“They will tell her they found no heartbeat, no breathing, no pulse … Three and a half seconds — that’s all it was — a slivered instant between the first shot, which missed the car, and the second, which did not.”
So starts the gripping opening scene in Dawn Tripp’s new book, “Jackie: A Novel,” plunging us into Jacqueline Kennedy’s experience that fateful day in Dallas, Nov. 22, 1963.
Beautifully written with sensitive insight, Tripp draws back the curtain on everything we think we know about Jackie. She gifts us with an intensely intimate portrait, which, because it is written in the first person, infuses Jackie’s inner thoughts with as much immediacy as the dialogue.
The book covers Jackie’s adult life, starting with her meeting “Jack” and alerting us to what would become a complex relationship.
“That night, there was something in you that I recognized — something hurtling, disparate — the ranging curiosity, incisive intellect. You were good-looking, of course. Your golden swagger could bend a room. I eschewed that. It smacked of arrogance. That night, though, there was something else in you I saw: something deeper, more fugitive and fragile, a kind of curious hunger to break on the world like a star.
You were not my kind of adventure. Too American. Too good-looking. Too boy. Too much about politics and new money. Your life, I told myself, was not the life I was looking for.”
Yet, we see how the two are inextricably drawn to one another physically, as well as for each of their “incisive intellect” and breadth of knowledge. Jackie reflects, “He’s brilliant. A maverick thinker, and when I am with him, I can feel my edges burn.” In one of the intermittent chapters written from Jack’s point of view, he says of her, “She’s not like other women. She’s read just about everything, and remarked once like she was commenting on the weather, how a story told the right way could blow time apart.”
We follow Jackie through their often challenging marriage, with all its intensity — the constant pressure of being in the public eye, the political storms around them, the expectations of being part of the Kennedy dynasty, difficult health issues, and, of course, Jack’s infidelities. Along their journey, at one point, Jackie narrates, “He loved me. I knew that. I also knew — even then — he needed not to love me, or anyone, too much. We were creatures of distance, Jack and I. He needed his freedom. I needed my solitude … I couldn’t resist feeling that if I could just be more independent, more useful, less spiky, he would love me more. Such an easy net to get tangled in, isn’t it? That belief a woman sometimes has that she can change herself to change a man.”
Motherhood is also core to Jackie. Amid all that occurs in her marriage and on the world stage, her devotion to Caroline and John shines through. So, too, does her complex relationship with the press, from the moment she became involved with Jack, through their reign and following his assassination. But it continued with vitriol around her relationship with Aristotle Onassis, and after as she forged a life as a career woman in publishing.
Tripp, a regular visitor to the Vineyard, includes Jackie’s deep connection to the Island she so dearly loved. Tripp writes in an email, “[Jackie] often reflected on how she wanted to create a house that her children would want to come home to … The Island felt intrinsically linked to the integrity of how she chose to shape the last few decades of her life.”
Tripp’s novel contains a bounty of fascinating details stemming from her immense research. But ultimately, it is Tripp’s richly nuanced interior portrayal that makes this legend, who was so many different things to so many people, come to life — to pulse with humanity.
Tripp says in the author’s note, “Throughout this novel, I wanted her to strike against that boundary between self-as-subject, as a perceiving, sentient being, and self-as-object, constantly being watched, deconstructed. I wanted to render the consequent sense of disconnect that can come with that split, and how a woman might have worked to reconcile various dimensions of who she was and what she wanted with how the world saw her.”
Ultimately, “Jackie” is a glorious love letter to a remarkable woman, and after reading the last page, we know why it was written.
“Jackie: A Novel” by Dawn Tripp; $30. Available at Edgartown Bookstore and Bunch of Grapes.