Stephen King’s 11.22.63 - a novel of time-travel and doomed-romance

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Stephen King’s 11/22/63

Stephen King’s 11/22/63 is a very long (752 pages), very readable and very professional novel published in July 2012. Jake Epping, a mildly dissatisfied English teacher in the Maine of 2011, discovers through the proprietor of a local diner, Al Templeton, that there is a portal in the back of the establishment leading back to 1958. Al first uses it for trivial profit, buying cheap meat in the past, but then conceives a larger ambition: to prevent the assassination of President Kennedy on 22 November 1963. Failing to carry this through himself, he passes the mission to Jake, who accepts it out of a mixture of moral excitement, curiosity and a certain vacancy in his own life.

A central rule of the novel is that the past is “obdurate”. It does not yield gracefully to intervention. It resists, throws unlikely misfortunes into the path of anyone trying to alter events. The mechanics of time travel are not of major interest here, though not irrelevant. The book begins, accordingly, as a thriller of experiment and consequence. Jake tests whether old wrongs can be righted. He discovers that they can, but not cheaply.

What gives the novel its heft is the labour King put into recreating the period. The afterword makes plain that he did a great deal of research, absorbing the literature on Kennedy's assassination and visiting the key locations. The America of the late 1950s and early 1960s feels textured, inhabited and physically there, though seen through the nostalgic mist of both author and protagonist.

What was King really trying to do in writing this book? The novel is not really about saving Kennedy; that's the setting. The book’s true engine eventually emerges when Jake, now living in the past, takes a teaching post in Jodie, Texas (near Dallas-Fort Worth) and meets Sadie, the school librarian with whom he falls in love. From that point on, 11/22/63 becomes less a political what-if than a romance buckling under historical pressure: not whether Jake can stop Oswald, but whether he can achieve a life with Sadie - and what such a life would cost in collateral damage.

Clare thought the Jake-Sadie relationship was tedious and added little, and that the novel would have been better without it; the book would have worked for her as an ingenious and immersive historical thriller. I kind of see her point: Sadie is not fully imagined as an authentic character. Her inner life is schematic; her independent reality a generic blur. She often feels less like a real person than a bland projection - Jake’s ideal woman, and behind that, Stephen King’s. The arc of their relationship has the emotional colouring not of complex reciprocity, but of an authorial wish-fulfilment fantasy.

The ending, however, is clever, poignant, bittersweet, and centrally involves Sadie. One sees why readers respond to it - Clare included - even if one can still faintly hear the gears engaging.

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