Romance with bite: the perfect escapism for today’s anxious times.
Bayard imagines Jack and Jackie Kennedy’s momentous courtship through the eyes of Lem Billings, the future president's lifelong best friend.
Everyone knows how things turned out—every strand of Kennedy lore has been examined repeatedly. Bayard doesn't change names or reveal new facts (and an author’s note pointedly acknowledges that he's made up a plot point concerning Lem). Instead Bayard produces an “alternative history” evincing these very public figures’ inner lives while considering how different choices might have led to different outcomes. While Lem Billings was an actual Kennedy intimate, narrator Lem is reminiscent of The Great Gatsby’s Nick Carraway, and his fictional reminiscences structure the novel around the triangular friendship he shares with Jack and Jackie in the years leading up to their wedding in the early 1950s. The result is a meditation on the definitions, possibilities, and failures of friendship. The real Lem survived homophobic times semicloseted. Here Lem is portrayed as a heartbreaking mix of fear, loyalty, and perception who watches as Jackie is sucked into the Kennedy maelstrom. She can’t stand Jack’s family but also can’t resist Jack, a presence as indefinable as quicksilver, calculating yet straightforward, treacherous with women yet remembered by Lem as the “finest” of men. A dedicated lothario, Jack has no interest in marriage, but his family’s political ambitions for him require a wife, and Jackie meets Kennedy prerequisites. How deeply Jack grows to care for her remains unclear, but he does not want her to marry under false pretenses and asks Lem to make sure Jackie understands what to expect. Too softhearted, Lem sidesteps the brutal facts. Almost 30 years later, facing his own sexual identity crisis, he sees how his silence failed both Kennedys. Lem’s pre-AIDS 1981 now seems almost as innocent as his 1950s. As for Jackie, she’s pure delight—beautiful of course, naïve but self-aware, her keen intellect showing small glints of the tough resilience she’ll need later on when she's become an icon.
Romance with bite: the perfect escapism for today’s anxious times.Pub Date: June 14, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64375-035-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
Vintage Follett. His fans will be pleased.
A dramatic, complex imagining of the origins of Stonehenge.
In about 2500 B.C.E. on the Great Plain, Seft and his family collect flints in a mine. He dislikes the work, and the motherless lad hates the abuse he gets from his father and brothers. He leaves them and arrives at a wooden monument where sacred events such as the Midsummer Rite take place. There are also circles of stones that help predict equinoxes, solstices, even eclipses. This is a world where the customary greeting is “May the Sun God smile on you,” and everyone is a year older on Midsummer Day. Except for a priestess or two, no one can count beyond fingers and toes—to indicate 30, they show both hands, point to both feet, then show both hands again. Casual sex is common, and sex between women is less common but not taboo. Joia, a young woman who becomes a priestess, wonders about her sexuality. After a fire destroys the Monument, she leads a bold effort to rebuild it in stone. To please the gods, they must haul 10 giant stones from distant Stony Valley. Of course neither machinery nor roads exist, so the difficulties are extraordinary. Although the project has its detractors, hundreds of able-bodied people are willing to help. Craftspeople known as cleverhands construct a sled and a road, and they make the rope to wrap around the stones. Many, many others pull. And pull. Meanwhile, the three principal groups—farmers, woodlanders, and herders—all have their separate interests. There is talk of war, which Joia has never seen in her lifetime. Soon it seems inevitable that the powerful farmers will not only start one but win it, unless heroes like Seft and Joia can come up with a creative plan. But there is also the matter of love for Joia in this well-plotted and well-told yarn. The story has a lot of characters from multiple tribes, and they can be hard to keep track of. A page in the front of the book listing who’s who would be helpful.
Vintage Follett. His fans will be pleased.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781538772775
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
A masterpiece.
Two young Indian writers discover their conjoined destinies by leaving home, coming back, connecting, disconnecting, and swimming in the ocean at Goa.
Sonia’s grandfather, the lawyer, and his friend, the Colonel, are connected by a weekly chess game and a local tradition of families sharing food, “paraded through the neighborhood in tiffin carriers, in thermos flasks, upon plates covered in napkins tied in rabbit ears.” Shortly after Desai’s magnificent third novel opens, the two families are also connected by a marriage proposal. Upon hearing that Sonia is feeling lonely at college in Vermont—loneliness? Is there anything more un-Indian?—and unaware that she is romantically involved with a famous, much older painter, her elders deliver a hilariously lukewarm letter proposing that she be introduced to Sonny, the Colonel’s grandson. Sonny is living in New York working as a copy editor at The Associated Press, and he, too, has a partner no one knows about. Sonny’s family feels they are being asked to give up their son to balance out some long-ago bad investment advice from the Colonel; on the other hand, they would very much like to get the other family’s kebab recipe. The fate of this half-hearted setup unfurls over many years and almost 700 delicious pages that the author has apparently been working on since the publication of The Inheritance of Loss (2006), which won the Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. You can almost feel the decades passing as the novel becomes increasingly concerned with the process of novel-writing; toward the end, Sonia can’t stop thinking about whether, if she writes all the stories she knows, “these stories [would] intersect and make a book? How would they hold together?” Desai’s trust in her own process pays off, as vignettes of just a page or two (Sonia’s head-spinning tour of a museum with the great artist; Sonny’s lightning-strike theory that only people who have cleaned their own toilet can appreciate reading novels) intersect with the novel’s central obsessions—love, family, writing, the role of the U.S. in the Indian imagination, the dangers faced by a woman on her own—and come to a perfectly satisfying close.
A masterpiece.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780307700155
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
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BOOK REVIEW
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