D. M. Thomas's novel Flying in to Love is a charged, poetic meditation that takes the immediate circumstances of the assassination and expands those minutes in time and space. Before the narrative concludes with Kennedy's death in Dealey Plaza, it moves the reader back and forth in time, and it speculates on what might have happened had JFK not been killed. In the novel, the real shooters, the ones on the grassy knoll, are arrested before they can do their work, and thus after Dealey Plaza, the president takes a tour of Austin and arrives at the Texas ranch of Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson. Thomas gives each moment of the Kennedys' visit here and in Dallas temporal depth, such that he can explore motive and character: Jackie's sadness over the recent loss of her infant son and her well-documented dignity, cultural credentials, and beauty; JFK's uncertainties about policy and his surprising habit of saying his prayers before bedtime. One motive for his womanizing--at least while Jackie is away--is that he hates to fall asleep alone.

Parallel to these temporal and spatial expansions in alternating chapters is the life story of Sister Agnes, a young nun who teaches at the Sacred Heart Convent in Dallas. JFK spots her as his motorcade makes its way to Dealey Plaza, and he stops his car and thanks her for turning up to cheer him on. She says she's proud that a Catholic has become president. JFK shakes her hand and proceeds on his way, thinking of her. He takes from the encounter a powerful sexual attraction to the attractive young nun. She feels the same--though at first she will not acknowledge it. After his death, Sister Agnes becomes wholly obsessed with his image, founding and maintaining a journal, November 22, and a November 22 Museum. The story of her life, taken to 1990, includes her family's story. JFK, in his World War II role in the navy, had instructed her father in PT boat operations. JFK remembers the connection--and at the conclusion of the novel recalls that "Teach" Mason had been dismissed from PT boat training for making improper advances to black kids whom he was teaching to read.

Thomas interweaves with this material the narrative of the conspiracy to assassinate the president. The narrator makes it clear that the real shooters were on the knoll, and a giant coverup concealed all the evidence of this conspiracy. Thomas has sections devoted to Lee Harvey Oswald and Marina Oswald; David Ferrie, the New Orleans District Attorney; Jack Ruby; J. D. Tippit; and, finally, one of the shooters, a gruff, uneducated man named Wayne.

In 1990, Wayne comes to Sister Agnes in the museum to confess what he has done and to ask her forgiveness--nobody else to whom he tells his story will believe him. She accedes to this request, and now the proof is at hand. When Sister Agnes realizes that Wayne is telling the truth, she is elated. She has believed all along that the conspiracy existed.

That night she dreams that she has had sex with Wayne. When she wakes up later, she has lost the ability to read. She drinks a bottle of whiskey and swallows many painkillers. Just in time, one of the other nuns finds her and takes her to Parkland Memorial Hospital. All the players in the Kennedy drama "were inside her, assassins and victims alike . . . The drama had taken up residence in Sister Agnes's mind, and every moment of her life was the moment between firing and impact."

Sex and death are pervasive motifs of the novel. JFK interrupts his breakfast on November 22 to visit Beth Pulman, the wife of one of his party stalwarts who has just had a mastectomy, at Parkland Memorial Hospital (where Kennedy is later pronounced dead). He asks her husband to go to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee and then instructs his Secret Service detail to let no one into the room. Once inside, he undresses and gets into bed with the patient. She is delighted; she had slept with him at the 1960 convention. Years later, on her death bed, she tells all to her daughter, Jane, a student of Sister Agnes's, who had been in the nun's class taking a test on November 22, 1963. Now a Ph.D. in psychology, Jane writes a shrewd paper on JFK's sexuality--printed as a chapter of the novel.

Throughout, Thomas's narrative emphasizes both the human frailty and inwardness of JFK and the powerful imaginative impressions he left behind. But Sister Agnes's response to the death of the president is the central element in the novel's mythologizing of the man and his death. The effect on her represents the effect on the country. Ironically, "Jack," the man whose emotions--so inward, so heavily invested in himself and his role as president and as a Kennedy--make him incapable of real love, lands, on the last day of his life, at Love Field, the Dallas airport where his body is loaded onto Air Force One. Dying, he flies into the mythos of Agnes's (America's) love.

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