ENTERTAINMENT

One of the pivotal moments in the 20th century and a touchstone for generations of Americans, the darkest day in Dallas history is usually depicted in bold strokes of mythic proportions. But in November 22, 1963, Adam Braver takes a much different view, building this story around myriad details and characters from the margins of history.

Jackie Kennedy is the center of Mr. Braver's fictionalized account of President John F. Kennedy's assassination. In our cultural memory, she is remembered mostly as the beautiful widow veiled in black lace, or the woman in pink scrambling across the limousine after the bullets find their mark.

To Mr. Braver, though, Jackie is both fragile and strong, exhausted after the death of her tiny son, Patrick, apprehensive about her husband's safety in politically torn Texas, and finally, steely as she faces the future, her first task planning the state funeral of her husband, dead only a few hours.

But it's the details, real and imagined, about characters largely forgotten, that tell the emotional story of this American tragedy.

There's Bobby Hargis, a Dallas motorcycle cop who frets when JFK stops the procession to wade into a crowd, and later, aghast, wipes bits of the president's brains from his face.

The chapter on Abraham Zapruder opens with the operating instructions for the Bell & Howell 414 DP Discovery Series Movie Camera, then follows him step by step from his business in the Dal-Tex Building to the parade route where he recorded the president's passing.

We eavesdrop on Jackie and Bobby Kennedy as they await the completion of the autopsy. We meet Vernon O'Neal, the funeral home director in Dallas who supplies his best casket for the president, then wrestles for months for payment. We listen as Maud Shaw, the Kennedy children's nurse, prepares to tell them their daddy has gone to heaven to be with the baby brother they'd lost just weeks before.

And we catch a few shared moments between the president's widow and ambulance driver Al Rike at Parkland Hospital, where he gives the first lady a cigarette, and then touches her hand briefly, helping her to push her wedding ring on her dead husband's finger.

Beautifully written, November 22, 1963 blurs the line between novel and journalism into something more powerful than either – a visceral story of an unthinkable event that continues to touch millions, 45 years later.November 22, 1963

Adam Braver

(Tin House Books, $14.95)