THE BOOK OF READING

In this cerebral SF novel, Larsen presents a time-travel love story and a mission to save JFK.

Malcolm Reiner is a graduate student at the University of Iowa in 1963. Throughout the fall semester, Malcolm feels, at various moments, that he’s able to glimpse holes in the normal passage of time—moments when, for example, a rotary phone suddenly becomes an old-fashioned candlestick model. Following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November, Malcolm begins traveling through these holes 30 years back in time to 1933, where he meets Eveline Stahl, then a student at the university. The two slowly build up a romance seated next to each other in Old English class. Though Malcolm is in love with Eveline, he feels a strong obligation to try to prevent the assassination of Kennedy in his own time. “Eveline and I were being given the opportunity to undo an immense wrong,” he writes. “If we could succeed, then other and subsequent wrongs, even greater ones, could in turn be avoided.” The political is inevitably personal—preventing Kennedy’s death will require Malcolm to confront his animosity toward his abusive father. Together, he and Eveline resolve to travel to Malcolm’s future hometown of West Tree, Minnesota, in the hopes of stopping the formation of the CIA, the Cold War, and one of the most impactful political assassinations in modern history. Larsen is a writer of recursive, polemical sentences: “That is to say, America chose the river of blood,” reads one passage. “After 1947, the nation began a moral, intellectual, and spiritual emptying out of its being, doing this with increasing rapidity as the process went on. And into the resultant and ever-enlarging hollowness of the nation, evil poured.” At the end of one chapter, the text includes, without warning, several highly gruesome photos from JFK’s autopsy—a choice that exemplifies the book’s cranky, confrontational tone. Despite the novel’s many inventive flourishes, the reader never cares enough about the characters to justify wading through the convoluted and ultimately self-indulgent plot.

A somewhat turgid postmodern time-travel novel about America’s favorite conspiracy theory.