Books I Didn't Finish: 11/22/63

That’s right, it’s time once again to revisit the Fountain Of Easy Blog Content, AKA the bibliography of America’s spookiest grandpa.

11/22/63 is apparently a polarizing novel, with some calling it King’s best modern work and others despising it. Based on the title of this post, you can probably guess how I reacted to it. King is usually very readable even at his worst, so why did I give up on 11/22/63 so quickly when I tried to read it last year?

Mainly because it’s boring as shit, but read on for the specifics.

The book is about Jake Epping, a supposedly thirty five year old teacher who inexplicably comes across as a much older man (almost like he was written by an author in his 60s). Jake’s life takes an unexpected turn when his friend Al, proprietor of a local diner, invites him over to reveal two bombshell pieces of information: firstly that he’s dying of cancer, and secondly that his storeroom contains a staircase that leads to the same location in the year 1958.

The portal has a few odd properties, in addition to the whole time travel thing. Only minutes pass in the present no matter how long one spends in the past, and the experience “resets” with every trip--the staircase always leads to 1958. Al had been spending years at a time in the past, but his cancer and his artificially advanced age are now preventing him from completing one final wish: making it to 1963 in order to prevent the assassination of JFK. When Al asks Jake to take up the cause, Jake eventually agrees, both because he has his own reason for wanting to time travel and because his life in the present is incredibly uninteresting.

It’s certainly a neat premise. Stephen King grew up in the 50s and so has first-hand recollection of the time period in question, and setting a story back then means that the quaint New England dialect that he likes so much is more prevalent than in the present. The folksy old geezer quotient is going to be off the charts!

But even the most interesting premise can’t survive a poor execution. 11/22/63 started testing my patience very early on, when Al gives Jake an introduction to the mechanics of the time portal that feels like it goes on for about a decade of in-universe time. Every single wrinkle and rule of how the system works gets repeated over and over again just to make sure the reader understands, even though it’s really not that complicated (I explained most of it in a single sentence above). 

And Jake comes across like a bit of a doofus for how long it takes him to understand parts of it; in particular, he needs to have the “you always go back to the same date” bit explained to him about seven times, which made me want to reach into my Kindle and slap him.

Even putting this aside, I don’t think the story does a good job of giving Jake a believable motivation for going along with Al’s plan. This is a mission that will take up at least five years of his life, and which brings with it all sorts of potential jeopardy (Al is eventually forced to return to the present because of an illness that 1960s healthcare can’t treat, to give just one example), and I just didn’t buy that Jake would agree to it as easily as he does.

The book takes a three-pronged approach to tackling this issue. Firstly, as mentioned, Jake just doesn’t really have any particular attachments or anything keeping him in the present, which makes it seem like he eventually agrees to the proposal mostly because he doesn’t have anything more interesting to do. I mean, I can relate, but give me a little more to work with here.

Secondly, there’s the “deep” friendship between Jake and Al. I put deep in scare quotes because the book completely fails to sell this aspect of the story. Al and Jake meet each other briefly the day before Al summons Jake to tell him about the time portal, and they come across as casual acquaintances, which makes it a little confusing when a chapter later Jake is talking about how long they’ve known each other and how they’re such good friends.

And thirdly, there’s Jake’s personal reason for wanting to time travel: he tutored an elderly man through his GED exams, and during the course of this learned about the old man’s horrible childhood trauma, which he wants to go back and stop it from happening. The scene where Jake encounters this information is right at the start of the book, and it’s one of the most eye-rolling things Stephen King has ever written. I’ve talked several times about how King doesn’t get criticised often enough for putting treacly melodrama in his books; this is maybe the worst example I’ve yet seen. The image of Jake weeping as he reads a semi-literate essay that sounds like JK Rowling trying to write a working-class person is very hard to take seriously, and nearly prevented me from making it past the first chapter.

So the story is on shaky ground to begin with. It does pick up briefly when Jake sets off on the JFK mission; him thinking through the practical considerations of the plan and all the precautions he’s going to have to take is fun, and I was ready to go along for the ride. 

But it turns out that 1958 is kind of boring. I mean, maybe time travelling there in real life would be more interesting, but in this book it’s insomnia-curingly uninteresting. Once Jake gets over the initial novelty of being in the past, he just wanders around having (extremely long, dull) conversations with people and driving from place to place. 

Then the story takes a wildly self-indulgent detour to Derry, the setting of IT, so that King can engage in some self-fanfiction. Jake pootles around Derry for ages talking to random people, and he feels an inexplicable malevolence due to Pennywise’s influence, sees random vaguely creepy bullshit and notices that the people are all hostile and unfriendly, and then he has more extremely long conversations where the events of the childhood sections of IT are extensively referenced for absolutely no reason.

Not only does this diversion to Derry feel completely pointless, it actively makes IT seem worse in hindsight, as the aura of evil surrounding Derry and the hostility of the locals are both ramped up to cartoonish extremes. The town no longer feels like a real, or even plausible, location.

And this is where I gave up, just as a romance element was starting to drift into view. If there’s one thing I can’t forgive an author for, it’s wasting my time.