Book review: Stephen King travels back in time to Kennedy assassination

"How many books have been written about the chain of events leading up to that day in Dallas?" wonders Jake Epping, narrator of Stephen King's "11/22/63." ''A hundred? Three hundred? Probably closer to a thousand."

Undeterred, King has written a big, page-turning novel that explores the events culminating in President John F. Kennedy's assassination through the eyes of Jake, a 35-year-old high schoolteacher from 2011 Maine able to travel back through time — and potentially save Kennedy's life.

Jake's rabbit hole into the past originates in the pantry of a greasy-spoon diner owned by Jake's buddy, Al Templeton.

On the other side of the great divide?

The same Maine town that's been left behind, except now it's just before noon on Sept. 9, 1958.

A long-closed paper mill is humming with life. A large root beer from an old-fashioned soda fountain costs a dime. Five gallons of gasoline goes for less than a buck. Everybody smokes. Nobody uses computers.

Dying of cancer, Al wants Jake to go back and finish off what he himself is now too sick to do: Hang around the past long enough to murder Lee Harvey Oswald and stop Kennedy from being killed.

"Save Kennedy, save his brother," Al pleads. "Save Martin Luther King. Stop the race riots. Stop Vietnam, maybe. Get rid of one wretched waif," continues Al, referring to Oswald, "and you could save millions of lives."

Elected in 1960, Kennedy too takes us back to the seeming innocence of a time when anything seemed possible — before baby boomers like the 64-year-old King had grown up, leaving youth and its wide-open dreams behind.

Saving Kennedy's life dangles the promise of a second chance.

Recently divorced and drifting, Jake warms to the idea that he can irrevocably change history. Before long, he has been reborn as George Amberson, counting down from 1958 to his date with destiny.

In Dallas, Jake falls in love with a world that not only features rock-bottom prices, but also manners, World Series games played in the afternoon and people routinely watching out for and helping one another.

It doesn't take long before Jake also falls in love with someone from this world: Sadie Dunhill, school librarian in Jodie, the small Texas town where Jake teaches English in the early 1960s.

King doesn't rush, taking a long timeout from his overarching narrative conceit and the inexorable march of history to bring alive this vanished past and Jake's once-in-a-lifetime love story.

Jake reaches a point where he frankly admits caring more for the world he has entered than the one he left — and caring more about Sadie and his students than about Oswald and JFK.

So do we, which makes for some long stretches, as Jake pulls us away from Jodie so that he can resume his cloak-and-dagger efforts to determine whether Oswald acted alone.

As Kennedy's trip to Dallas grows closer, the pace of the novel quickens, culminating in a great set piece that it wouldn't be fair to disclose.