Mrs. Paine's Garage

November 26, 2001
In his fiction, Mallon (Henry and Clara,
etc.) has looked at history's accidental tourists, ordinary citizens thrust by happenstance into the swirl of cataclysmic events. This time around, he turns a journalistic eye toward a central surviving figure in the Kennedy assassination. In 1963, Ruth Paine, now in her late 60s, was a recently separated housewife hoping to improve her Russian. As a result, she offered to shelter a Russian woman, Marina Oswald, her children while her husband, Lee Harvey, sought work. In the end, Paine, a committed Quaker, unwittingly provided Oswald a sniper's nest—she helped him find employment at the Texas School Book Depository—and storage space, her garage, for arguably the 20th-century's most infamous murder weapon. The views on her association with the Oswalds have run the gamut, from naïve do-gooder to CIA conspirator. Here we meet up with some old faces, seen now through Paine's eyes, such as Jim Garrison, the overzealous New Orleans district attorney determined to uncover a conspiracy. Mallon follows the strange trajectory of Paine's well-intentioned life, from her first meeting with the Oswalds to her voluminous testimony before the Warren Commission to her pursuit of an estranged Marina following the events. Mallon also generates a variety of delicious "what-if" scenarios and "small-world" coincidences. There are a few brambles to hack through at the outset, awkward chronological zigzags and family histories that are tedious in spots. But these patches are soon smoothed out. While not a heavy-hitting historical tome, this may introduce some fresh air on the vast storehouse of Kennedy works. Ruth Paine's is ultimately a human story, the tale of one woman living in America.

Starred review from December 1, 2001
For all the paper tonnage inspired by the murder of John F. Kennedy, it has also produced a small shelf of timeless literary journalism. To Garry Wills and Ovid Demaris's profile Jack Ruby and Jean Stafford's eccentric dialog with Marguerite Oswald, A Mother in History, Mallon adds this portrait of witness Ruth Paine and a life admirably lived in the face of national tragedy. The Oswalds shared Mrs. Paine's house during the months prior to November 22, 1963, when Lee left quietly for work with the rifle he'd secretly kept in the Paines' garage. Most of the too-familiar events in Dealey Plaza gratefully occur offstage in Mallon's telling; his concern is more with Ruth Paine's life with the Oswalds before the assassination and her determination to preserve her life whole in the years after, when so many of the tragedy's other surviving principals became household names in the conspiracy debate. In addition to showing us this Quaker woman's successful struggle, Mallon (Dewey Defeats Truman; Henry and Clara) surveys the culture and "unfinished" national grieving of the Kennedy assassination, contrasting Ruth's earnest diaries and good works with the shrilly sinister online speculations about the Paines made by conspiracists. A first-rate attempt to demystify and bring light to a corner of the assassination story through the humanizing arc of one person's life. [For an interview with Mallon, see p. 146. Ed.] Nathan Ward, "Library Journal"

Copyright 2001 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.