11-22-63 by Stephen King, is Kennnedy the true protential-man or am I to European to get this book?
So I finished 11/22/63 today. I went into it without really knowing anything except the general premise of the book. (Spoilers ahead.) Who doesn't like a plot about traveling back in time to change a major historical event? I also really like some of Stephen King's books, especially horror novels like Pet Sematary. I'd heard a lot of good things about 11/22/63, and people really praised it. So I went ahead, listened to it, and... I really don't get it.
Am I too European?
When the characters (oh, don't get me started on the MC—or, God forbid, the romance) first bring up stopping the assassination, they don't even discuss whether it's worth the effort. Immediately after it's brought up, the MC is completely on board with the idea and basically says, "Oh yeah, everybody would do that." It really took me out of the story that Kennedy is treated like this sacred figure who would have saved the world if he hadn't been assassinated.
This theme stretches through the whole book, even to the point that Oswald is portrayed as an absolutely evil and devilish personification of evil. I kept waiting for a twist or a closer examination of this deification of a politician, but it never happened. Don't get me wrong—his death was really tragic—but Kennedy really comes across as history's ultimate "potential man."
There was also this general romanticizing of the 1950s in America. Sure, the book is occasionally critical of segregation and pollution, but nothing really comes of it. Instead, there's just so much praise for that time period. Everybody is so nice and helpful (except in Dallas), everything tastes better, everything is better, and there are what feels like fifty descriptions of how cheap lunch is. I kept waiting for another twist, but again, nothing.
So I'm sitting here wondering: is there really this general hype and romanticization of the 1950s in America? Is there really this widespread feeling that everything went downhill after Kennedy's assassination? Am I just missing the cultural context?
I mean, in the end, the world becomes apocalyptic after the MC prevents the assassination. But I interpreted that as simply being how time travel works in the book, not as a statement about Kennedy himself. It doesn't matter what you change in the past or how much good you try to do—the act of tampering with time makes things worse. So the state of the alternate timeline isn't a failure of Kennedy; it's just how the book's time-travel system works.
I have really mixed feelings about this book. But if I read another book where the MC is just a flawless writer self-insert, I'm going to bite into my furniture.
English isn't my first language, so I used AI to help correct the spelling and grammar.