April 4, 2022
Bayard (Courting Mr. Lincoln) offers an enchanting narrative of John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier in which their marriage might not happen after all. The story is told from the perspective of Jack’s best friend, Lem Billings, who recounts the couple’s surreptitious dating in 1952 followed by their engagement and Jackie’s hesitancy to go through with the nuptials. Despite embodying “a creature bending both toward and away from matrimony,” Jackie is groomed to become a future Kennedy and to fall in line with both Jack’s political aspirations and his womanizing. Looking back from the early 1980s, Lem is regretful over not warning Jackie as much as he could about the darkness behind the Kennedy family’s legacy, as well as his inability to come to terms with his sexual identity due to concerns about Jack’s reputation. Things can also be delightfully dishy, as in a description of Bobby Kennedy’s wife, Ethel, as being “combative as a Cape buffalo, not above swiping an older sister’s boyfriend... and then, having smuggled her way into the compound, quicker than anyone to bar the gate.” Bayard suffuses the spritzy story with wit, charm, and depth. The result is tailor-made for fans of Camelot drama.
Starred review from April 1, 2022
Lem Billings, John F. Kennedy's roommate from boarding school, takes center stage in this imagining of JFK's courtship of Jackie. Billings knows Kennedy to be a true friend who opened up both the doors of power and to his own family, the rambunctious Kennedy tribe, to him after Lem lost his own father. He also knows that JFK has never been, and will never be, faithful to any woman. But the time for John to ally himself with someone suitable is coming. JFK's political star is rising and, to be elected to the US Senate in the 1950s, he needs to be married. Jacqueline Bouvier, raised to marry into wealth, seems to fit the bill. Lem is deputized to ensure that Jackie understands her role in her future marriage, but at the fateful moment, Lem fails both Jackie and JFK. VERDICT Bayard (Courting Mr. Lincoln) is a master of historical fiction; this exquisite book is no exception. This is a love triangle in which the future president is tragically incapable of fully returning the love given to him by both Jackie and Lem. A necessary purchase for public libraries.--Jennie Mills
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Starred review from March 1, 2022
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, na�ve 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.
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Starred review from April 1, 2022
The world knows the story of the marriage of Jack and Jackie Kennedy, or at least a version of it. What is less scrutinized is their courtship, which Bayard so convincingly fictionalizes as an often fraught and frantic tap dance of missteps and missed signals, of confidences and secrets. For rising young politician Jack, his attraction to debutante Jackie Bouvier was as calculated as it was genuine. His pursuit, however, required the Miles Standish-like ministrations of an intermediary, Jack's childhood pal Lem Billings. Today, Lem would be known as Jack's "fixer," but in the early 1950s, he was the only person Jack trusted to keep Jackie entertained and off the market while he launched his career and indulged his philandering ways. No one, least of all Lem himself, a closeted homosexual, could have predicted the deep affection that would develop between him and Jackie nor the lifelong doubts that would arise from all the what-if moments in their complicated friendship, shadowed by their mutual love for the charismatic but confounding Jack. Bayard pursued the First Friend/First Lady trope before in the much-acclaimed Courting Mr. Lincoln (2019). Here he brings a poignant empathy, persuasive intimacy, and nuanced imagination to his interpretation of a relatively unexamined chapter in Kennedy lore.
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