At which point he has four years of waiting around to do.
King has some plausible enough logic to throw at us regarding Jake's decision not to simply track down Lee Harvey Oswald and do away with him in 1959, partly to do with the moral and practical complexities buried in the phrase "do away with", and partly to do with the celebrated possibility that Oswald was not acting alone. But his main reason for wanting Jake to live four years in the past is that a time travel story offers enormous wish fulfilment mileage. Jake, an ordinary, somewhat lonely middle-aged guy, is suddenly The Man Who Knows The Future.
He can dish out the best advice anyone he meets will ever hear. He can change lives. He does. He also falls in love.
The remarkable thing about this book, which consists for much of its length simply of Jake living day-to-day in a different decade, is how pleasant King manages to make the process of turning the pages.
It reminds me of mid-period Robert Heinlein, who also went in for male first-person narrators much given to unconvincing self-deprecation and who was also somewhat inclined to lecture you on the nature of society, morality, and other abstract nouns. He also had, these qualities notwithstanding, the gift of irresistible narrative gravity.
This is a nostalgia trip with way too much of the sentimental and not nearly enough suspense, and if you think too hard about the time travel logic it rests on - which I can never help doing - it doesn't make a great deal of sense. But let's not pretend I didn't enjoy it. King is, as Jake might put it, readable as hell.
David Larsen is an Auckland reviewer.
