It took me some time to dig deeply into the new Stephen King novel.
Sometimes his novels are one-weekend affairs (whatever the size—I remember whisking through The Tommyknockers at spacecraft-speed so I could share it with the rest of the family one Christmas vacation). Other times (as with 2010’s Under the Dome) I can dawdle over them for months. Full Dark No Stars I started lugging around as a library book and ended up finishing via an audiobook download on my iPod (despite the grating recitation of Jessica Hecht).
I read 100 pages of 11/22/63 before setting it back down for over a month.
Glad I picked it up again a couple of weeks ago, because the remaining 749 pages have been a treat.
Not only does a key chapter occur on the actual day of my birth, 11/16/60, there’s a long tangent about the book’s time traveling hero, Jake Epping, directing a high school production of Of Mice and Men. It’s a lovely bit of sustained writing about how theater can change lives, wound in and out of Epping’s main preoccupation while stuck in the past: preventing the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Stephen King is not a stranger to live theater. His Richard Bachman novel Rage (a book that was pulled out of print when its depiction of a high school student on a murderous rampage in his school began to lose fictional identity) was adapted into a stage play in 1989 by Robert B. Parker, author of the Spencer mysteries. King is making his debut as a playwright this Spring at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta with The Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, a collaboration with songwriter John Mellencamp. Plus, of course, the Off Broadway revival of the much-lambasted 1988 Broadway musical based on King’s breakthrough horror novel Carrie is currently in previews and will open March 1.
In 11/22/63, King uses familiar elements of the high school theater experience without rendering them as High School Musical clichés. He explores the special circumstances of sports jocks becoming actors. He describes how a community relates to a play featuring townsfolk differently than it deals with a professional show from outside town. Epping’s (and King’s) understanding for layered stage drama extends to a disdain for superficial entertainments such as Arsenic and Old Lace—yet balances that with empathy for the well-timed and community-celebrating comedy revue. When illuminating the performances of the young actors, King presents their dialogue phonetically, giving you a glimpse of their speech patterns and put-on accents.
There are lines in the drama-club subplot which suggest that Stephen King missed his calling as a theater critic. Here, he describes opening night of Of Mice and Men, bringing in the personalities of the actors, the virtues of ensemble performances, and the magic of stage lighting:
The stage was a beachhead of light. Beyond it was a lake of darkness where the audience sat. George and Lennie stood on the bank of an imaginary river. The other men had been sent away, but they wouldn’t be gone long; if the big, vaguely smiling hulk of a man in the overalls were to die with any dignity, George would have to see to it himself.
“George? Where them guys goin?”
Mimi Corcoran was sitting on my right. At some point she had taken my hand and was gripping it. Hard, hard, hard. We were in the first row. Next to her on her other side, Deke Simmons was staring up at the stage with his mouth slightly hung open. It was the expression of a farmer who sees dinosaur cropping grass in his north forty.
“Huntin. They’re goin huntin. Siddown, Lennie.”
Vince Knowles was never going to be an actor—what he was going to be, most likely, was a salesman at Jodie Chrysler-Dodge, like his father—but a great performance can lift all the actors in a production, and that had happened tonight. Vince, who in rehearsals had only once or twice achieved even low levels of believability (mostly because his ratty, intelligent little face was Steinbeck’s George Milton) had caught something from Mike. All at once, about halfway through Act I, he finally seemed to realize what it meant to go rambling through life with a Lennie as your only friend, and he had fallen into the part. Now, watching him push an old felt hat from props back on his head, I thought that Vince looked like Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath.
There’s several straight pages of evocative scene-setting like that. The play and the actors in it also underscore 11/22/63’s central themes of community, commitment and sacrifice.
I have often lamented that Stephen King has made too many of the protagonists in his many novels be novelists themselves. (Epping poses as one in this book, plus the entire 11/22/63 is written in his first-person voice). But I have also been encouraged that King hasn’t ever gone the cheap, ill-informed route that so many horror and crime novelists have, basing murder plots around egotistical actors or jealous movie stars or imperious directors or godlike producers. When he writes of performers, he humanizes them. When his characters have to get up onstage, whether it’s Carrie at the prom or mystery novelist Tess addressing a book club in Full Dark No Stars’ story “Big Driver” or mayors and ballplayers dealing with the media in Under the Dome and Blockade Billy, King can convey both the exhilaration and trepidation of these situations.
Yes, Stephen King is a master of suspense. And he gets that getting up in public is suspenseful.
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