Eric's Reviews > America's Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

A "just the facts, ma'am" kind of book. Not much media history or cultural criticism. Nor much wit. (I had to refresh myself with Wayne Koestenbaum's Jackie Under My Skin from time to time.) I imagine the ideal Jackie book as a novel, a "maximalist" juggle of different styles and forms: part verse (pastiches of Millay for youth, Plath for childbirth and caked blood, Cavafy for age), part epistolary (Sévigné, intimate gossip), part casual social-political chronicle (Saint-Simon's court memoirs, the Goncourt Journal) studded with acidic portraits, and everything pierced through with a lonesome lyricism, like Salter's Light Years, with the enigmatic, essentially solitary wife Nedra.

Their life is mysterious, it is like a forest; from far off it seems a unity, it can be comprehended, described, but closer it begins to separate, to break into light and shadow, the density blinds one. Within there is no form, only prodigious detail that reaches everywhere: exotic sounds, spills of sunlight, foliage, fallen trees, small beasts that flee at the sound of a twig-snap, insects, silence, flowers. And all of this, dependent, closely woven, all of it is deceiving. There are really two kinds of life. There is, as Viri says, the one people believe you are living, and there is the other. It is this other which causes the trouble, this other we long to see.