11/22/63 | Stephen King

Title: 11/22/63
Author: Stephen King

11/22/63 is more than 800 pages long, which sounds like a commitment until you're several hundred pages in and wondering how you got there so quickly.

Jake Epping is a high school English teacher whose friend Al introduces him to a portal hidden in the back of his diner. It leads to the same moment in 1958 every time, and Al has spent years thinking about what could be done with it. His answer is ambitious: stop Lee Harvey Oswald from assassinating JFK.

There are rules. Every trip begins at the same point, only two minutes pass in the present no matter how long you're gone, and going back again resets whatever you changed the last time. Al also warns Jake that the past is obdurate. It resists being changed. Jake makes one test run before committing himself to the much larger task ahead.

One of his first stops on the main trip is Derry, Maine, not long after the events of It. Richie and Beverly turn up briefly, and Derry is about as welcoming as you'd expect. I enjoyed seeing Jake dropped into one of the nastier corners of King's fictional universe, even if he doesn't stay there long.

Jake has years to spend in the past before he can really begin investigating Oswald. Once he does, he has to sort through questions that have followed the Kennedy assassination ever since: Was Oswald really the assassin? Did he act alone? Jake isn't willing to kill him without being certain of his guilt. So he watches him, looking for the answers history has never been able to provide conclusively.

He doesn't necessarily have to wait until November 22 to stop Oswald. If he's certain of Oswald's guilt sooner, he can act sooner. The past keeps interfering with his attempts to get that certainty, sometimes in ways that are almost impossible to dismiss as coincidence, while November 22 gets closer.

Oswald himself is almost jarring in how unimpressive he is. King researched him extensively, and there's no criminal mastermind here. He's angry, abusive, resentful, frequently pathetic. It's strange to think about someone like that occupying such an enormous place in history, but that's part of what fascinates me about him. A person doesn't have to be extraordinary to do something with extraordinary consequences.

Jake also has a life in Texas. He teaches, becomes part of a community, and directs a school play. He meets Sadie Dunhill, and I was not prepared for Sadie.

I cared so much about this relationship.

King gives them time. They aren't just thrown together because Jake needs a love interest while he's waiting for Oswald to get on with it. They spend time together, fight, make plans, dance. Jake is carrying around an entire future that Sadie knows nothing about, and eventually there's no clean line between his mission and the life he's made with her.

By November 1963, I still cared very much whether Kennedy lived.

I also desperately wanted Jake and Sadie to be okay.

The novel also takes seriously what changing history might actually mean. Saving Kennedy is only part of the equation; Jake has no way of knowing what else might change along with it. I won't say where King takes that idea because the consequences are too important to the last part of the book to spoil.

I expected 11/22/63 to be a book about JFK. It is, obviously. But somehow King made me care just as much about a school play, a small Texas town, and two people dancing together.

Five out of five stars.