From the outside . . . looking in

Certain events resist the impulse of fiction. The assassination of John F. Kennedy is one. It’s too big, too mythic; in its ambiguity and scope, it approaches Greek tragedy. In the decades since that motorcade in Dallas, only Don DeLillo’s 1988 novel, “Libra,” has managed to get at the essential strangeness of the saga as hundreds of nonfiction books have done.

For DeLillo, the key was to look at fringes of the story, to focus not on Kennedy or even the idea of national crisis, but on the cipher of Lee Harvey Oswald. In Oswald, he was able to discover his own passage through the narrative, to take the public drama and redirect it toward what fiction has always been so effective in evoking -- a sense of character, of individual identity.

Adam Braver’s fourth novel, “November 22, 1963,” brings a similar intention to the assassination, finding meaning less in historical events than in the interstices of daily life. Taking place over the course of about 20 hours -- from the time the Kennedys woke up at Fort Worth’s Hotel Texas to the moment the president’s casket arrived at the White House -- it is a kaleidoscopic portrait of the day of the killing, told from a variety of points of view.

There’s Bobby Hargis, the Dallas motorcycle cop who ended up with the president’s brains splashed across his face.

Or Maud Shaw, nursemaid to the Kennedy children, pressed into telling them about their father’s death.

At the center of it all is Jackie Kennedy, another cipher-like figure, whose experience of the assassination (as a person, that is, rather than as a witness) has always been, astonishingly, overlooked.

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.

Later, Al helps her slip her wedding ring onto the president’s finger, “[h]er hand graz[ing] his as she pushed with a little more force.”

That’s a little bit of nothing, a moment so small it evaporates almost before it’s finished. And yet, in this tiny glimmer of connection, whole universes of emotion are uncovered, “[a]ll these bits and pieces . . . turning into a story that will be told so many times that it ends up true.”

This is a key idea, that even here, meaning arises from the stories we tell. To highlight that, Braver stays away from much of the principal action, focusing on the edges, the periphery. We hardly see the shooting, except in Jackie’s memory; the president and Oswald are barely present either, as if not really part of the narrative.

It’s a risky choice, but it pays off because, 45 years later, the only way to see this story afresh may be to observe it on purely human terms. “[E]ven in the strongest of moments,” Braver writes of Jackie in her hotel room that morning, “she’d been aware of the fragility of the ground where she walked. These days, for the most part, she could expect the feeling to pass. But every once in a while, she found that she needed to sit down. Put her feet up. She was afraid that a single step might shatter everything.”

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david.ulin@latimes.com