Book Review: Jackie & Me
Jackie & Me by Louis Bayard (Algonquin Books, 2022).
Audiobook read by Sean Rohani.
I had every intention of reviewing Ian McEwan’s new novel, Lessons, this week. McEwan has consistently done excellent work, as evidenced by his many awards, honors, and appearances on the bestseller lists, and I’ve long enjoyed his writing. So I couldn’t wait to get hold of Lessons. Unfortunately, when I did, I soon began to feel as if I’d gotten hold of an avalanche. McEwan tries to cover so much in this novel—war, sexual abuse, Chernobyl, feminism, climate change, communism, divorce, good and bad parenting, the conflict between art and family obligation, and much more—that the result is more a wild disorganized jumble than a novel. At the end, I was left without much to say except “Whoa.”
On the other hand, I originally considered the audiobook of Louis Bayard’s Jackie & Me a guilty pleasure. I dearly love to see the Kennedy men dragged for their heinous behavior, and descriptions of Bayard’s novel promised a good hard dragging. (Look, if you grew up around Kennedy-adoring relatives as I did, you’d understand.) And the book delivered on that promise, but it also delivered a lot more than that, which is how it ended up bumping Lessons from this week’s newsletter.
Jackie & Me is narrated by Lem Billings, JFK’s close friend and confidant, looking back over his relationship with the Kennedy family. From the time he makes friends with young Jack at prep school, Lem becomes so enmeshed in the family that he’s almost another son. Which, it turns out, is not an unequivocally great thing to be.
Lem speaks with great warmth and loyalty of the Kennedys. Or he tries to. Through Bayard’s rich, evocative writing, little hints leak through of Lem’s underlying discomfort with the clan. That discomfort comes to the fore when Jack Kennedy asks Lem to spend time with Jackie Bouvier, the young woman he’s dating. The young congressman is too busy and ambitious to have much time for his girlfriend, but those very ambitions dictate that he’ll need a wife before long. So Lem is deputed to keep Jackie on the hook until Jack gets around to deciding whether she’s the right one for that role.
It’s Lem’s gently rueful narration that makes the story (and Sean Rohani’s superb reading of the audiobook is just right for the tone). Lem, though reliably good-natured, nonetheless provides some sharply observed character portraits, wickedly satirizing the matriarch Rose and pulling no punches about filthy-minded old Joe Kennedy. Isolated and lonely, burdened with feelings and attractions he won’t admit even to himself, Lem can’t help feeling grateful to be embraced by this family. But he also can’t help seeing through the facade. Every relationship with these people is transactional; all the family charm and intelligence hides a black hole of emotional emptiness. And Jack is no exception to the rule.
Accustomed to following Kennedy orders, Lem dutifully carries out his task of keeping Jackie occupied, but their growing friendship leads him to wonder if sucking her into the Kennedy orbit is really the right thing to do. Her characterization is a little more opaque, her motivations sometimes harder to discern, but it’s clear that she feels more for Jack than he does for her. Torn between the claims of loyalty and ethics, trying to decide whom to support, Lem knows that one false step could cost him everything he values. And sharp as he is, he can’t convince himself that he shouldn’t value these things. His quandary is pitiable, but it’s also deeply human and understandable to anyone who has ever clung to a difficult friendship because letting go would be even worse. And it’s masterfully depicted by Louis Bayard, who’s equally adept at portraying glittering surfaces and painful depths.
In our last issue, I wrote about how this newsletter got its name from a passage by Dorothy Parker: “I kept ... sneaking off to the dear, strange things I truly ached to read and to ponder.” The quotation comes from a piece in which Parker was trying diligently to review a very serious novel, only to get bored and keep drifting back to a fascinating newspaper article. And this vacillation of mine between two books demonstrates exactly the sort of thing she was talking about. By any number of metrics, Lessons is the more important book, but Jackie & Me is the better read. Sometimes that’s just the way it goes.
(Cover image copyright Algonquin Books)
Book Links:
Jackie & Me on Amazon
Jackie & Me on Bookshop
Jackie & Me on Audible