fails, give up and go to the library.

6. If there is love, smallpox scars are as pretty as dimples. I'll love your face no matter what is looks like. Because it's yours. 

7. She speaks in a voice almost too low to be heard over the music, but I hear her—I always did. “Who are you, George?”

     “Someone you knew in another life, honey.”

     Then the music takes us, the music rolls away the years, and we dance.