Because in the end, the past isn't obdurate out of cruelty. It’s obdurate because it’s already perfect. Not in its events—but in its irrevocability.
The book is also a love letter to the painstaking process of research and the ordinary heroism of living a decent life. Jake spends years working a 9-to-5 job as a teacher, buying a house, making friends, and falling in love—not as a means to an end, but as the actual story. The assassination is the plot. The life Jake builds is the theme.