11/22/63
by Stephen King
USA: Gallery Books, 2012
880 pp., $40
11/22/63 asks, what if John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th President of the United States of America, hadn’t died in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963? In bestselling horror-novelist Stephen King’s account of events, the assassination is thwarted, at the last possible instant, by a time-travelling, English teacher, Jacob Epping, but not without incidents, coincidences, and consequences.
The most interesting aspect of this 850-page book is not the subject, which has been treated in works as varied as Don DeLillo’s novel, Libra (1988), Norman Mailer’s true-crime meditation, Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery (1995), and William Manchester’s authoritative chronicle, The Death of a President (1967). Rather, it’s that King has turned his talent and boundless resource of fame (a kind of currency) to a story that is meant to tax his knowledge of literature, his storytelling technique, and his own socio-political sensibility to produce a commentary on time, fate, love, and death.
These are big themes that demand epic treatment—and a novel as big as Mailer’s tome and as sweeping and as engaging as Manchester’s.
Jacob Epping’s surname carries echoes of “epic” and his entrée to time-travel—a portal between September 9, 1958, and 2011—is a kind of invisible Jacob’s Ladder (or staircase) that allows him to go back to the past to try to set things right (namely, to thwart Kennedy’s assassination). King’s hero is an Odysseus of time-travel, who must live five years in the past (1958-63) before he can return to the present, and whose “Penelope”—so to speak—is Sadie Dunhill, a teacher who Epping loves and loses (in 1963), but rediscovers in 2011, when she is in her 80s.
Given its epic scope, 11/22/63 cannot be dismissed as just another page-turner. It is ambitious: it is also a historical novel written as speculative fiction (a very neat trick), plus it comments on the value of “serious” literature (William Shakespeare, John Steinbeck) versus the mass bestseller (Shirley Jackson, Ian Fleming). King is anxious to demonstrate that there needn’t be a division. A careful reader will find echoes of “serious” literature—from Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) to John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969)—which also emphasizes the different endings possible (plausible) in a story, and from Joyce Carol Oates ‘s Blonde (2000) to Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962). Tellingly, these works, all canonical, are also “popular.” In addition, King refers to Ayn Rand, H.H. Munro (“Saki”), Zane Grey, Jonathan Franzen, Leo Tolstoy, and Karl Marx, (there may also be a nod to Marguerite Duras’s Hiroshima, Mon Amour [1959]), all writers who, again, depending on one’s likes, can be seen as “popular” and/or “canonical.”
Arguably, the subtle concern of 11/22/63 is not Kennedy’s assassination (or Lee Harvey Oswald’s “attempt”), but rather the questions of literary value—what makes an author or a text important (including “bestselling”)—and what makes a story a cultural force—as a text to be studied and/or celebrated. While it is fascinating to see King take up these scholarly issues, in essence to prove that one can be a great writer and be “popular” (although Epping is rightly reluctant to mention Franzen and Tolstoy in the same breath), 11/22/63 must still succeed as a story, and it does. Indeed, the moral of King’s yarn seems to be that, though it is human to wish to change it, “the past is obdurate,” and that efforts to improve upon it can actually make things worse—or, if one prefers, simply, differently unpleasant. For one thing, as a result of Epping’s interference with JFK’s fate, Maine ends up joining Canada, which King considers bad news. (New Brunswickers would likely agree.)
As it turns out, as rotten as the present may seem, it is likely the best of the alternatives available. To put this point another way, bold souls make history—but devils change it. In 22/11/63, King offers an excellent portrait of JFK’s America, but also, a Gone-With-The-Wind-size love-story, and an affectionate (and semi-glamourized) portrait of alleged assassin Oswald’s real-life wife, Marina Prusakova. Not bad. Shakespeare would approve.
The One: The Life and Music of James Brown
by R.J Smith
Gotham Books, 2012
464 pp., $19
R.J. Smith’s The One: The Life and Music of James Brown is a rare excellence: Smith translates into print the intangible genius and legendary charisma of “Soul Brother Number One,” the one and only Brown (1933-2006). Music, dance, rhythm, and speech tend to oppose the relative frigidity and rigidity of print. As screaming, moaning singer, as shimmying and thigh-splitting dancer, as shaper of rhythm & blues into funk, and as a scatting, freewheeling lyricist, Brown escapes the confines of prose.
But Smith finds a way to comprehend the entertainer, icon, and trendsetter. He does so by fusing the scholar’s fidelity to fact and the audience’s attention to sound. Smith delves deep into African-American and pop music history; his writing utilizes the cadences and earthy metaphors of Brown, his friends, family, and foes; and Smith gets us close to “The One,” both Brown and his philosophy of the (black) beat, of African-originated percussion. Along the way, Smith “crawled around a South Carolina cemetery as it sank into the swamps, “ got “run off the road by an 18-wheeler,” “caught pneumonia twice, and lost my job,” and even “received a faith healing in the parking lot of an Outback Steakhouse.”
Smith’s research adventures mirror the religious-revival, backwoods, moonshine-spiked vaudeville act and Africanized American urban performance rituals that composed “The James Brown Show” and made their way onto records, and across concert stages.
Smith begins Brown’s life story by focussing on the “The One,” an African concept of rhythm—including “patting, tapping, dancing”—that views it as flowing “into the body as surely as it (flows) from it….” For Brown, “The One was a way to find yourself in the music,” and it was “an anchor, an upbeat that put him in touch with his past and who he had become.” Brown explained, “The ‘One” is derived from the Earth itself, the soil…. The upbeat is rich; the downbeat is poor. Stepping up proud only happens on the aggressive ‘One,’ not the passive Two, and never on lowdownbeat.”
If there’s mysticism in Brown’s sense of “The One,” he came by it honestly, for, at birth, he seemed stillborn, and it was only after “infinite minutes” that “he came to life.” Brown’s early struggles were compounded by his mother’s desertion, his “medieval poverty” in the segregated South, his juvenile thievery and incarceration. He needed redemption; he found it in gospel songs. “As he performed, he noticed that those around him were moved, crying, and then he surprised himself by breaking into tears, too. You beat an opponent in the ring and people cheered, but this was a greater power.” When he first heard a broadcast of his “Please, Please, Please” (1955), it “animated him like nothing else in life…. It made him feel special, different, and hungry for more.” Because audience adulation meant cash, fame, and (temporary) salvation, Brown became “The Hardest Working Man in Show Business,” recording a train of hits that define the rhythm & blues side of “integrated” rock & roll: “I Feel Good,” “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” “Cold Sweat,” “Prisoner of Love,” etc.
But what distinguished Brown from other singles artists was his realization that the “Show”—his band, singers, and dancers—required the expansive format of the album. Thus was born Brown’s first great masterpiece, Live at the Apollo, recorded in October 1962 and released in May 1963. Here he uses his “show” just as jazz maestros Duke Ellington and Miles Davis used their bands: as inspiration for spontaneous improvisation. In the late 1960s, Brown, Davis, and Jimi Hendrix thought of collaboration. Davis did borrow Brown’s drummer to produce his jazz-fusion marvel, On the Corner (1972). All three transformed music, but it is a still pity that this trio never played together. Upon his death on Xmas Day, 2006, one of the books found in Brown’s house was The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965). It makes sense: Malcolm X had also been a boxer and a convict, but had found mass influence as an orator, becoming the voice of “Black Consciousness.” Brown earned similar prominence as the voice of “Soul” and “Funk,” the pop grooves that flesh out “Black Consciousness.”
