It’s an audacious beginning to a daring enterprise. All fiction is pretend, but to write a novel centered on a well-known figure — someone who has already been relentlessly scrutinized in print — requires an extra ounce of chutzpah. Is there any need for another portrayal of someone whose biography is familiar to countless millions of Americans?
Tripp spells out an authorial justification by ascribing a certain thought to the fictional Jackie, perusing a newspaper profile of herself. “When they tell the story of a woman, they never get right up against what she might have felt and thought and seen and feared and wondered,” the character muses. Tripp — who previously wrote a vibrant novel about the life of artist Georgia O’Keeffe — goes about filling that gap with an intimate, episodic narrative, told primarily from Onassis’s point of view.
Rather than cover the whole life, as a biographer would, Tripp chooses incidents, stretching from Jacqueline Bouvier’s first meeting John F. Kennedy at a Georgetown dinner party in 1951, to a walk, a few days before her death, in Central Park accompanied by her grandchildren and her partner, Maurice Tempelsman (the best of the three important men in her life). Tripp’s wonderful, pointillistic skill with physical description and the deft, empathetic leaps she takes — jumping off from letters, contemporary memoirs and photographs snapped of the former first lady — gives “Jackie” undeniable emotional punch. Struggling with JFK’s philandering early in their marriage, when he was a senator, the fictional Jackie reasons: “You don’t stay with someone because they hurt you … you stay for the slight and mythical promise of a dream that once meant so much you were willing to trade a different future for.”
As sensitively rendered as “Jackie” is, I imagine many of Onassis’s friends and fans rolling their eyes. They won’t applaud Tripp for concocting scenes, inventing dialogue and presuming to know how the real-life woman felt. In truth, without the built-in distance that time’s passage provides, fiction about public figures may go down better with a heftier dose of make-believe.
By contrast, Curtis Sittenfeld’s two juicy first-lady novels — “American Wife” and “Rodham” — depart from reality in ways both big and small. In “American Wife,” inspired by the life of Laura Bush, both names and settings are changed: school librarian Alice Lindgren meets Charlie Blackwell, scion of a political family, in Wisconsin, not Texas. The political content — including a complicated subplot explaining Alice’s liberal views on abortion — isn’t as powerful as the section on Alice’s youth, especially the account of her momentary inattention, behind the wheel of a car, causing an accident that kills a high school classmate. Laura Bush has never publicly discussed in detail the fatal accident she was involved with as a teenager. Yet Sittenfeld’s poignant retelling gives readers permission to imagine just how painful this incident must have been for a conscientious, tenderhearted young woman living in a close-knit community.
“Rodham” imagines a different life for Hillary Rodham Clinton, one in which she dates, but never marries, Bill. Sittenfeld’s depictions of real people — not only both Clintons, but Donald Trump, too — are spot-on and hilarious. At one juncture, fictional Hillary has reason to compare her own tolerance for staying overnight at a wealthy donor’s home with that of Bill’s, now her political rival. “I knew Bill relished such opportunities, establishing the bonds that arose when you shared scrambled eggs in your pajamas, but the thought of sharing scrambled eggs in my pajamas with an extremely rich person that I was only pretending to be friends with exhausted me.”
A more succinct description of the difference between the two Clintons may be hard to find. And because “Rodham” is completely made up — indeed it’s a kind of highbrow fan fiction — pesky truth doesn’t impinge on the reader’s enjoyment of the characterizations, or the somewhat preposterous plot.
The most acclaimed practitioner of biographical fiction of our time, Hilary Mantel, considered her work fundamentally speculative, notwithstanding the copious background research she did before writing. “I am making the reader a proposal, an offer,” Mantel said of her Thomas Cromwell novels. Because Mantel is more widely read than any historian, her interpretation of King Henry VIII’s chief minister will probably dominate public understanding for some time. (How long? Only a generation ago, “A Man for All Seasons,” a play by Robert Bolt adapted into a popular 1966 movie, painted Cromwell as a man lacking both heart and conscience who brought down a saintly Thomas More, one of the baddies in Mantel’s books. So, no fictional rendering lasts forever.)
There have been numerous other recent Jackie novels — “Jacqueline in Paris,” “Jackie & Me,” “And They Called it Camelot,” “Jackie and Maria” to name a few. In this crowd, Tripp’s book stands out for its psychological acuity, although I reckon the former first lady, as she aged, became far more clear-eyed about her first husband than the author allows. Still, “Jackie” is also notable for its admirable emphasis on the intelligence and grace of this valiant American woman.
There are worse ways to be remembered.
Clare McHugh is the author, most recently, of “The Romanov Brides.”
Random House. 496 pp. $30
