Jeffrey's Updates

"Real spoilers are inside "spoiler" tags. Things that tell a little about the content that I would have appreciated hearing before committing to this behemoth are not. You've been warned.

This is my first Stephen King read. I'm not a horror fan, but I love a good alternate history, and I figured that a story of a man who goes back in time to stop Kennedy's assassination could be one of those. It isn't. Not the biggest hurdle, because this could still have been an enjoyable read if it had been about a man who travels back to live in a different time and gives insightful commentary on the similarities and differences between these cultures. This book wasn't that, either. It was exactly what I had (naively) been trying not to read: a horror. Your basic stabby horror, with a slight twist. In this book, the immutability of the past, its obduracy to cling to what has already been, is the thing with teeth. I know that doesn't sound traditionally horrific, but its manifestation is that when the main character is trying to do something that would result in immediately changing the outcome of a big event--such as an event in which someone originally got killed--this aspect of the past intervenes repeatedly and violently to keep him from doing it. (view spoiler)

Since the part where he tries to stop Kennedy's assassination doesn't happen until about 750 pages into the book, King compensates by having other characters behave in very violent ways. There's a killing of a family by sledgehammer-wielding maniac described in detail multiple times in the first 300 pages. Later on, a woman gets her cheek ripped open by a knife-wielding maniac. Multiple people kill themselves in front of our hero by slitting their throats.

The structure of the novel is as follows: guy finds out he can easily go back in time to 1958, to the same minute of the same day each time he goes. He becomes part of his friend's plot to keep Kennedy from being killed. Except the guy doesn't quite believe this whole time travel thing, so he goes back to 1958, spends about 2 months hanging out and making observations about what various companies' slogans are (always reproduced in all caps, so that it feels like they're being yelled from the page), stops a violent crime from happening close to home, and zips back to 2011 to confirm that, yes, he did change the past. He returns to 1958, re-stops that crime, and then spends the better part of five years waiting for Kennedy's assassination attempt. That's the middle of the book: him sitting around in the early 1960s, in a holding pattern, scoping out downtown Dallas and following Lee Harvey Oswald from a distance so he can convince himself that he really doesn't like this guy. It takes at least 600 pages for 1963 to arrive.

The decision of what to do to Oswald is presented as simple and binary, in a way that bugged me throughout the book. If our hero finds out that Oswald is the lone person behind the assassination, then the only course of action considered is for our guy to kill him. There's some momentary advance remorse about that, but not much, because Oswald is known to have killed Kennedy in the real timeline. The thing I still don't get is, in the real timeline, Oswald died as a direct result of having been arrested for Kennedy's murder. Which means that a person who simply kept Oswald from being present on the parade route that day (by any means necessary, gory ones included--slit the guy's arm open with a knife, for example) would save both Kennedy's life and Oswald's. No murder necessary. King doesn't even give this idea lip service--killing is presented as the only possible plan in order to get the assassination stopped.

Back to our hero. After he changes history, (view spoiler). So you spend 800 pages wondering what King thinks this history would have looked like with more Kennedy in it, and...you don't get your answer.

King's writing itself is very workmanlike. He is rarely poetic or descriptive in ways that give any deeper meaning or even paint a vivid picture. This would be fine (or something on the yawn-inducing side of fine) if this were a fast, plot-driven book, but it's not. The engine of the book is the main character's time travel journey back from 2011 to 1958 and the years immediately following, but nothing that he ever says makes this feel like reality. The narrator is supposed to be 35 in 2011, which places him in my own age cohort--but I think even someone 10 or 20 years older than I am, given the time-travel option, would have a lot of strong visceral reactions to the way the world was back then. King has him comment on the fact that root beer tastes "fuller" from a 1958 soda fountain than it does in the present--but frankly, that doesn't give me much to go on, and he uses that same descriptor every time he references the root beer (an awful lot) without adding to the picture. And that's it: he does nothing else to show how the experience of drinking at a 1958 soda fountain would be different from the experience that someone born in the late 1970s would be used to at a diner in the 21st century. It's like this with so many things: either our hero doesn't seem to notice all the little differences in daily life, or he treats these with a nostalgia borrowed from the author.

The representation of his age is wrong on other levels, too--the guy says he had never used a rotary phone before traveling to 1958, even though many people from older generations (like my grandparents and anyone else who could remember the Depression) held on to their rotary phones until almost the 1990s; and yet this same guy has a thorough and in-depth understanding of how to mess with records and record players to slow down playback. His first time in 1958, our hero buys what is apparently a cool 1950s car and instantly falls in love with driving it, to the extent that he detests his Toyota Corolla with a passion when he gets back to 2011. The shift in his loyalties is instantaneous and unequivocal--no disorientation about the lack of seat belts or other now-familiar features in an older car, just a seamless love for all things vintage that feels too uncomplicated to be on-target. The cigarette smoke is another of this kind of example: our hero comments that smoke and smokers are everywhere, but then just seems able to ignore it. It rings false that a 2011 non-smoker who finds himself in a place where every restaurant and bank has people smoking in it, and where every hotel room, used car, and cab reeks of cigarettes, wouldn't have a lot more adjusting to do than just the casual shrug that the guy gives when he mentions it.

It may sound weird that, given a book that's far too long, I'd be complaining about a lack of words, but it's more that the things King chooses to say often don't contribute to the storytelling (or plotting or character development or setting) and instead are meaningless, repetitive, and make the lack of significant detail all the more conspicuous by its absence. While I was reading this book, my commuting audiobook was TC Boyle's Drop City, which is set in a hippie commune in 1970. The contrast between how Boyle gives a sense of 1970 and how King gives a sense of 1960 is vertiginous.

Now for the -isms. After about 250 pages of 1958, it struck me that King was painting an idealistic, whitewashed picture of what was a turbulent and violent time with regard to civil rights. And right then, our hero said exactly the same thing in the narrative: "in case this seems like an overly happy picture, let me tell you about this 'colored' restroom I saw outdoors in North Carolina." (I'm paraphrasing, but not by much.) He goes on to describe a rest stop in which the regular bathroom is labeled for use by whites only and the signs to the 'colored' restroom lead to something awful. Completely reasonable and valid point made right there...except that it's the only place where he describes that kind of treatment. Anytime else in the book when he wants to talk about Civil Rights or unequal treatment or any of that, he references the bathroom in North Carolina. It doesn't seem to matter that the character drives from Florida to Texas across all of the most virulently racist states in the South during a time when race-related violence was peaking, then lives in Texas for another few years. In all that time, he runs across a white man who says racist things and consequently decides he doesn't like the guy...and that's about it. This 2011 character is walking around in the South living in segregated neighborhoods, eating at segregated lunch counters (at which he always comments that the food is both good and cheap), drinking from segregated water fountains, riding buses where he gets to sit down when others have to stand in back because of their difference in skin color--and barely notices all of the casual racism entrenched in this world. I found it unreasonable that after a lifetime spent having at least some African-American friends/classmates/teachers/co-workers (yes, even in Maine), a lifetime that almost definitely included watching The Cosby Show and Men in Black and very definitely included years of having an African-American president in the White House, our hero would be able to ignore the treatment of others around him almost every moment of every day. The fact that not only doesn't he notice this around him, but also that he has to reach way back to that one restroom in North Carolina whenever he needs to talk about discrimination, comes across as casually racist.

Anti-Semitism: there are four characters in the book who are described explicitly as Jewish. One of them is Jack Ruby, a real person who apparently owned a strip club (King makes sure to point out) and who was the guy who shot Oswald in the real timeline after he was in custody. The other three are fictional, all bookies. They run pawn shops and have Mob ties and all make their money explicitly from the suffering of others. (I could mention the two female family members we are introduced to as well, but they aren't characters--the narrative states explicitly at one point that they are interchangeable. They also work in the family money businesses.) I'd like to thank Stephen King personally for perpetuating stereotypes that just need to freaking die already.

While we're at it, sexism: our hero is a guy who starts dating a woman in about 1961, and he also spends a number of years teaching high school (don't get me started on that--an English teacher from 2011 travels back 50 years and starts teaching adolescents seamlessly, without having any trouble adjusting to the loss of the most recent five decades of writing to teach from? The loss of recognized diversity in curricula? How limited a teacher is he?), and yet he never sees anything to complain about with regard to the way women are treated in that time. He comments that they're expected to wear girdles sometimes, but he compares that to guys having to wear condoms and says that guys have it worse. Otherwise, he conveys no sense in the least that girls or women might have an easier time of things in 2011 than they do in 1961.

I could say more about my dislike of this book. I could mention my frustration with the way that King writes as though he knows nothing about what the Butterfly Effect actually references for the first 800 pages--so that when he reveals that he mostly gets it, it's too little, too late. I could rant about many other aspects of the novel. Instead, I'll end by saying that there are books out there that accomplish what King is trying to do, using well-chosen words (and fewer of them), thoughtful plots, and skilled character development. For true alternate history, try Lion's Blood: A Novel of Slavery and Freedom in an Alternate America, by Steven Barnes. For a time-travel study in contrasts, try Kindred, by Octavia Butler. For an experience of recent history that feels immersive and real (1970, complete with sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll), try Drop City, by TC Boyle."