"With a captivating mix of fact and fiction, Braver (Mr. Lincoln's Wars) chronicles the events surrounding JFK's assassination to moving effect. The event is no stranger to the literary world, but Braver's recreation, owing to small and often previously off-camera details, remains hauntingly original. Some of these details, like the ones that open the book and dwell on Jackie's fashion preferences, present a factual backdrop against which later scenes — e.g., where Jackie refuses to remove her blood-splattered pink suit — tragically play out. Others, like the way JFK's eyes keep popping open during the autopsy, underscore the grisly reality of his death. While the accumulation of small moments gives the book its weightiness, the stories of people peripherally associated with the assassination make the book sing; through the experiences of the Texan who sold the government Kennedy's casket, the mechanic in charge of the limousine in which Kennedy was shot and numerous others, Braver reveals the tragedy of a national story that decades later can still be acutely felt." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Forty-five years ago, John F. Kennedy, the handsome, charismatic president of the United States, was assassinated in Dallas. The first lady sat beside him, wearing a striking pink wool suit with matching pillbox hat. The suit was ruinously stained with blood, but she declined to change it for hours afterward, saying, famously, "I want them to see what they have done to Jack." In the novel "November... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) 22, 1963," Adam Braver has taken it upon himself to "imagine" that day, the funeral that followed, and a few more occasions after the Johnsons had moved into the White House, including two when Lyndon calls up Jackie to flirt with her on the phone.

Several years back, Braver used this same technique to imagine Sarah Bernhardt, in late middle age, coming to perform in Los Angeles, where she is hounded out of the downtown theater by the forces of decency and is invited to move her act out to the new tourist attraction at Venice Pier, with artificial canals and its own brand-new theater. Although we know she'll go on acting well into her 70s, during her time in Venice she goes through a crisis of the heart, wondering if the life of art is worth it. That novel had some wonderful images in it — for example, a moment in which Sarah expresses a desire to fish from the pier and a boy is hired to swim out and hang a dead fish on her hook. Her outrage follows. We see a combination of the splendid and the tawdry in that newfangled beach resort, and sense the passing of fragile time from one minute to another as Sarah waits to begin her performance.

This technique doesn't work all that well with Jacqueline Kennedy, for several reasons. First, those of us who were alive on that fateful, awful day own it for ourselves; we saw the pictures, heard the commentators, read all the historians' first drafts that appeared in the respectable magazines of the day. We know, or think we know, that Jackie took off her wedding ring and put it on Jack's finger. We were there when the counter-history began to trickle out: stories of Kennedy's womanizing and his possible connection with the Mafia. Our illusions were jolted just a bit when Jackie married Aristotle Onassis. They were jolted because we thought we knew these people, but of course we didn't. They and their followers had, quite consciously in some cases, created a myth — all that Camelot stuff — but for all their elegance they turned out to be merely human beings, just as the Beatles turned out to be just four guys.

Second, there is a whole school of people who don't remember Nov. 22, 1963, at all and, because they don't remember, can't be expected to care all that much. Third, Caroline Kennedy is still very much alive. You take an awful chance when you "imagine" the death of her father and the thought processes of her mother, whom she knew and loved. You presume.

This novel opens with Jackie, on the morning of Nov. 22, obsessing about her pink suit. Will it be too hot for the Texas weather? Will it be too heavy? She joins her husband a few minutes later in a hotel ballroom, going through the kitchen to get there, a reminder to the reader that no place is secure: look what happened later to Jack's brother Bobby. As the day proceeds, interviews are interspersed here and there: one with a real motorcycle cop who doesn't answer questions as the author might wish him to, another from some ordinary guy who simply remembers that he was in school when it happened (presumably to show that every American remembers where he or she was when the assassination occurred. But don't we all know that already?).

A great deal is made of Mrs. Kennedy's wish to put together a funeral as much like Abraham Lincoln's as possible. (And, indeed, Braver has written a book about Lincoln, too.) We are made aware of the passage of history, the shortness of time between the earlier assassination and the one under examination now. Braver brings out the underpinnings of race and class through a long monologue by a (fictional) black servant in the Kennedy White House who recalls that President Eisenhower expected the maids to turn off their vacuums and face the wall when he walked by.

To me, this is where "imagination" gets a little too full of itself. Was Eisenhower really that odious? It seems unbelievable. If it were true, it surely would have been backed up by a footnote. This holds doubly true with these imagined Lyndon Johnson phone calls. Perhaps something like that actually did happen. But the man is in the unfortunate position of being dead enough not to be able to defend himself, yet alive enough to still have living offspring whose feelings will be hurt. Besides, it just doesn't sound true! All of us imagine things all the time, but we don't go around putting that material in books and calling it art. I would respectfully suggest to the author — who really is a wonderful writer — that the next historical figure he picks for his vigorous literary carwash be far enough away in chronological time that no reader will be able to say, "I just can't buy this." Because I certainly couldn't buy this.

Reviewed by Carolyn See, who can may be reached at www.carolynsee.com., Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"Braver's collection is a piercing portrait of those who experienced the Kennedy assassination first-hand." Steve Almond, author of My Life in Heavy Metal

"I had thought that Don DeLillo's Libra was the last fictional word on the JFK assassination, but I was wrong. Like a sublime actor, Adam Braver inhabits these characters, especially Jacqueline Kennedy, in a way that seems brave and heartbroken and true. This is a haunting history play, of private agonies wrenched onto the public stage."

April Bernard, author of Swan Electric

"I would never have thought there was a new way to view a moment so thoroughly dissected. Turns out there is. Quite an achievement."

Suzanne Kleid, KQED

"November 22, 1963 is more than an intricately imagined microhistory of the primary American trauma of the late 20th century; it's also an affecting portrait of the then First Lady, simultaneously devastated and resilient as she moves from embodying her country's image of someone who controls fortune to someone who's been flattened by it."

Jim Shepard, author of Like You'd Understand, Anyway

“This extraordinary reconstruction blends fact and imagination with a subtlety that utterly dissolves the line between public and private. It's the intimacy, the closeness we come to these (mostly) well-known protagonists, that is so shocking and moving. Adam Braver has pulled off quite a feat, realigning all our notions and expectations of historical fiction.”

Phillip Lopate, author of Waterfront and Portrait of my Body

"Adam Braver has a wonderfully rich imagination and his grasp of historical characters and settings is both deep and natural. I would gladly read anything he writes."

Dan Chaon, author of You Remind Me of Me and the National Book Award Finalist Among the Missing

"With a captivating mix of fact and fiction, Braver chronicles the events surrounding JFKs assassination to moving effect. The event is no stranger to the literary world, but Bravers recreation, owing to small and often previously off-camera details, remains hauntingly original. Some of these details, like the ones that open the book and dwell on Jackies fashion preferences, present a factual backdrop against which later scenese.g., where Jackie refuses to remove her blood-splattered pink suittragically play out. Others, like the way JFKs eyes keep popping open during the autopsy, underscore the grisly reality of his death. While the accumulation of small moments gives the book its weightiness, the stories of people peripherally associated with the assassination make the book sing; through the experiences of the Texan who sold the government Kennedys casket, the mechanic in charge of the limousine in which Kennedy was shot and numerous others, Braver reveals the tragedy of a national story that decades later can still be acutely felt."

Publisher's Weekly

"This terse, tense, tough novel is absolutely riveting...Every rose petal, drop of blood and splatter of brain, every movement and comment resonates with history as if trapped within a claustrophobic nightmare. Braver keeps this solemn and somber tone throughout, his brisk, often lyrical declarative sentences as direct and translucent as the characters are unable to be."Sam Coale, The Providence Journal

“Braver is a terrific writer, an observer of the most acute details; throughout the book, he traces the subtle interactions of his characters as they collide and move apart. One of the most moving interactions here takes place between Jackie and an ambulance driver named Al Rike as they share cigarettes outside the trauma room where her husband's body lies...in this tiny glimmer of connection, whole universes of emotion are uncovered.”David Ulin, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"This is fiction of course, but it has the ring of truth...And it is both painful and fascinating, like rubbernecking at an accident, to watch. With an audacity of confidence and a sure sense of fiction's ability to tell eternal truths better than history, Braver re-creates the day the world changed." Jay Strafford, Richmond Times-Dispatch

"Beautifully written, November 22, 1963 blurs the line between novel and journalism into something more powerful than eithera visceral story of an unthinkable event that continues to touch millions, 45 years later."Michael E. Young, The Dallas Morning News

"Adam Braver's November 22, 1963 focuses on the singular event of President Kennedy's assassination, fusing fiction and fact from eyewitnesses and other sources to make for a blazingly original, brilliantly concretized historical novelfrom the author of Mr. Lincoln's War."ELLE

“Braver has achieved more than a skillful retelling of a particularly morbid moment in American history. With its collage-like structure and postmodern blend of fact and fiction, November 22, 1963 raises fascinating questions about how we perceive history and the ways in which personal and collective experience intersect.”

Alexis Nelson, The Oregonian

"A literary piece that blends fact and fiction, making protagonists of real people and asking very deep questions about the history, nostalgia and loss."Kel Munger, Sacramento NewsandReview

"You would think that by now every and any thing that could have been written about the murder of the president has been said a dozen times over...Yet this outstanding piece of non-fiction fiction from Adam Braver manages to do so, and thus makes the book very much worth the time and money to buy and read." Neil Flowers, Feminist Review

"Bravers use of multiple viewpoints, engaging personal insight, and short blocks of prose propel readers through this impressive example of historical fiction."Library Journal

"Adam Braver has done something that might have seemed impossible not long agohe's created a fresh look at the events of November 22, 1963...Braver has found a way to once again dip into this event that shattered a nation, and reminds us of how devastating a day it was without simply re-hashing what others have written before. It's a bold task for a writer, begin to write about something that every reader picking the ball up already thinks they know the ending to, but Braver was more than up to the task."Dan Wickett, Emerging Writers Network

"This is historical fiction at its best: intensely researched and beautifully written."Erika D., Book Bargain Reviews

"With a captivating mix of fact and fiction, Braver chronicles the events surrounding JFK's assassination to moving effect." Fort Dodge Today

"One may feel drawn into the experience of various characters, while simultaneously treading above some darker, plunging depth. At other moments, there is only the residue of memory, the granite presence of fact...[Braver] writes with the seductive concision of an alternate commission, a tautness that gives authority to speculation and authenticity to the emotional valences, retrained as they are." Ron Slate, On the Seawall

"The successes of November 22, 1963 lie in Bravers ability to gently and respectfully reside, like a professional surgeon might, in the stomachs and minds of the people who lived through that day...Halfway through November 22, 1963, you realize the novel is somehow not about JFK at all, but about us. A lesser writer would have failed at piecing this story together in such a way that we are okay reliving that monumentally awful day, but in Bravers hands, we come back to the present wiser versions of ourselves, if also a bit sadder." PDX Writer Daily

"Bravers novel shows what can be done when a writer delves deeply into the textures and facts of a historical event about which we thought we knew everything. Of course we did not; we never know everything. His curiosity and reconstruction brings to life the human drama in a way that Oliver Stone and a roomful of conspiracy buffs never could. Yet the conspiracy buffs get all the press. Bravers novel deserves a bigger share."Don Graham, Texas Observer