11/22/63, by Stephen King

Time for confessions. Waaaaay back in 1987 or 1988, I wasn’t reading very much, after years of reading Hardy Boys, Louis L’Amour, and way too many books about baseball. School and girls had taken over my life. (One of those girls is now my wife, though, so it wasn’t all bad.) Anyway, I was home alone one weekend, and I was actually… bored. I hopped in the car and drove to the mall, which was the only place to buy books back then, and I went looking for something to read. I walked out with Stephen King’s It. (I purchased it- I didn’t steal it, just so you know.)

I then proceeded to inhale the novel in about a week, and this set me off on reading again. I plowed through ‘Salem’s Lot, Carrie, Cujo… I probably read ten King books in a row. Since then, I haven’t had a “dead zone” (hah) in my reading. So in a way, I credit King for bringing me back into a love of fiction. (And to this day, The Stand is one of my favorite books.)

With all that said, I believe that we the readers enter into a contract of sorts with King when we begin one of his sweeping, epic-length novels. We’ll overlook the digressions, dead spots, and sometimes-heavy-description because King is going to take us somewhere new, exciting, and fascinating. A place we (I) would never have thought could have existed. That’s why I read Stephen King, and why I read 11/22/63.

11/22/63 tells the story of Jake Epping, a thirty-something English teacher, who walks through a “rabbit hole” and goes back in time to a particular day in 1958. He can, from there, decide to change history, although history works pretty hard to avoid being changed. When he goes back through the rabbit hole, he returns to 2011, only two minutes later than when he walked through the hole, even if he stayed in the 1950’s for years and years. If he goes back through to the past a second time, everything “resets,” so he can try multiple times if need be (although we find out later that it wasn’t as easy as Jake and his friend Al thought).

A short digression here: if you could go back in time, what would you want to do? What would be important to do? Try to stop Hitler before 1939? Stalin? Stop the Manhattan Project? I’ll admit that every once in a while, I look at my 9th graders and wish, just for a minute, that I could go back and have a re-do on my high school experience, as long as I could still have the maturity and knowledge I have now. (Thank goodness we can’t actually do such a thing.)

Jake (and Al) believes that saving JFK could have the biggest positive outcome. Think about it: maybe the Vietnam war wouldn’t have escalated like it did. Maybe the Civil Rights Movement would move ahead faster. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King might not have been assassinated. The Butterfly Effect might impact many millions of people in a positive way.

So King takes us back in time, when the United States was a more trusting, innocent place. We follow Jake as he stalks Lee Harvey Oswald, trying to determine if he acted alone or if there was a wide-ranging conspiracy. Jake met a woman, fell in love, taught English to 1950’s teenagers, went to the drive-in for movies, and immersed himself in the times.

November 22, 1963 finally arrived, and Jake changed history… but it didn’t have the outcome he was expecting.

It took almost 800 pages to get there, so the contract was in effect. King meanders, digresses, and describes until I was ready to scream, but he took me somewhere interesting- somewhere I would never have expected. I also loved how King subtly alludes to his own novels, like It, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, and Christine. This one had only a touch or two of the horror that King is obviously famous for, so this would be a good place to start for those who are looking for a place to begin reading King’s novels.

Stats

Published: 2011

Category: Fiction

Pages: 849

Rating on Goodreads: 4.23

Why I Read This Book: I sometimes enjoy large, sweeping novels!

How I rated this book: 3/5 stars

The Time in Between, by David Bergen

(Careful- spoilers shall be included)

This slim volume deals with the war experience, a searching that can consume a life, and the expatriate experience.

Part I opens with siblings, Ada and Jon Boatman, searching for their father, Charles, who has disappeared in Vietnam. Jon seems to embrace the differences, and disappears himself for long stretches. The reader is left with following Ada, who is struggling to find not only her father, but some sense of peace in her life. She speaks with restaurant owners, hotel managers, and random people on the street, all to no avail. She picks up a trail, but it is decidedly cool.

About halfway into part I, Bergen changes the perspective of the novel, and we begin tracing the very troubled life of Charles. He was a soldier during the Vietnam war, and he, like many participants in that “conflict,” has been struggling with a terrible act committed many years ago. Part I ends with Charles committing suicide with a cement block and a length of rope.

The rest of the novel is Ada drifting about Vietnam, in a “time in between,” trying to determine what is next in her life. Should she return to Canada, should she try to force her brother to return with her, and what should she do with her father’s ashes? The book ends with Ada searching for a boy who had been earlier been haunting her, to give him a bicycle. She couldn’t find him, either.

I enjoy reading about the Vietnam war. In particular, Tim O’Brien and Stewart O’Nan have written amazing fiction about the war experience. (O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is one of my top three books of all time.) Bergen tries to connect the war experience in a different way; he looks at the experience from both sides. We learn quite a bit about Charles’s experience, and how it ultimately led to his suicide. Bergen also introduces a novel written by a North Vietnamese participant, and includes almost ten pages of the novel- a book-within-a-book. (Interestingly, though- the Vietnamese book was written in the 3rd person.) This novel does not reach the level of O’Brien or O’Nan, as the second half drifts far too much.

However, I’ve lived in a culture that is not my own for almost eight years now, and I think Bergen hit a bulls-eye with Ada’s ex-pat experience. Many of his descriptions of Ada’s struggles with a new culture resonated with my own experiences in Kenya. For example, on page 51, Ada is frustrated with a Vietnamese policeman, Lieutenant Dat, who refuses all of her requests, and then when Ada finally complains, Dat says, “You are sometimes rude, Miss Ada. You think you are always right, or that I am perhaps stupid, or that I am a smaller person because I am not as rich as you.” I have been involved with conversations like this, and they are almost always hurtful. It is a clash of two people looking at the same situation with entirely different world views.

Later, on page 168, an American woman who is in Vietnam with her family, explodes with this: “I hate it here. We had this vision, or at least my inspired husband did, to start a church here… Everything is such a struggle. I’m terrible with the language, and I abhor the market and the people clutching and grabbing, and I miss my friends…Jane is suffocating. Sammy’s happy as a clam. He jabbers away in Vietnamese with Ai Ty, his nanny.” While I would never say that I hate it here in Kenya, there are pieces of the ex-pat experience that I abhor, too. (We had some shocking experiences while adopting here, for example.) Bergen lived in Vietnam for several years, and he certainly knows what he’s writing about.

Ultimately, the book is like its protagonist. Ada, a pretty woman, is searching, drifting, but is unsure about what she’s even looking for. This book’s prose is pretty, too, but the second half in particular drifts, searching for meaning.

Stats

Published: 2005

Category: Fiction

Pages: 237

Rating on Goodreads: 3.15

Awards: Giller Prize Winner in 2005

Why I Read This Book: Tournament of Books selection from 2006

How I rated this book: 3/5 stars

Beautiful Boy, by David Sheff

I must admit that, compared to some, I’ve lived a pretty boring life. No major health problems, no accidents, no deaths of close family members, and most of all, no addictions.

It’s that last one that I’m most thankful about now that I’ve read Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction (although I’m thankful for all, of course!).

Originally an article published in The New York Times Magazine, this book traces the harrowing, devastating effects of drug abuse- in particular, methamphetamine abuse.

It is also brutally honest. I imagine that most nonfiction authors would be tempted to make themselves look a little bit better in the end, but Sheff pulls no punches. The most telling passage is when Sheff describes smoking a joint with Nic, his adult son, and the overwhelming feeling of committing a huge mistake that came along with the action. But that’s one of the things that comes with drug abuse by a child- Sheff writes quite in depth about how he struggled with his own feelings of guilt as his son was making terrible choices.

Nic relapsed again and again and again. Each time was more difficult to read. In fact, I wished that the book was 100 pages shorter, just because I wanted the ordeal to be over. And therein is the key- for addicts, the ordeal is never, ever over.

(I remember reading, many years ago, an interview about Lonnie Smith, a 1980’s era baseball player who struggled with a cocaine addiction. Years later, after Smith had been clean for a long time, a reporter asked him how often he thinks about cocaine. Smith answered, while beginning to weep, “Every day.” At least that’s how I remember it.)

Sheff switches back and forth between his son’s story and information about addiction and rehab. He includes quite a bit about the brain, too- can the brain recover from drug abuse, or is there irreparable damage done? Is there an “addiction gene” that switches on when a substance is first used? How about rehab centers- how long should the program be? What about “tough love” centers? (Sheff describes one such place in which offenders are ordered to cut the grass…. with scissors.) Can you force someone into rehab and make it work? What percentage of people are ultimately sober after a certain length of time? Sheff does his best to answer these questions and many more.

This book, while difficult, is still quite readable. Sheff doesn’t overwhelm the reader with technical terms and statistics, and while it’s  brutal to read about a father changing the locks because his son has robbed him to buy more drugs, I also found myself rooting for this family.

Stats

Published: 2008

Category: Nonfiction

Pages: 326

Rating on Goodreads: 3.99

Awards: Entertainment Weekly’s best nonfiction book of the year; an Amazon best book of the year; “Discover Great New Writers Award” by Barnes & Noble.

Why I Read This Book: Recommended by Jason G

How I rated this book: 4/5 stars