By Rob Cline, correspondent

In Ellen Feldman's 'The Unwitting” (Spiegel & Grau, 286 pages, $26), a central character is killed in an apparent mugging on the same day John F. Kennedy is assassinated. As Kennedy's legacy is both burnished and tarnished in the aftermath of his death, the coincidence serves to highlight one of the major themes of the novel: our public selves and our private selves are not always the same, even when our public audience is made up of those we hold most dear.

The majority of the novel is narrated by Nell Benjamin, who tells the story of her life on the left during the Cold War. Her husband, Charlie, is the editor of a literary magazine that extolls values Nell believes in, though not always in as strong or timely a manner as she would like. In the course of the novel, her world is shattered twice, first when Charlie is killed and then again when she learns of a secret he'd been keeping that calls everything she believed about him and their relationship into question.

Nell is an engaging narrator, who builds suspense without unduly teasing the reader with vague foreshadowing. Here, for example, she sets up a key scene that will be returned to later in the book: 'This is what Charlie told me about his lunch with Elliot McClellan as we sat in La Cave Henri IV, where we went to celebrate that night. I'm not suggesting that my memory is infallible. All you have to do is listen to two people recount the same incident to know that no one's is. But I'm not forgetting part of the story. I know now that Charlie never told it to me.”

Nell has a secret of her own, and late in the book attempts in vain to balance the moral ledger of her marriage. Feldman smoothly crafts a way to let Charlie tell a portion of his own story, and she doesn't seek a tidy resolution. 'The Unwitting” finds its story in the ambiguities and compromises that are part of every life and relationship.

Rob Cline is a writer and published author, marketing director for University of Iowa's Hancher and director of literary events for New Bo Books, a division of Prairie Lights.