50 Book Challenge 2012, Book 30

11/22/63 by Stephen King

This is another one of King's later-in-life very long books that feels a tad too long. And yet having read it, I can't quite put my finger on what could have been removed to give it a little more brevity.

The first third of the novel sees our time-traveling protagonist changing minor-to-medium events in order to study their impact on the future via the Butterfly Effect. If you're reading this wanting to get right to King addressing the assassination of JFK, these chapters are probably the ones you would say could go, but they're so necessary, so integral to our character's (another Jake!) drive to do the right thing.

The book has many King tropes like the sanctified mental defect, the mysterious man in strange colored coat and fedora, the Whedonesque take on happy romances... but the one that has annoyed me the most for decades--the blunt foreshadow ("And that was the last time Ben saw Susan alive") is not lingering around anywhere in this tale.

My primary gripe: King paints a very stereotyped, harshly negative caricature of the poverty-level American throughout this book that was mildly offensive to me. Not every poor neighborhood is filled with unattended children, men who beat their wives, wives who sell their sex to make ends meet, etc. but to read this, it often seems that way.

This novel has a really interesting King take on time travel, unlike what he's used in the Tower, that you absolutely must read the entirety of the novel to grasp--because what Jake thinks is the answer to predestination and the time traveler time paradox is rudely taken from him for the reality of another quite late in the game.

It ends on a note bittersweet. A very "there are other worlds than these" note. I enjoyed the book; it was always fairly solid, never a compelling page-turner. B/B-

Other King work cameos/echoes:
A couple key locations in Derry from It as well as Bev and Richie, appear in the early portion of the book. The protagonist of this novel even begins to write a fiction novel based on the Derry murders.

The make believe Japanese car make/model noted in both Wizard and Glass and The Stand is a part of this world as well, suggesting it's another book set in that universe.

The same red and white Plymouth Fury as Christine is present in this book and is a herald of dark events.

For my next book I need to pick something a bit lighter and let my brain decompress a bit.