Customer Reviews

November 22, 1963: A Novel

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This book broke my heart as if I were again that 9th grader I once was, looking out the window of her algebra classroom, hearing the announcement that Kennedy was dead.

The smaller details are covered here. The intense emotions are felt.

An amazing, intimate look at an admirable First Lady and extraordinary grief as well as the working men and women who saw the tragedy unfold.

According to the Historical Novel Society, "To be deemed historical...a novel must have been written at least fifty years after the events described, or have been written by someone who was not alive at the time of those events (who therefore approaches them only by research)." Author Adam Braver may have been alive when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated: Braver was born in 1963. But he obviously does not remember the event, and he has approached it through a fascinating combination of research and fiction-crafting in his new novel.

I thought I knew a lot about the assassination, which is an historical event for me, too (my parents were still a few months away from meeting each other on November 22, 1963). But Braver's book, which focuses in depth on the events of that day through the closely-drawn third-person eyes of everyone from a Dallas policeman to Abe Zapruder to Maud Shaw (Caroline and John-John's nanny) to, of course, Jackie Kennedy, opened up so much more.

Most of us will never know what it was to be Air Force One as it bore the slain President's coffin back to Washington; Braver has imagined that. Most of us didn't witness the autopsy at Walter Reed; Braver has evoked it. Most of us can't imagine how Maud Shaw told six-year-old Caroline what had happened (I hadn't even realized that Jackie Kennedy had given the nanny that awful task); Braver shows us how it might have happened:

"They were the only two in the room, but...Miss Shaw could barely look at Caroline, tucked firmly in bed under the canopy of rosebud chintz, forcing a confident expression, though it was clear she knew something wasn't right; and Miss Shaw's eyes were tearing while Caroline stared at her, almost demanding an explanation other than Miss Shaw taking her hand and apologizing for the tears; and Miss Shaw knew she could wait until morning (Mrs. Auchincloss told her Mrs. Kennedy said it was up to her to gauge what the children did or didn't know), but she looked at Caroline and something told her it wouldn't be fair to send the girl to sleep, to let her wake up full of promise--better for the girl to wake up as part of the grief, and that way maybe she'll mourn more purely; then Miss Shaw inhaled so deeply her gut almost burst, and on the exhalation she said that there had been an accident; then she paused, realizing the sound of hope in the word accident, and corrected herself to say, 'He's been shot, and God has taken him to Heaven because they couldn't make him better in the hospital,' and then closed her eyes, praying that when she opened them she wouldn't see Caroline crying--that this had all been a dream."

This is historical fiction at its best: intensely researched (check out Braver's staggering list of acknowledgments, including the Oral History collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum [Maud Shaw's is among the transcripts Braver tells us he accessed]) and beautifully written. I recommend it highly.

Original and creative, heatbreaking without being overwrought, a quick read that is hard to put down.

I recently returned from a trip to Dallas over the new year. I did take in the JFK sites and did it as a history buff and not as a tourist. This book is a mix of fiction and history and it truly will catch you from the first chapter. I love the story telling angle. I feel that Braver captures Jackie Kennedy's raw emotions and amazing strength in the face of a horrific nightmare. I find that I cannot put this book down and I love it!

Adam Braver set himself a difficult task in his newest novel, November 22, 1963, by attempting to take the Kennedy assassination--one of the most talked about and discussed events of the twentieth century--and make it fresh again. One of the ways he does this is to stay away from Kennedy himself, as well as Lee Harvey Oswald, and to instead focus much of the book on Jackie Kennedy and the other, often more ordinary people affected by the events of the day. He doesn't ignore the social or political implications of the assassination, but he does rightly push them aside in favor of focusing on his characters and their actions rather than the ideological meanings behind them.

Braver's depiction of Jackie Kennedy is of a strong, deeply sad woman still reeling from the death of her youngest son and stunned by the events of her husband's death. In one of the most affecting passages from the early chapters of the novel, Jackie, sitting alone with the president's body while in flight back to Washington, senses a warmth coming from within the casket, taking her back to the hospital where he was pronounced dead:

"Jack's foot had still felt warm when she kissed it. That had been in the emergency room at Parkland, and he had been covered by a sheet that was thick and bulky at the top, from where his head was still wrapped in layers of other sheets. Had he been given last rites? Jackie wanted to know. The priest told her conditional rites. There was finality to his voice when he said that. It trembled in his throat. That was when Jackie took off her ring. She turned to leave the room, feeling neither brave, nor proud, nor resigned. She ran her empty finger along the edge of the gurney. The metal, cold and detached, cut a straight line through the stillness of the room. Part of Jack's foot had been left uncovered. Sticking out. The tendons slightly tensed. His big toe at attention, with the wisp of blond hair curling up. Jackie braced her hands on the gurney. She leaned over. Only her lips touched his foot.

And although it is not rational, this is hope."

Jackie Kennedy's story provides the backbone of the book, a thread which begins hours before the assassination in a Fort Worth hotel and more or less ends with her arrival back at the White House later that day. Along the way, Braver offers a variety of other stories--some based in fact, some completely fictional--in which he makes his own myth out of the details of the assassination, mirroring the national mythology that has grown up around Kennedy's death. He details the men who fitted Kennedy's casket in Dallas, the selling of the Zapruder film, and the worries and preoccupations of the White House staff as they try to determine whose responsibility it will be to tell the children that their father has been killed. These chapters are richly imagined, including one which uses descriptions from the autopsy reports to introduce brief sections of fiction, creating new stories directly from the facts:

"It's one of the photos of the autopsy. His head. Photographed from the neck up, with just a trace of his shoulders and chest, enough so that you can tell he's undressed. It's a simple picture, one snapped by the medical photographer John Stringer on a four-by-five Graphic camera. But what's so amazing about the picture is how dead Kennedy looks. And it's not Hollywood dead, with passively closed eyes, and a nodded head that suggests the sleep of the just. In the photo, his head is tilted back, eyes wide open, and his mouth ajar, without any sense that he's ever lived. A tracheotomy pokes out his throat, as though his survival had just been a matter of extra air. His teeth look a little bucked. You can stare and stare and stare, noting how the tiles in the floor grame the definition of his collarbone, and the tufts of chest hair. There certainly are characteristics of the Kennedy you've come to recognize, but when pressed you'd have to admit that you've never seen anyone look so dead before."

From this description, the narrator leaps to a memory of his friend's dead father, the first body he saw, and then to other funerals he's attended, leading to a meditation on death, a realization that it's "all just smoke and mirrors, a hypnotist's whisper and suggestion that makes you believe... Maybe when the body dies, the hypnotist's fingers are snapped, and we stop barking like dogs, and look around, suddenly recognizing the machinery."

In some ways, this feels like one way to read Jackie's plot line, and therefore the novel as a whole. It is only after the assassination of her husband that--still trapped in the presidential airplane carrying his body across the country--she attempts to make sense of their life together. For just that one day, it is possible for her to see the details of who she is and of what her life has become, and to fashion those details into some sort of new meaning. Even more impressive, Braver applies the same technique to the assassination as a whole. By deconstructing this well-worn day into these new, fragmentary narratives, he tears back the layers of myth and ambiguity around Kennedy's assassination, laying it bare before rewrapping it in his own imagination, using a landslide of tiny, fragmentary details to "create a story that will be told so many times that it ends up true," one that offers not only new explanations but also a more human perpective capable of replacing all that has been lost forever to histories and conspiracy theories, to mere facts.

November 22, 1963 is a fantastic novel, and one of my favorite books of 2008.

This novel by Adam Braver defies typical narrative writing. He takes the singular moment of the tragedy of the Kennedy assassination and makes it personal. Jackie Kennedy's face on the front cover of the book tells it all: the indefinable sadness and grief combined with her distinct beauty, grace, and courage. It was Jackie who made our nation continue, not LBJ. Really makes you want to cry and be proud to be an American. No conspiracy theories, no dwelling on what might have been. There is no delusion that we were once an innocent nation. Braver has written something so pure and powerful, so compact. It is one of the best books of the year.

An interesting look at the minor characters in a real life significant event and how they were impacted by it.

This publication is amazing . . .it is based off the author's equation that stories + memories + fact = history.
That is the exact formula of this novel, which while it resides on stories and facts, is still exactly that, a novel.

This story will move the reader who has witnessed this event and even those who are too young to remember will feel like they were there.