I couldn't find a discussion page for this, surprisingly enough. Lets discuss!
So far, I am enthralled by this novel. This is easily the best thing King has put out in a long time. But, here's what I really want to discuss:
Spoiler from pages 1-145
Spoiler: 11-10-2011 08:15 PMwoodpryanOops. Shit. No wonder I didn't see it. I'm in the wrong damn forum. What a moron. Sorry about this, but could someone move this for me, please? 11-11-2011 12:00 AMJeanyes, someone could!
we don't seem to have such a thread here anyway. I will add it to the list later today. 11-12-2011 09:53 AMmaeJust started reading. Got a big hankering for root beer. 11-12-2011 10:18 AMHeather19So far I'm absolutely loving the story :)
Quote:I agree 100% with your spoiler. I just got to that part.Spoiler: 11-12-2011 10:47 AMRickyI'm going out to pick up some copies today. So far it's great to see that everyone else seems to be loving it. 11-12-2011 01:01 PMErinI'm so into this book. Here's something I'm wondering about though (I'm to the part where he's teaching in the small town in Texas):
Spoiler: 11-12-2011 01:19 PMBev VincentHang in there -- all will be revealed. 11-12-2011 01:38 PMjhanicI'm about halfway through my reread of the book. I had some trouble getting into the book the first time around, but this time I'm having a ball. A great read!
John 11-12-2011 02:35 PMmaeSo absorbing and immersive. I've plowed through 130 pages reading most of the day for the first time in years. Man, the fifties were so awesome. 11-12-2011 02:52 PMbiomiegI finished it fifteen minutes ago and I LOVED it. 11-12-2011 02:56 PMBev VincentI want to reread sections after my visit to the book depository yesterday. 11-12-2011 05:47 PMMerlin1958 11-12-2011 05:58 PMBev VincentSpoiler: 11-12-2011 06:20 PMmaeSet my XM radio to 50s on 5 :) 11-13-2011 04:38 AMjhanicI'd like to make a suggestion to the mods--please add "Spoilers" to the title of this thread so we don't have to be bothered hiding the spoilers in the text.
Thanks,
John 11-13-2011 10:45 AMJeanright 11-13-2011 12:09 PMmaehttp://entertainment.time.com/2011/1...harvey-oswald/
Quote:
I’ve only read three books by Stephen King. When I was 10 I read The Long Walk, one of his pseudonymous Bachman books. In my early 20s, while trapped on a family vacation, I read The Dark Half, which taught me a word I have never forgotten: psychopomp. Now I have read 11/22/63.
It’s not like I was avoiding King. I just never felt drawn to his stuff. I’m not a big horror reader, and his prose isn’t unmissably lapidary or anything. Judging from other people’s reactions to his work, something important was going on in there, but I could never really feel it. It’s like he was transmitting on a frequency I wasn’t calibrated to receive.
And plus Gilbert Cruz — who edits this blog, or whatever it is — is practically a one-man King bureau, so I got in the habit of just forwarding everything King wrote to him. But with 11/22/63, I took matters into my own hands. I turned vigilante. Like Lee Harvey Oswald.
I started 11/22/63 because I was curious, just from a technical, writerly point of view, what King was up to. I finished it because I liked it. 11/22/63 isn’t your typical King outing: it’s a time-travel novel about a guy who finds a portal back to 1958 and uses it to try to prevent the assassination of President Kennedy. It’s not a horror novel. It’s hard to say what it is, exactly.
But whatever it is, it’s obviously the work of a master craftsman. You feel safe immediately: sit back, relax, a professional will be handling matters. Everything is in sharp focus: the details are precise, and even minor characters and extras are given distinct individual faces (it’s surprising how few writers bother to do that). The boxes you need a book to check are firmly and methodically checked. By page 5 we’ve got our hero, Jake, and we’re already firmly on his side. He’s a teacher; his wife just left him; he’s nice to a borderline-mentally disabled janitor; he likes John Irving. We like him. Check.
Then there’s another kind of box, which doesn’t get checked: King opts out of the cliches of the genre. No mad scientists, no gleaming time machine, no grandfather paradox, no Tesla coils, nobody coming back from the deep past with a dinosaur for a pet. You’ve read plenty of time-travel stories, so your sensors will be on high alert, but King walks right past them. No alarms go off. Nothing here is stock or off-the-rack: this story is custom-made, one of a kind. The first hint Jake gets that he’s dealing with a time-portal is that a friend of his goes from healthy to wasted-by-cancer in a day. Turns out the friend, Al, just spent four years in the past. He came back because he was dying.
Al owns a diner, which has a pantry, and the pantry is a hole into the past, specifically to September 9, 1958. King doesn’t try to explain this, which is just as well. Jake and Al decide that Jake is going to go back and stop Lee Harvey Oswald.
As it turns out, Jake likes the past. King does too. The root beer was better. The music was better. Life was simpler. Neighborhoods were safer. The best thing about 11/22/63 is King’s warm, precise portrait of the 1950’s, for which he clearly feels a powerful longing. It’s pleasant watching Jake set up his life there. He has a fake identity. Like Biff in Back to the Future Part II, he bets on sporting events that he knows the outcome of. He’s clever and efficient. It’s like watching Robinson Crusoe set up house on his island.
Since the time-hole is permanently set on 1958, and JFK died in 1963, Jake has five years to kill. So he rights a few local historical wrongs in Derry, Maine (where King has set a couple of other novels; according to Professor Cruz, some characters from It make a cameo), then he moves to Texas, the better to surveil Oswald. Jake becomes a teacher in a small town near Dallas, where he finds a tall, lovably gawky librarian named Sadie to fall in love with.
We have a lot of time to kill too. The big question, of course, is will-he-won’t-he stop Oswald, but it’s a long haul to the fateful day, and the wires go slack from time to time. Much of the book’s tension comes from the fact that the past doesn’t like being changed. It throws up barriers to keep Jake from changing the timestream—a fallen tree, a sudden illness, a stalled car—and the more major the change, the more serious the barriers. (There’s a whiff of Final Destination in 11/22/63.) But Jake spends a lot of time noodling around inspiring his students and flirting with Sadie, too. The book wanders in the middle, from genre to genre, from thriller to romance to mystery to period piece to Friday Night Lights.
Only rarely does King go to his horror-writer chops, but those are the moments when I really felt the master’s presence—King is a diligent journeyman when it comes to staging a romance, but when he does horror the book snaps into hi-res. When Jake emerges from the time-hole, or whatever it is, he’s immediately greeted by a drunken bum who seems to realize that there’s something different about Jake—he doesn’t belong there. The bum carries a yellow card on his hat, and Al has named him the Yellow Card Man, though sometimes his card changes color for reasons that are obscure. The Yellow Card Man calls Jake “Jimla,” a nonsense word that recurs in odd places throughout Jake’s story, and slowly but surely fills with dreadful meaning. The Yellow Card Man is a surreal presence who hovers over much of the book, reminding us that, even as he lives out a 1950s idyll, Jake is messing with forces beyond his understanding. Maybe it’s dangerously self-indulgent to think that one man can rewrite history to his specifications. Maybe he’s not so different from Oswald.
Given the discipline and the cold, cutting skill with which King handles the few horror elements of 11/22/63, it’s surprising how sentimental he’s willing to go. He actually talks us through a high-school performance of Of Mice and Men—starring a protégé of Jake’s, a football-player-turned actor—in something close to real-time. The audience collapses in sobs; I didn’t. When a cheerleader receives a disfiguring scar in a car accident, the whole school pitches in and puts on a revue to pay for plastic surgery. Sadie herself, as a lonely small-town librarian, is at least half-cliché.
King also curses Sadie with a crazy and abusive but not very interesting ex-husband, the better to obtain our sympathy for her. I don’t mind being manipulated — as a reader, that’s what I’m here for — but gently does it. Just as Jake feels the fell hand of history pushing him this way and that, I felt the hand of King rubbing my nose in Sadie’s misery, demanding that I feel sorry for her. He’s overplaying a winning hand. I already liked Sadie! I didn’t need to pity her too. (Because of said ex’s craziness, by the way, Sadie is still a virgin when Jake meets her. All for Jake!)
But I stuck with 11/22/63. I had to: it was simply too pleasant living in King’s vision of the past, where the entire world is suffused in a golden glow arising from the absence of cell phones and e-mail and homeland security and all our other modern miracles. And I was too interested in the grand loop of King’s time-travel conceit. It’s rare that time travelers have really good, specific reasons to go back in time, beyond averting a chrono-flux vortex or whatever. But Jake does, and I cared about him. And I wanted to know: what kind of twist does an 800-page time-travel novel lead up to?
I found out. The build-up is better than the payoff, as it almost always is. But there’s a lot to be said for a good build-up, and it’s not a cop-out. 11/22/63 asks a good question: what if this world—as cruel, tragic and horrifying as it is—really is the best of all possible worlds? If there’s no good answer to that question, it’s not King’s fault.
So that’s three down, out of King’s 50-novel oeuvre, and I believe I’ll make it four. What should I read next?
11-13-2011 02:55 PMmaeHm, The Guardian doesn't like the book: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011...?newsfeed=true - the first negative review I have seen. Must be a British thing :) 11-14-2011 12:06 AMJean 11-14-2011 12:17 AMStoryslinger 11-14-2011 04:54 AMDoctorDodgeAs Storyslinger said, incredibly true. It's not even just the case with books, but films and tv, as well. As long as that story deals with characters, with emotions and the psychology of it, with the heart and soul of the story, essentially, then I don't care how complicated or simple a story is. I do plan to read 11/22/63 when I can, but something tells me I just might enjoy it. Under the Dome and Duma Key first, though, I think. 11-14-2011 05:06 AMBrice 11-14-2011 08:45 AMStoryslinger 11-15-2011 07:50 PMmystimawill have to wait for this book till i finish his last one i have...UTD...when I finish that one I will definitely get this one. 11-15-2011 08:34 PMmaeI cannot get over how good this is. 11-16-2011 12:09 PMpixiedark76I have finished 11/22/63 and I have this to say on the book. The Irish have a saying "What's done is done; can't be undone." In other words leave the past in the past! After reading 11/22/63 I never have realized how true this really is. You should leave the past alone and don't ever think about changing it! Things might end up a lot worse! 11-17-2011 06:14 PMBriceJust finished. Damn, this was good. Now i wanna use my time machine to see what i can screw up. :emot-cthulhu: 11-21-2011 12:49 PMmaehttp://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...S78.DTL&ao=all
Quote:
Stories about time travel generally share one trait: They believe, by implication or open statement, that yesterday remains a malleable canvas, if only you could access it. "The past," author William Faulkner once wrote, "is never dead. It's not even past."
In the United States, one of the most obsessed-upon pivot points of our recent past — the moment when people felt the country took a hard turn down a fraught and unpleasant path — was the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas. The date is etched forever upon the American psyche: 11/22/63.
Which is exactly the minimalist title of Stephen King's new book. The behemoth "11/22/63" postulates what might have happened if an English teacher named Jake Epping slipped back in time from now to 1958, then lived out five years of his life waiting for Kennedy's appointment with Lee Harvey Oswald's bullet 48 years ago Tuesday — and possibly preventing it.
In other words: One of the Baby Boomers' most celebrated authors is spending three pounds of bookage examining whether the course of the 1960s and the decades beyond would have changed if a single traumatic event had been averted. It's like a mashup of "Back to the Future" and "In the Line of Fire."
This is a wrenching and subtle book, but that's not what we're here to discuss. More important is this: The 849 pages of "11/22/63" channel the angst and longing that so many Boomers feel about a past that, perhaps, didn't go in the direction they had hoped — and possibly even about lives that didn't turn out quite as planned.
The cover of "11/22/63" distills this duality. On the front is a newspaper bearing the familiar headline: "JFK Slain in Dallas, LBJ Takes Oath." On the back, though, is a might-have-been banner from another lifetime — "JFK Escapes Assassination, First Lady Also OK! Americans Breathe Sigh of Relief." It almost hurts to read it, to envision the possibility.
Imagine: giving someone a pen to rewrite the 1960s and beyond — to make Beatles survive, new presidents emerge, things turn out differently. Imagine how that could play with Americans who watched the Kennedy mystique peter out and dreams of revolution melt into ads that use Janis Joplin tunes to sell cars.
King is able to address questions that have been raised so often in the years since that lunch hour on Dealey Plaza in Dallas: Would we have gone so far into Vietnam? Would so many have died? Would JFK, had he lived, have produced an enduring foundation for peace and prosperity? Would the children of the 1960s have come of age in a different world?
Those are the obvious tensions. But, through the eyes of Jake Epping and his Brave-Old-World road trip through pre-Vietnam-era America, King also burrows into some less frequently articulated national themes, both philosophical and theological. Among them:
_Even if we could put a rewrite guy on the history books, could a single man, even one with foreknowledge, have changed everything? In a culture so based on individualism, this is a central question.
_Is there such a thing as fate? Are some things just destined to happen?
_Was the American past actually better, simpler, kinder, more bursting with possibility? Is the national zest for yesterday justified, or is it just a crutch that we use when we want to escape?
As the 1960s dawned, the future was a central part of the American experience. From "The Jetsons" to Kennedy's New Frontier, we shaped and shared optimistic visions of it, made it part of the political dialogue, elevated it to one of the fundamental expressions of our national optimism.
That has long since faded. Today, visions of the future are generally dystopian and menacing. Instead we look back, using entertainment and shopping and casual dining and home decor to evoke pasts that we never lived, to surf among our yesterdays without having to grapple with the tough questions.
This makes King impatient. At one point in 1963, the woman Jake loves in the past learns of his origin and his intent and snaps at him: "That's what all this is to you, isn't it? Just a living history book." King is gentle about it, but he indicts people who bathe themselves in the aura of nostalgia, who look back rather than forward and blindly glorify what came before.
Yes, Jake Epping allows, in 1958 we hadn't destroyed the environment quite so much yet, independent businesses were still serving great pie a la mode and life didn't move quite so fast. But things were a lot smellier, a lot smokier — and, most saliently, a lot more unfair to people who weren't white and male. It wasn't, Jake says, "all Andy-n-Opie."
By the book's end, King's constant readers can place "11/22/63" in the context of his previous work and legitimately wonder: After all the rotting corpses and sharp-toothed clowns, after all the ghosts and aliens and possessed cars and possessed dogs, could this, at long last, be the thing that truly haunts Stephen King? Could the master of American horror, he who bravely shepherded us through the unspeakable in the 2000s, the 1990s, the 1980s and the 1970s, be afraid of the 1960s?
And could the sheer capriciousness of history, and how it rearranges all of us like tiny chess pieces, be the most terrifying thing of all?
King actually addresses this. Toward the end of the book he writes, in Jake Epping's voice, one of the most eloquent passages he's ever produced:
"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 dream clock 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."
Revealing how "11/22/63" ends would, of course, spoil the book. But it kind of doesn't matter, because the lesson is clarion: Don't mess with yesterday. It may bite. Pulling at the threads of time's tapestry is done at our own peril, and the conventional assumption that changing one thing about the past would make today better is simplistic. Besides, King writes: "The past doesn't want to be changed."
Boomers and Beatles may have believed in yesterday, but salvation doesn't necessarily lie there. No matter how deeply we feel, King seems to say, the answers were never just blowin' in the wind. They weren't even about whether one young president lived or died. They were, and remain, far more complicated.
11-22-2011 09:38 PMJQ The GunslingerHalf way into the book. The first 100 pages or so I was like Ehh, this plot is moving to fast for me. But once Jake visited Derry I was in for the ride. Can't wait to finish the rest. And am eager to find the explantion of the yellow-card man. 11-23-2011 12:01 PMpixiedark76 11-24-2011 11:47 PMmtdmanI thought King did a great job creating an atmosphere of what the 50s and 60s were like to live in, especially for someone who came from the future to live in the past. IMO it's his best job of creating an atmosphere as a character since Salem's Lot.
I pretty much loved the book. However, I could have done without so much day to day stuff about Oswald and his family. God that bored me and slowed the book down waaaay too much there for a while. I understand the historical aspect of that stuff, but it bored the crap out of me. 11-25-2011 07:58 AMBriceHe could have given another five thousand or so pages and I'd have been happy. 11-26-2011 10:43 AMErinI finished this a few days ago and LOVED it! A great book with characters I really cared about. I also think the ending was very satisfying, but bittersweet of course. 11-26-2011 07:39 PMHeather19I just finished it and absolutely loved it! The ending was perfect. I think this is definitely one of my favorites of his, and one of his best. The only part that frustrated me was Jake's gambling. I mean come on, that was bound to have extreme consequences. 11-26-2011 07:45 PMdivemasterFinished this today. Like most here, nothing but the highest praise from me.
I was very pleased to see King reference (prominently!) the Saki short story The Open Window toward the end of the novel. Just by coincidence I happened to read The Open Window for the first time a couple of weeks ago. (Coincidence? Or harmonics, hmmm?) I encourage anyone not familiar with the sotry to give it a read--it's only a few pages long. You'll see why Jake Epping referred to it in his tale! 11-27-2011 01:34 PMSilenozI'm a little over 300 pages in, it keeps surprising me how good this is. It's ridiculously absorbing so far. I love that it's long too, Jake is only just starting to get introduced to the Oswald family, and it's already been a great ride. Seems like it's going to have a great payoff at the end. 11-27-2011 02:21 PMHeather19I think this one has one of the most satisfying endings to a King book. Sometimes I get a little let down by the endings to his stories, but not this one. It was perfect in every way. 11-27-2011 05:52 PMMerlin1958I'm about 700 pages in and I'm starting to think Sadie won't make it in the end!!! That would suck big time!! I also hazard a guess that Al, the portal, the Yellow card man and the Obdurate past have a common link. That's just speculation though!! 11-28-2011 09:25 AMRandall FlaggWhat if any Dark Tower references are in the book?