Flying in to Love

The author of The White Hotel , whose subsequent books have been somewhat disappointing, is back on form in this dreamlike evocation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Poetic and often daring in its associative leaps, it is a long way from the only comparable fictional treatment, Don DeLillo's hard-edged Libra. That was a far more convincing book, but Thomas hardly wants to convince. Instead, he is trying to recreate those days in Dallas as a kind of myth that forms the substance of several women's dreams, among them a nun Kennedy spoke to on the fateful day, a writer obsessed for a lifetime by what happened. He is also imagining, fiercely, what might have happened if the conspirators had been caught before firing the fatal shots: he even creates scenes on the night of November 22, 1963 in which the President is still alive. He also plays with Oswald and Tippit (the slain policeman) and, in a bizarre scene on the plane back to Washington, shows us Johnson implicitly admitting to a conspiracy to JFK aide Kenny O'Donnell. The complexity is richly astonishing, and Thomas manages to sustain remarkable tension with this thrice-familiar material. Some readers will find references to JFK's sexual escapades distasteful, and others may feel that Thomas has too recklessly taken poetic license; but few will fail to be mesmerized yet again by a profoundly imaginative reconstruction of one of the events that has in some way shaped all of us. (Oct.)