RaveWashington PostThe ingenuity of Louis Bayard’s new novel, Jackie & Me, is that it doesn’t try to penetrate the black box of the Kennedy marriage by writing about it directly. Instead, Bayard seeks an answer by focusing on the before: the years when Jack and Jackie were still two distinct individuals, a young man and a younger woman navigating their ways through Washington ... a poignant, late-summer-afternoon kind of novel. There is a sweet, timeless joy in Lem and Jackie’s shared scenes — riding the Ferris wheel, cracking silly jokes — and the pages turn easily, even if the tension never quite reaches more than a low simmer. These are two central characters who are, for the most part, stuck in a holding pattern, subject to the whims of another ... Bayard thoughtfully explores the question of what it means to repress one’s own desires, to shape one’s life and identity around another person ... Bayard captures his characters with deft economy ... There is a way in which Jackie & Me denies the future first lady these darker possibilities and, in that, denies her true complexity ... None of this, though, ultimately detracts from the sheer enjoyability of this novel. Jackie & Me is a story perfectly tuned to our ongoing fascination with the Kennedy marriage — and a novel, like Jackie herself, with charm to spare.
