The word novel may seldom be more aptly applied to a book than it can be to Jed Mercurio‘s new book American Adulterer. After all, John F. Kennedy is not exactly a figure who has lacked for attention or interpretation, but Mercurio, a British doctor and novelist, has developed a unique approach that truly makes you see Kennedy afresh. Writing in the voice of a clinician, dispassionately treating Kennedy as a subject for behavioral analysis, looking at him in all his roles–husband, father, president, sexual animal, patient–Mercurio gives the reader a sense of what it could have been like to have been Kennedy in real time, a person subject to lots of feelings and impulses, many of them self-destructive. Most effective is Mercurio’s ability to show how Kennedy’s debilitating infirmities, the treatments he took for them, and their own havoc-wreaking side effects, challenged and in some cases may have undermined his ability to lead, and certainly exacerbated his sexual impulses. I don’t know if very many people care about JFK so much anymore; after haunting the American landscape for more than three decades after his assassination, his stature in tragedy seems to have been eclipsed by 9/11, and in hope by Barack Obama. But for those are still interested in the Kennedy enigma, Mercurio’s book does that rarest of things: it lets you see the subject from a new perspective.
Jed Mercurio answered some questions from me:
How did you come to this subject?
The book started with an interest in adultery/sex addiction, specifically a character who’s outwardly virtuous and admirable but who’s private life conceals a compulsive vice. As I developed the protagonist his resemblance to JFK became overwhelming, to the point where my publisher and I agreed that it helped more than hindered the novel for him to become the subject.
Did you come to the device of the clinical narrator from the outset?
The clinical voice arose early, in reaction to the shocking extent of JFK’s physical problems. I needed a narrator who wouldn’t get shocked or else the novel’s tone would become melodramatic. I also needed a narrator who wouldn’t judge the subject morally but would leave that to the reader. American Adulterer considers a physically and psychologically diseased protagonist, encouraging the reader to extrapolate aspects of JFK’s character into universal issues of male sexuality, monogamy and marriage and ask himself/herself what’s “moral” and “normal”. I also felt that later in the novel the style would provide an original and unsentimental gateway to the emotional impact of the Kennedy tragedy.
Did your view of Kennedy change during the course of this project?
The more I studied Kennedy, the more I admired his courage in suffering his chronic medical problems. LIke most people, I found his sexual conduct extreme, but for the sake of the book I needed to remain sympathetic and non-judgmental. The novel is deliberately hagiographic about his Presidency in order to contrast the sex addiction he hid from the American People. It helps the reader see one of my central question’s more clearly: how important is a person’s private vices if in public service they carry out good works?
So very much of the book is based on documentary material. Did you apply rules to your imagination when inventing scenes or discussions?
Although American Adulterer isn’t and can’t be the “truth”, good fiction requires verisimilitude. My primary objective was for those imagined or embellished scenes to appear authentic, and the only rule as such was not to defame anyone in a fashion incommensurate with the historical record, while serving the novel’s ambition to deal with male and female relationships.
Bobby Kennedy is conspicuous by his absence. Why did you decide to eliminate the role of this person who was so very close to JFK?
This was the hardest creative decision I faced in writing American Adulterer. I wanted to invent a fictional but versimilar JFK, but Bobby was so closely involved in many of the President’s political actions that his inclusion would have diluted the hagiographic portrayal of JFK as a politician. I wanted to write about the Kennedy marriage not the Kennedy family – by opening it out to Bobby there’d be the question of portraying other family members; the same applies to other key aides of the President. Finally, I would have had to deal with aspects of RFK’s private life and the facts there are much less clear and much more controversial than his brother’s, e.g. his own alleged affair with Marilyn Monroe – which throws up an ethical issue when his widow is still living.
Do you find that people’s reactions to the novel are governed by their opinion of JFK and/or his family? Do young people who have no personal memory of JFK react to the book differently than older readers?
I haven’t detected an age skew in the reactions, but, irrespective of age, readers bring their own values and sensitivities to a book, and even if you don’t share them you have to acknowledge them. I’d be naive not to anticipate readers bringing their own image of Kennedy to the book, but some will cling to theirs more strongly than others. JFK remains an enigmatic and protean figure. I hope readers will appreciate that aspects of his career and character can be selectively presented to portray him as either a saint or a sinner, and that therefore they’ll understand why American Adulterer isn’t a biography but a thought-provoking novel.