Books of 2013, #25: 11/22/63, by Stephen King

Look, Steve, we love you. The American reading public, I mean. You’ve sold millions upon millions of books, had ’em adapted into films great and small (and sometimes more than once), and gathered enough publisher mojo to publish a fairly noncommercial epic in The Dark Tower.

But goddammit, man, you need an editor. And by this I mean someone who can tell you when your shit stinks — or, at least, when you’ve bloated out a book so far that it begins to collapse in on itself.

11/22/63 is King’s take on time travel. That as an elevator pitch was enough to get me to bite, even though the obligatory pivotal event was yet-more-baby-boomer-bullshit, but I should’ve given it a second though, and a third one if necessary. King playing in speculative fiction is trouble, and he fails utterly to do anything interesting with his premise. It’s telegraphed from the start that, obviously preventing JFK from leaving half his noggin in Dealey Plaza would have butterfly-esque effects that result in an unrecognizable dystopia in 2011 (“now” for the book). Shit, even if that wasn’t a tired and overdone trope in time travel fiction, you’d KNOW that was going to be the case just because of the name on the spine. It’s not like King is known for giving us ice cream and puppies, right?

But because he’s not (apparently) a student of the prior work, he goes there anyway, and gives it only a smattering of pages. He’s way more interested in the “detective story” of how his protagonist determines Oswald’s the real killer, and establishing how much his GenX hero loves the 1958 – 1963 world he’s transplanted to. Baby boomer wish fulfillment much, Steve-O?

The book’s a turgid mess, I’m sad to say; even his shout-outs to his own mythos — we start in Maine, naturally, and the time tunnel opens in 1958, so our hero’s in Derry during the 1958 portions of It — mostly failed to amuse me. He’s also dragged down by the amount of research into the assassination he clearly did, and which he by-God clearly had to get into the book regardless of cost. I’m reminded of one aspect of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, as explained to me by a college prof twenty years ago: Dreiser’s book lopes along pretty well until the last third or so, when it slows to a crawl as we move through every tiny bit of legal minutia Dreiser could cram in — because he’d done the research, too, about a notorious crime and resulting trial in upstate New York, and he was hell-bent on using that material, too. It hurt Dreiser, but it’s one of the fatal flaws for King.

Oh well. At least we’ve got Joe. Plus, my “three Kings” reading project still has one entry to go: Owen’s novel, which has garnered high praise. He’ll be on deck this summer.

Oh, one more thing

This makes 25 books from 1/1 to 6/7 (when I finished it), so the “50 book year” thing still seems on point.

3 thoughts on “Books of 2013, #25: 11/22/63, by Stephen King

  1. I’m with ya on King needing an editor, though I found this novel to be one of his best efforts in years (and I am a King fan from waaaaaay back, like 11 years old, a fact I did not share with my MFA colleagues). I concur however that the having to work in characters from It was irritating, but then It has never been one of my favorites.

    I actually have a theory about the editing thing. If you’ll recall, Mr. King published a novel in the late 70s called “The Stand.” It has since become the favorite King novel of most King fans (not me; I think that distinction belongs to either “The Shining” or “‘Salem’s Lot”). He was relatively un-established when The Stand hit, so his publisher balked at publishing a 1200 page novel and pared it down to a relatively manageable 800. And, my god, did they butcher it. (I don’t know who did the actual edits.) I read it when it first came out when I was 12 or so, and there were large parts that didn’t seem to make much sense; when they finally released the “director’s cut” when I was in grad school, all of a sudden it had better flow and answered many questions I’d had about more tangential characters. This is why I suspect he’s gun-shy about editing. (Plus, he has tons of money and doesn’t have to let people tell him what to do now. Not that I’m dissing Steve; he can still tell a great story, and he’s a reliable left-winger as a bonus.)

    50 books? You can do it! I tried to do 100 books one year and made it through about 40. Meanwhile, my wife can read five to seven books per week. It’s one reason why she’s such a good bookseller.

  2. My King-fan bona fides are at least as strong as yours; I read nearly everything he published through about 1989 or 1990, and was in line to buy the unexpurgated STAND back in Tuscaloosa. Shit, I even read the whole DARK TOWER thing. This one, though, was just turgid and haphazard.

  3. You do have me out-geeked there. I couldn’t get through the Dark Tower at all. Oddly, I just, about five minutes ago, finished King’s newest novel, “Joyland”. It’s a paperback original from Hardcase Crime but it’s not at all hard-boiled. Really kind of meh, albeit with an appealingly bittersweet ending. And it’s much tighter than recent efforts, clocking in at under 300 pages. Might be worth a look, but the book you really should be reading is “The Rook” by Daniel O’Malley. (I’ve probably mentioned it to you before.) Seriously. It will give you massive geek-gasms.