This week another long book with a page count coming in at 843 pages. It is a book by one of America's favorite authors, an author I hadn't read yet. So, without further ado, let's open up this can of worms.
My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.
Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.
11/22/63 by Stephen King DNF (pg 131)
The eagle eyed reader will already discovered that Stephen King and his time travel story about an effort to prevent President Kennedy from being killed in Dallas on 11 Nov 1963 did not prove to be my cup of tea. King is one of the most popular authors still writing today, and he seems to be a favorite author of several of the booktubers that I look in on. I'm not a horror fan, so he never was going to be one of mine, but I thought that this might be the book to sample his work without delving into the horror genre. And well, my wife liked it, so I thought, why not give it a try? I did, and now I'm here to talk about why it wasn't for me, since I'm certain you're curious to know why. Spoilers for the first 131 pages and the premise below.
Let's start with King's writing style. This is a first person narrative, which is my favorite story style. However, right from the beginning King's style just didn't sit well with me. While I have nothing against slow starts, I use them myself, I thought the start of this book was, if not too slow, too scattered; too many things tossed about rather haphazardly in order to set the scene and character. And perhaps more importantly, he has the reader more in the head of the narrator than I like. In short, I found the narration to be too granule, with too many thoughts on too many inconsequential matter, all of which prevented me from connecting with the narrator and the story.
And then we have the pet peeve of mine. I want the author to stay hidden behind the characters of the story. One thing that, for me, brings the author out from behind the characters is when he starts sprinkling the story with all sorts of trivia, and then explains it for our education. To me this smacks of an author showing off how much research he's done, how adept he is at using Wikipedia. I'm sure this is justified in the author's mind as "world building, scene setting." but too much of it just becomes trivia. As I said last week I like learning history within well researched historical fiction, but there is a difference between setting a story within a historical context, and just sprinkling it with all sorts of trivial, which I think is what King did here. Do we need to know who's on a pre-1958 $20 bill? Or that a motel was called a motor court, or a V8 was a Y-block, or modern dimes would not work in a pay phone, or how everyone smoked and the brands they smoked, the obsolete soft drinks, the songs on the 1958 radio, the lack of air conditioning and three channels on a b&w TV? It struck me as King went out of his way to highlight all the differences between 2010 and 1958 by having the narrator notice and comment on all these trivial things, as if he had been actually hatched in 2010 and all this past was brand new to him, even though the narrator was 40 years old, so that some of these things would've been hardly new to him at all. I've complained about this before, but boy, did it bug me here, as it seemed to be a major focus of the story up to the time I gave up on it.
Next, let's talk about the story. A time travel story is always going to be a hard sell for me. They never make sense, no matter how much handwaving is employed to make it seem like it does. I was, however, willing to suspend my disbelief for this story, and since my wife liked it, I thought I'd give it a try. I had, however the idea that it would involve some sort of organization sending someone back in time to stop Oswald. This proved not to be the case. It's just a fellow who has a fissure in time, with steps, in the pantry of this silver trailer hamburger joint and who thinks the country would be in a better place if Kennedy wasn't killed. However, he as a problem; he's dying of cancer and can't stop Oswald himself, so he talks the narrator into doing it instead. I found the baseline premise rather lame with lots of little problems overlooked.
The way the time travel works in this book is that the restaurant owner has discovered an invisible fissure in time, with invisible steps in his pantry, which takes a person to one, and only one day in the past; Tuesday September 9th 1958. After arriving in the past you can stay there as long you want, and when you find the fissure and climb back up the steps to the pantry, you will have been gone exactly two minutes in 2010. The hamburger joint is (in)famous for the cheapness of its hamburgers, made possible by the fact that the owner simply goes back to 1958 to buy his hamburger meat at $.50 a pound.
(An example of the types of problems I had with this story: The restaurant owner needs to pay for the hamburger meat with pre-1958 currency. How hard and expensive would it be to acquire that currency in 2010 in the volume needed? So how would it pay to do so?)
The restaurant owner discovered that he could change the future while in the past, but as soon as he went back again, the future was reset to what it had been when the last time he visited. Every time he goes back, everything is almost the same as it was the first time he visited the past. I can hear you thinking; Groundhog Day. And you'd think King with his emphasis on trivia, or one of the characters in the story, would be thinking that too, but there's never a mention of the movie in the story, at least in the part that I read, even though the concept is an extension of Groundhog Day's basic premise, with the major difference being the day is not repeated like it is in the movie, time just keeps going on just as long as you stay in the past.
In any event, if one is going to prevent Kennedy from being killed, a person would have to spend over 5 years in the past, and if he returns to 2010, he can never go back again, for that would reset the future and erase what he did. In this story, time travel is really just magic, with steps. As you can tell, those steps really bugged me. Why would any sort of fissure in time have steps? Not to mention why are they there? And is this fissure attached to the trailer, or the place it's parked, and why has no one in the past tripped over the invisible steps and found themselves in the pantry of a hamburger joint in 2010? Who knows? My wife couldn't help me, she forgets details like that. I didn't care enough to find out.
At the point where I bailed on the story, our narrator has gone back to the past in order to prevent the gruesome murder of a mother and three children, in which one of his GED students survived, just to test if you can really change time and change it back again. To do so, he has to spend several months in the past to get to the date in 1958 when the murder happened, as well as to the city in which it happened. The story, set in Maine, which I gather is usual for King, and the city, Derry, is a dirty, gloomy, city with a Lovecraftian air about it. We learn that there has been a serial killer of children loose, and something about the sewers - so many of them, built in the depression... and then a light went on in my head. What King horror story was this describing? I think it is It. Having watched these booktube videos that mention King, I gathered that he likes to link all his stories together with references to his other stories, all of which take place in a multiverse known as the Macroverse, and this is an example of it. At this point, I was out.
As I said at the beginning, I'm not a fan of horror so this would likely be the only book I would've read of his. However for all the reasons I've talked about above, and because this story is at least tinged with horror, this story simply wasn't for me.
I read this book, years ago. There were one or two good bits I still remember, but mostly, it was just a slog. And indeed, my feeling is I actually like it less and less the more time goes by. The more indie books I read, the less impressed I am with famous authors like King.
ReplyDeleteHi Berthold, I came to this book expecting a different type of story, which was my first disappointment. But there was something about King's writing, as I tired to put my finger on in the review, that just did not sit well with me right from the get-go. At least I know I'm not missing anything.
DeleteMark Paxson here. I was once a huge King fan. But over the last 20 years I have turned very anti-King. He has been writing the same basic story over and over. Every time a new book comes out, people say “this is King like you’ve never seen him,” or some such nonsense. A friend said that about this book. So I bought it and read it. And while it was a bit different … when he went to Derry, it was too convenient, too cute, too lazy. I finished the book, but that was the last time I ever believed the “this is King like you’ve never seen him” line.
ReplyDeleteHi Mark, I was never going to be a big King fan, but, as I mentioned my wife liked the book, so I thought this book would be the safest (i.e. non-horror) and best book to at least sample what King was all about. Hell, I must admit that I'm old enough to remember those events of 1963, so there's that.
DeleteKing writes with great confidence, maybe, as you suggest, because he's done it 50 times before, but how many times do you have to pause the narration to tell that the restaurant owner has to stop for a coughing fit for the reader to get the idea. I'd say way fewer than King seems to think he needs to. Little things like that bugged me. And, as I said, I'm not into horror, and I really didn't care to read about the murder... I'm a fragile flower... Thanks for your comment, Mark.