cover image Jackie by Josie

Jackie by Josie

Caroline Preston. Scribner Book Company, $22 (288pp) ISBN 978-0-684-83077-3

Part academic sendup, part heartwarming family story, Preston's debut novel is the story of Josie Trask, a 28-year-old Brown University graduate student who can't seem to finish her Ph.D. thesis on an obscure American poet. While her husband, Peter, is hard at work on his dissertation on the popular culture of 1966, the year of his birth, Josie is more caught up in raising their three-year-old son, Henry. So, when a celebrity biographer offers to pay her big bucks to spend a few months researching the life of the recently departed Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis for a quickie unauthorized tell-all biography, Josie jumps at the chance. Before she can say ""Hyannis Port,"" she and Henry have moved in to her mother's house near the Kennedy Library, and Peter has departed for summer school in California, accompanied by the flirtatious Monica, a fellow grad student. The narrative weaves together Josie's jealous fears of losing Peter and her concerns about her unhappy childhood and her mother's drinking with a healthy dose of (often outrageously apocryphal) Jackie lore. Competently written, the book neatly skewers academia and energetically forces every possible connection between Josie's life and Jackie's history. As she becomes more familiar with the woman inside the myth of Camelot, Josie realizes that Jackie isn't the only one skilled at making up stories about her life. Unfortunately, the various plot lines end up so neatly resolved that one longs for the untidy--but far more interesting--magic of Jackie's real-life odyssey. (Feb.)