JACKIE & ME by Louis Bayard

BENEATH CRUEL WATERS

Bassoff, Jon Blackstone Publishing (256 pp.) $27.99 | May 10, 2022 978-1-79993-888-0

Two violent deaths in the same spot 34 years apart bookend an American family horror story from the heartland. In 2018, Vivian Davidson returns to the ruin of the house in Thompsonville, Colorado, where she shot former lover Ruben Ray to death back in 1984, to hang herself. Why did she kill Ruben, and why did she wait so long after getting away with murder to kill herself? These are only the first of the many questions that torment Holt Davidson, the son who pulls himself away from his job as a firefighter in Topeka to come to her funeral after learning of his mother’s death from her best friend, police widow Joyce Brandt. It’s a small service, attended mostly by Pastor Boswell and Vivian’s fellow congregants from the First Lutheran Church. Vivian’s brother, musician Bobby Hartwick, isn’t there because he’s playing on the road somewhere, and Holt’s older sister, Ophelia Davidson, isn’t there because she’s staying in a halfway house after long years of institutionalization following a breakdown. Looking through his mother’s house in search of answers, Holt finds several things—a handgun, a Polaroid shot of the dead Ruben, an unsigned love letter—that raise even more questions, and he sets out in dogged pursuit of the truth. Each damning new confession he wrings from the people connected to the two fatalities attempts to paper over the even more shocking revelations to come, and each of these revelations brings new grief. No wonder Holt tells Joyce: “I should stop digging. Before it’s too late.” But it’s already too late.

A powerful family melodrama drenched in sadness and guilt with hints of redemption.

JACKIE & ME

Bayard, Louis Algonquin (352 pp.) $27.95 | June 14, 2022 978-1-64375-035-4

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.

HOPE AND GLORY

Benson, Jendella Morrow/HarperCollins (400 pp.) $27.99 | April 19, 2022 978-0-06-308057-7

A young woman’s homecoming sparks the unraveling of family secrets. When Glory Akíndélé, a British Nigerian woman, learns of her father’s death, she leaves sunny Los Angeles for good and returns to south London. While cleaning/snooping around her parents’ bedroom, Glory

finds the birth certificate of her twin sister, Hope, who died when they were children. Although Glory is unable to locate Hope’s death certificate, she uncovers a previously unseen photograph of herself, Hope, and their older sister, Faith, as young children posing with an older White couple. Glory starts asking questions that her grieving mother is unwilling, or unable, to answer: “The smudged memory of her sister’s existence came into sharp relief as she looked at the little girl wearing the same powder-blue pinafore as the tiny version of herself. While Glory’s face was a suspicious frown, holding the gaze of the camera lens at a careful distance, Hope’s was open and inviting….A wave of nauseating grief shook Glory and sent her to her knees.” Glory is consumed by her desperation to find any information on Hope as well as by the sickening feeling that her father may not have been the man she believed he was. And if Glory’s life wasn’t complicated enough, throw in a new relationship, uncertainty about her future career, and lingering guilt about not having returned home sooner when her younger brother, now in jail, was arrested. Filled with unexpected, but earned, twists, Benson’s novel balances moments of rich humor and devastating profundity. But Benson’s greatest success is her ability to write characters and family dynamics that feel deeply authentic.

A meditation on the sacrifices we make for love.

THE LIONESS

Bohjalian, Chris Doubleday (336 pp.) $28.00 | May 10, 2022 978-0-385-54482-5

An actress and her entourage are kidnapped by Russians in Bohjalian’s uneven thriller. In 1964, Hollywood’s gossip rags are agog as movie star Katie Barstow marries gallerist David Hill and takes her inner circle along on her honeymoon. And an adventuresome honeymoon it is—on safari in the Serengeti with aging big-game hunter Charlie Patton, who once helped Hemingway bag trophies. But Katie is not the star of this ensemble piece. The populous cast—a who’s who at the beginning is indispensable—includes Katie’s publicist, Reggie Stout; her agent, Peter Merrick; her best friend, Carmen Tedesco, a supporting actress who plays wisecracking sidekicks; and Terrance Dutton, Katie’s recent co-star, a Black actor who’s challenging Sidney Poitier’s singularity in Hollywood. With obvious nods to Hemingway’s worst fear—masculine cowardice—Bohjalian adds in Felix Demeter, Carmen’s husband, a B-list screenwriter who reminds his wife of Hemingway’s weakling Francis Macomber. Felix seems a superfluous double of David, who feels inadequate because Katie is the breadwinner and his father is CIA. Then there’s Katie’s older brother, Billy Stepanov, whose abuse at the hands of their mother shaped the psychologist he is today; Billy’s pregnant wife, Margie; and Benjamin Kikwete, an apprentice safari guide. Thus, a proliferation of voices whose competing perspectives fragment rather than advance the story. The kidnapping plot seems less designed to test each character’s mettle than to exercise Bohjalian’s predilection for minute descriptions of gore. The most heartfelt portrayal here is of the Serengeti and its flora and fauna, but none of the human characters net enough face time to transcend their typecasting. The motives behind the kidnapping might have lent intrigue to the proceedings, but foreshadowing is so slight that the infodump explainer at the end leaves us shocked, mostly at how haphazard the plot is.

Perhaps A-list screenwriters will be able to spin TV gold from this sketchy treatment.