11/22/63: A Novel by Stephen King — novel #261

  

What is the most devastating watershed moment of your lifetime? Would you change it if you could? Can you be certain the world would be better today if you did?

 

Stephen King’s 11/22/63 grapples with these questions in a mesmerizing thriller.

 

• Author: Stephen King
• American Lit, Science Fiction, Historical Fiction, Suspense, Thriller, Fantasy
• Published: 2011
• My edition: Scribner (eBook)
• Setting: Maine, 2011 and Texas early 1960s
• Awards: 2012 International Thriller Writers Award for Best Novel
• Also by this author (that I’ve read): The Stand; Dark Tower Series

 

In 2011, Jake Epping, a divorced high school English teacher from Maine, discovers a time portal, that always takes him back to 1958. No matter how long he stays in the past, when he reverses his path through the portal, he returns two minutes later than the moment in 2011 when he left.

 

And Jake has the chance to re-write history. He just has to hang out in the past for five years or so, until the title date of November 22, 1963, the date of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Stopping that would be a good thing, right? He can’t go back far enough to stop Hitler. He probably wouldn’t live long enough in the past to stop 9/11, but getting Lee Harvey Oswald, that would be well within his sights (pardon the macabre pun).

 

No brainer, right? It’s almost his duty.

 

But Jake learns several nuances of time-travel. Some of these nuances even have real-world names, like the “butterfly effect”: (in chaos theory) whereby a minute localized change in a complex system can have large effects elsewhere.

 

If you mix the butterfly effect with time travel, well just buckle up. There is no possible way to predict the outcome. And under no circumstances fall in love whilst redirecting the course of human history.

 

Throughout the story, Jake observes that the past is obdurate. It is almost a consciousness that resists Jake. The bigger changes he attempts to make, the more the past resists. I believe this was King’s main point. The past is obdurate. Some people say everything happens for a reason. I don’t believe the past has a conscience, but I do believe it has a sentient director, and he doesn’t need our help.

 

That’s my point, not King’s, but I don’t think his was far off. He makes a strong case, that even if we have the capability, we shouldn’t go messing with the past.

 

My rating 4 ½ / 5 stars

 

 

 

You probably know that King’s novels are all interconnected; some very bluntly, others more subtle. There’s a fairly blunt allusion in this novel. Jake makes a stop in Derry, Maine, the setting for IT, for some lesser time altering, and he learns there was a string of murders, children mostly, some years back. One of the locals tells him…

 

Other folks say he [the murderer] was a local who dressed up like a clown to keep from being recognized.

I love it when I catch those allusions. I’m certain I miss many.

 

King often references other writers. When Jake was describing the town of Derry, and the despairing malaise he sensed, he compared it to Ray Bradbury’s fictional town of Greentown, from the Green Town Trilogy, which includes Something Wicked This Way Comes, Jake states…

 

But there had been hidden horrors in Bradbury’s Greentown too.

Love that. Jake, the fictional character, had read real life Bradbury’s fiction.

 

Elsewhere, Jake’s love interest in the past, Sadie Dunhill, mentions a short story by Bradbury, A Sound of Thunder, that is entirely about time-travel and the butterfly effect.

 

And in the course of the novel Jake reads Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy, and Oswald reads Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.

 

Finally two quotations:

 

Sadie reminiscing with Jake about their past…

 

How we danced!

And Jake sometime later to someone else…

 

Dancing is life.

This was an absolutely riveting read. I don’t think I’ve ever read an 800+ page novel so quickly. I’ve loved everything I’ve read by King. I’d welcome your views on Stephen King, and recommendations for what to read next by this prolific author.

 

. 

Recap of Novels 251 - 260

  

Average rating of novels 251 – 260:  3.7 stars (out of 5)

 

251.  ★★★★              The Magus

252.  ★★★½              A High Wind in Jamaica

253.  ★★★★              The Remains of the Day

254.  ★★★                 TheAscent of Rum Doodle

255   ★★★★              LordJim
256.  ★★★½              Things Fall Apart
257.  ★★★½              Scoop

258.  ★★★½              Kim

259.  ★★★★             The Power and the Glory

280.  ★★★★             The Code of the Woosters

 

 

Favorite: Lord Jim

 

Least Favorite: The Ascent of Rum Doodle

 

Best Hero: Jim, the title character from Lord Jim

 

Best Heroine: Emily Thornton from A High Wind in Jamaica

 

Best Villain: Maurice Conchis or the magus. Very creepy, and even at the end it isn’t perfectly clear that he is a villain. He is.

 

Most interesting/Complex character: Unnamed priest from The Power and the Glory

 

Best Quotation: You can’t be a successful Dictator and design women’s underclothing. One or the other, not both. ~ Bertie Wooster

 

. 

 

The Code of the Woosters (1938) by P. G. Wodehouse — novel #260

You can’t be a successful Dictator and design women’s underclothing. ~ a musing of Bertram Wooster; just a glimpse at the depths of his profundity
 

·      Author: P. G. Wodehouse (pronounced wood-house)

·      Comic novel, British lit

·      Published: 1938

·      My edition: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011 (eBook)

·      Setting: Totleigh Towers a fictional country estate in Gloucestershire, England, pre-WWII

 

Bertram Wilberforce Wooster, Bertie to friends and family, is twenty something, a bachelor, and idle rich, residing in London with his resourceful valet Jeeves. The Code of the Woosters is "Jeeves #7": stories that were serialized in The Saturday Evening Post and The Strand magazines. They can be read in any order. Wooster has a talent for getting in trouble; Jeeves has a talent for getting him out.

 

In this story, a desperate telegram from Bertie’s old chum Augustus “Gussie” Fink-Nottle pulls him into the fray. Gussie has fouled things with his fiancé, Madeline Bassett, and now the engagement is off, threatening Wooster’s happy bachelorhood, as Madeline was previously, rather irrepressibly inclined for Bertie, and is likely to re-engage, literally!

 

According to Wooster, she is a ghastly girl.

I call her a ghastly girl because she was a ghastly girl. The Woosters are chivalrous, but they can speak their minds.

 

He admits…

…Madeline Basset was undeniably of attractive exterior—slim, svelte, if that’s the word, and bountifully equipped with golden hair and all the fixings.

 

But…

She was definitely the sort of girl who puts her hands over a husband’s eyes, as he is crawling in to breakfast with a morning head, and says” ‘Guess who!’

 

Bertie is called to the scene, ostensibly to clear things up. The reader who is familiar with Bertie’s tact and delicacy cannot be hopeful, but for the knowledge that Jeeves will accompany. There are other complications, involving blackmail, theft, arrest, assault, and a second imperiled engagement of another Wooster chum.

 

It is all quite ridiculous, preposterous, and yet—in Bertie’s world—somehow perfectly plausible.

 

It is great fun, a great read, a laugh-out-loud read, with one minor detractor: I’ve seen it all portrayed flawlessly by Stephen Fry (Jeeves) and Hugh Laurie (Bertie) in the wonderful television adaptation Jeeves & Wooster. I wholeheartedly recommend both the written format and the TV series. If you read first, picture Fry and Laurie in their respective roles.

 

My rating 4/5 stars

 

This was title #29 of 50 for The Classics Club Challenge –Round IV

 

Much of the charm is Wooster’s first-person narrative. A female acquaintance compares Wooster to Sydney Carton, the self-sacrificing hero of A Tale of Two Cities. Wooster is unimpressed.

 

Stiffy Byng thought me like Sidney Carton. I had never met the chap, but I gather that he was somebody who had taken it on the chin to oblige a girl, and to my mind this was enough to stamp him as a priceless ass.

 

Or this bit of dialogue, when Bertie discusses a hostile brute he had to blackmail. This brute was the leader of an intimidating fascist group making noise in England. Bertie, through Jeeves, learned he was also secretly the prorietor of a women’s lingerie boutique. (Bertie speaking first, then Jeeves)

‘You can’t be a successful Dictator and design women’s underclothing.’

‘No, sir.’

‘One or the other. Not both.’

‘Precisely, sir.’

For the record, the “code” of the Woosters is…

"Never let a pal down"

 

Have you read The Code of the Woosters, or other stories in the series? What did you think? I bet you are not neutral.

. 

The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America by Thomas S. Kidd

Author: Thomas S. Kidd

Genre: History; Religion

Published: 2007

My edition: Yale University Press, paperback

 

I consider myself an evangelical, though I’d never considered, that at some point, it was a new term, and I’ve heard of The Great Awakening, and could even name two principals figures: George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards, but I couldn’t name the dozens more who were involved, nor pinpoint precisely when it occurred.

 

Thomas S. Kidd’s The Great Awakening sheds light on the two mysterious terms. Indeed the first question he addresses is whether there even was such a thing as The Great Awakening. He saves the conclusion till the end, but yes, there was such an event. It began in the 1730s with ebb and flow throughout most of the remaining 18th century. It was primarily an American-Colonial phenomenon, though it had traces to the old world. As I’ve mentioned, one of its most prominent figures was English itinerant preacher George Whitefield.

 

Kidd identifies three main camps that shaped the movement:

 

• Moderate revivalists—the mainstream evangelical core that emphasized order, but accepted some level of fervor or enthusiasm. Whitefield and Edwards were in this camp.
• Radical revivalists—whose meetings were often characterized by chaotic frenzy of the congregation who could simultaneously experience, terror, repentance, joy, evidenced by cries of despair, laughing, singing, fainting, praying, exhorting, and seeing visions.
• Anti-revivalists who staunchly opposed the movement, and its challenge to convention and authority.

 

Kidd portrays all in the historical context, without making heroes or villains.

 

The tenets of this new brand of Protestant Christianity—evangelicalism—include emphasis on personal conversion, or new birth, the irresistible work of the Holy Spirit in conversion, assurance of salvation, and a spiritual equality before God of converts, which in this American story included women, children, African-American slaves and free, and native-Americans.

 

Kidd concludes The Great Awakening was a real historical event. He also offers his own view, which I think may be the popular opinion, that this period, 1730s to 1780s or 90s, is the FIRST Great Awakening, but that there is only an ambiguous break between the First and Second Awakening—and probably continuing with the third as well.

 

Finally, Kidd addresses the Awakening’s relationship to the American Revolution. He sees real cultural and rhetorical connections—ideas of liberty, resistance to tyranny, and individual conscience—without asserting direct cause and effect. He cites numerous examples of moderates, radicals, and anti-revivalists in both the patriot and loyalist causes.

 

I felt the title and subtitle were reversed from the emphasis that I inferred. It seems more about the genesis of evangelicalism in America as it was shaped by the widespread, phenomenal spiritual experiences, known as The Great Awakening. Either way, it was not quite what I was expecting—a Christian perspective celebration. The book is much more historical and documentary. I thought it was very thorough and enlightening.

 

.