11/22/63 by Stephen King

Some events are so important that we never forget where we were when we learned about them. The night Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency, I was working alone at the Little Rock AP and proceeded to get reaction for the national desk. When my Nana died, I had just arrived at Sunday evening church services. When John Kennedy was assassinated, I was sitting in Mr. Fawcett's math class. Our superintendent announced that the president had been shot. We said a silent prayer, and moments later Mr. Key told us the president had died.

So, when I read Stephen King's 11/22/63, a novel in which a time traveler sets out to prevent the Kennedy assassination outside the Texas Book Depository in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, I also did a bit of time traveling. As King mentioned things only a time traveler would notice -- no cell phones in 1963, for instance -- I, too, was transported back to that Cold War era and to my own memories of the assassination and my life then.

The book is long (849 pages), but it is an easy if at times frustrating read. King repeats sentences and even offers occasional plot summaries so to speak. "The past is obdurate," he wrote how many times? I lost count. I'm sure he did that intentionally, for effect. But the only effect it had on me was irritation.

Still, I enjoyed the book, especially fter a few hundred pages into it when King finally deals with the main plot -- you know, the part about how Lee Harvey Oswald, a Marxist and proud of it, came back to the United States after defecting to Russia. Along with Oswald, came his Russian wife Marina, their baby daughter and a death wish for Kennedy and the president's anti-Castro ways.

While the book is a novel with fantasy and fiction, King included much historical fact along the way -- so much that I found myself days later in my garage looking for the canvas-blue, three-ring notebook in which, as a child, I had cut and stored newspaper clippings from the now-defunct Memphis Press-Scimitar about the assassination. (I think such notebooks also have become part of the "obdurate" past.)

After reading the book and looking through the now-fragile clippings, I began noticing names and facts that as a 13-year-old girl I had not noticed. There was Ruth Paine, who in the book and in life had allowed allowed Marina to live with her during Marina's separation from Lee. There was Maj. Gen. Edwin Walker, who had barely missed a rifle bullet in April 1963 -- an assassination attempt Oswald reportedly boasted about to Marina that night. And I had forgotten the point to which King repeatedly alludes -- how Kennedy had begun a withdrawal from Vietnam. Of course, that all changed after his death, and Vietnam became its own nightmare in U.S. history.

But the part of the book I was most curious about was not so much a question of fact as one of portrayal. Had King accurately depicted the 24-year-old Oswald's widowed mother, Marguerite Oswald, as a self-absorbed, controlling woman who most anybody would have been better off not to have had as a parent, especially Lee -- whose first name, by the way, was given to him in honor of Robert E. Lee?

It appears King was on target. According to an old Associated Press article I found, Oswald had been diagnosed at age 13 as having schizophrenic tendencies and being potentially dangerous. Yet his mother, who had little money, had "balked at aid from welfare agencies, ignored a court order that Lee receive psychiatric treatment" and refused to consider him "anything more than a truant," the AP reported, attributing the information to Lee's probation officer in the early 1950s.

The article also related how, in the days after the assassination, reporters and three Secret Service agents were at Marguerite Oswald's home when she called to the agents and said, "You all want to see me on television? ... I'm just exhausted. I haven't even had time to read the papers."

This book was the first I have ever read by King. I'm glad I read it despite a couple problems I had with plot inconsistencies. King seemed, for example, to change the rules on traveling back and forth in time near the novel's end for convenience sake. But when an author manages to hold my interest for more than 800 pages, prompts me to rummage through my cluttered garage for an old notebook and then causes me to reread almost 50-year-old newspaper articles, he must have done something right.