The last King-novel is based on a very interesting idea about time-traveling to the sixties and a chance changing the history with saving President Kennedy. But King brings the reader too close to the workdays of the past – so it outlined a long and boring travel to the history…
The basic idea is a well-known possibility to travel back to the past and to change everything. We did know well the idea from movies (example from the movie classic Back to the future), television series (like Life on Mars) and many more – it would have been exciting. But not in this book, because the time gate took the traveler too far in the past prior to the assassination of JFK, so he had to live many years in the sixties until the murder. And what could an English-teacher do in the past? Saving not just the president, but some common people – it’s OK. But teaching in a high-school? Meeting a girl? Writing a book? Is there any more boring idea to write a novel about? And Stephen King couldn’t drop out his well-known, detailed torture-story. Exactly the same way like in Christine, the main character has a hard task to stop the murderer with the wrong left knee…
There are many theories about JFK’s assassination and in the book the main character has a possibility to investigate the truth. It’s maybe an interesting topic to those readers who are interested in Lee Oswald’s life. We can observe him and his family very closely, because Jake turned out to be a very talented detective, even so he is an English teacher…
And after all, the ending of the book is simply bullshit, King was tired already. First of all, it’s at least fifty pages longer than it should be. In the second place, the human history may be changed by a time-traveler English teacher – but as far as it is known today, earthquakes are independent of human history… It wouldn’t be a problem if King brought a new interpretation to the time-travel topic, but this is not new, just wrong. So let’s consider it like a love story and a literary version of Lee Oswald biography, so we got an average, but too long book about the sixties of the USA.
Stephen King: 11/22/63
Scribner, 2011.
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