How do you write a book about protest? Or write a book that is, in some sense, a protest itself?

Or rather, how do you write a book—or more broadly, create a work of art—that offers an image of protest, or lodges a social complaint, without such a work becoming a work of propaganda itself?

There’s one in particular I’m thinking of, in these vexed times: the 2002 “nonfiction novel” Mrs. Paine’s Garage, by Thomas Mallon. Born in 1951, Mallon is chiefly known as a historical novelist, perhaps most famously for Fellow Travelers, which documents a gay romantic liaison within and around the institutions and agencies of McCarthy-era Washington.

That’s just one of his historical treatments of this postage-stamp terroir, which also includes the novels Watergate (which I might read) and Reagan (which I probably won’t). He was a faculty member at Bread Loaf the summer I was a Scholar there long ago, and if I recall correctly, everyone was dazzled by his prose, but perplexed by the specificity of his historical preoccupations. (This was during the long tail of Minimalism.)

I’d first read Mrs. Paine’s Garage a few years ago, after pulling it from a Little Free Library in my neighborhood park. But when I went to find it while I was writing this essay, I could not for the life of me locate it, scanning the crowded shelves of the big IKEA Kallax in my bedroom for my original edition, with its quiet design and wan black and white photograph of the book’s namesake, the original Ruth Paine, along with Marina Oswald and children in the busy kitchen of her modest suburban house. This modesty would come to seem significant to me.

Marina Oswald is in Ruth Paine’s kitchen because Ruth, a recently divorced mother and earnest Quaker in 1963 suburban Dallas, had endeavored to learn Russian, met and then invited Marina and Lee Oswald and their children to come live with her; and thus unwittingly entered into history.

Mrs. Paine’s Garage is the account of that invitation, and its long-reaching consequences. We learn from Mallon’s introduction that the book was put together from interviews with Paine, her children, and contemporaries from her circle, as well as a meticulous review of historical sources. The narrative begins, in medias res, on the ominous evening of November 21, 1963, when Marina Oswald is already living with Ruth, and where Lee, who usually only comes back on the weekends from his job downtown at the Book Depository, unexpectedly comes home for the night.

You know, of course, what happens next. The dramatic urgency of the book, however, derives not from those events, but from the painstaking manner in which it shows the emergence of Ruth’s moral orientation, which we know will ultimately collide with the media phantasmagoria of the Assassination.

This is a book about facts, the effort to compile the narrative of how Ruth became who she was—the Antioch College graduate, the Young Friends member who wangles herself into a Middlebury summer program to learn Russian, and ends up trying to tutor it at the patrician St. Mark’s School.

It’s apparent early on that Ruth Paine’s notions about cross-cultural friendship are rather too earnest, if not naive, along with a blindness of the potential problems/evils that getting involved with a former defector to the Soviet Union might pose—which she will find out about soon enough.

Here’s just one example: having agreed to take in Marina and some of the Oswald’s belongings to her house, there is this:

“Among the goods carried into the garage were a well-tied green and brown blanket roll containing a bolt-action Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. The only adult there who didn’t know that Oswald owned it was Ruth—the only person who wouldn’t have allowed it anywhere in the house.”

What is striking, though, is the integrity and honest moral reflection that Ruth brings to her efforts to serve others. And her slow—too slow—turn to act on her suspicions about what Oswald might be up to, is nonetheless imbued with her immense care to know exactly what is going on before she proceeds, hand-copying a letter that appears to implicate him in transnational espionage, and a possible turn back to the Soviets.

That also goes for Mallon. On every page, we see the sweaty effort to pin down exactly what happened, and what it meant. Consider this passage, a brilliant stone in the mosaic of the otherwise shattered date of November 22:

“Between developments, newscasters were beginning to locate, and create, parallels between the killings of Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln, whose funeral was being researched, at Jacqueline Kennedy’s request, by flashlight-carrying aides in the stacks of the Library of Congress.”

It is this very precision, in fact, that makes this story hypnotic, the close arrangement of what must have been drawn from the range of interviews Mallon himself conducted, and more ominously, from the FBI and other records after the assassination. Whereas other accounts about Oswald like Don DeLillo’s Libra purport to show the hollow unreality at the heart of what I guess we could call The American Paranoid, this is a book that holds that there is indeed a Truth, and that it can be assessed, built with bricks, constructed from a thorough analysis.

And at the heart of this remarkable book is Ruth Paine. The remainder of the book traces her own tragedy as the catastrophe of the assassination continues to echo throughout her life.

But Ruth herself, in Mallon’s telling, remains at the middle, her values substantially the same, and uncompromised. Even if you end up thinking she’s a bit too misguided (and there are conspiracists who claim she is part of the conspiracy too), there is absolutely no bullshit artistry here—either on the part of Ruth, or on the part of Thomas Mallon. Without guile is the Biblical phrase that comes to my mind.

I can think of no better way to protest at this time—other than, like Ruth, to tell the truth.

Caroline Langston was a regular contributor to Image’s Good Letters blog, and is writing a memoir about the U.S. cultural divide. She has contributed to Sojourners’ God’s Politics blog, and aired several commentaries on NPR’s All Things Considered, in addition to writing book reviews for Image, Books and Culture, and other outlets. She is a native of Yazoo City, Mississippi, and a convert to the Eastern Orthodox Church. She lives outside Washington, D.C., with her husband and two children.