11/22/1963

Stephen King is not my favorite writer; as a matter of fact, I avoid his literature because his over-blown, over-written horror stories do not engage me. However, his stories translate into outstanding films because what takes King a thousand tedious words to describe creates incredible mere seconds on the screen. Prior to my most recent King read, his best book in my experience is On Writing, an oft-recommended “memoir of the craft” that left me wondering how King can so clearly define “good writing,” then fail to use those skills in his own writing. I recently added another King read to my recommended reading list, an alternative exploration of changing the world by preventing Lee Harvey Oswald from assassinating President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, TX on November 22, 1963.

Again, as is common in my King experience, the book would benefit from some strong editing as it gets tediously long with no real reason for the length, analogous to beating a dead horse in some aspects, but the story premise is strong. A male English teacher (protagonist) walks through what King calls a rabbit hole and into the past, armed with explicit historical notes from another time-traveler, a Vietnam vet, who uses the benefit of his experience to determine that preventing the Kennedy assassination would not only save the thousands of lives lost during the Vietnam War, but also save the world. Parallel to the conviction that changing one event can better the outcome for the world is the “butterfly” theory, that the flapping of one butterfly’s wings affects the world and there is no way to determine what those affects are. King presents convincing ideas about both theories without demanding that the reader choose either A or B.

I am also one who wonders often what if, but my old head tells me that life happens the way it happens for a reason, including all those horrific events that we all wish never happened, a theory to which I could not subscribe when I was young and burned with the desire to stand the world on its head and right every wrong, even those over which I had absolutely no influence or control. Stephen King and I are of the same era, so I related to his intellectual query, his interweaving of ideas and/or theories about a critical time in our history. Those who were there not only don’t forget, but we use that experience as a bedrock for who we are now, what we became when Kennedy challenged US not to ask what our country can do for us, but what we can do for our country. We took those words personally, and we took his assassination personally. Our generation may still live in shoulda, woulda, coulda, which seems to be the motivation for King’s novel, 11/22/1963.

King researched the people, the places, and the events. He doesn’t pick a favorite theory and ride it from exposition to denouement, but he creates a story that the reader experiences with the protagonist, a man who accepts the challenge to travel back in time and spend 5 years searching to know whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone or as a part of a conspiracy. The protagonist’s goal is to kill Oswald before he can kill Kennedy, but before he can take that action, he has to know definitively whether Oswald acted alone because if he were part of a conspiracy, killing one assassin would not solve the problem.

King uses the term “think-hunch” to explain how we combine our knowledge with our intellect and/or experience throughout our lives, and posits that we rely on the “hunch” part almost more than we believe or act on what we think. Modern science has validated a single shooter, including ballistic recreations of the “magic bullet” plausibility that verifies that one bullet could have caused 7 separate wounds, beginning with the Presidential kill shot. While our intellect may accept that evidence, our “hunch” may be yeah, right: I don’t think so.

Determining whether the assassination is a conspiracy or the act of a single shooter, however, is not King’s point: his point is to explore how preventing Kennedy’s assassination may have affected the world. My generation knows how the assassination changed our own interpretation or interaction with the world we each experience, but did Kennedy’s death bring about change for the better or would his life have accomplished that goal? King thinks one way, but his hunch opens another pathway, so there is no definitive answer either for the conspiracy theorists who believe they have the answer, nor for those whose hunch is that life definitely would have been better had Kennedy lived.

Up to that point, I enjoyed reading the novel; however, the last several chapters are weak, unfulfilling, tacked on, as if King could not allow the answer to exist within each reader. If there is no answer, don’t provide one! Anyone who takes the time to read this particular novel is capable of challenging the premise of the story and drawing a conclusion. Change is neither good nor bad: it is merely different.

Leave it there.