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A review by christopherc
Libra by Don DeLillo
4.0
Libra is Don DeLillo's 1988 historical fiction of Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a result of painstaking research that prefigured the new wave of interest in JFK conspiracy theories that would erupt in the early 1990s. In DeLillo's imagination, the assassination of JFK was the work of three bitter CIA operatives -- the fictional Win Everett, Larry Parmenter and T.J. Mackey -- veterans of the fight against Castro who cannot forgive Kennedy for denying air support to the Bay of Pigs invasion and thus causing the operation to fail. They feel that an attempt on Kennedy's life, with a tangled thread that leads toward Cuba, will reenergize action to take back the island. Everett painstakingly fakes IDs, all manner of paperwork and elaborate back stories, but when the cabal learns of Lee Harvey Oswald, they find their man is already there waiting for them.
Lee Harvey Oswald is the Libra of the title, born in October and like scales wildly out of balance, he constantly teeters between extremes: a juvenile delinquent who joins the Marines and then becomes Communist and defector to the USSR, only to be disillusioned by the Soviet Union's political system. DeLillo's treatment of the assassin is remarkable: Oswald's innermost thoughts and motivations are on display, everything that makes him tick, and yet we can never crack him like we can the other characters. As David Foster Wallace wrote in the introduction to one edition of the novel, "Libra is proof that the best authors can do anything they want. A book about Lee Harvey Oswald, Libra manages to get into Oswald's head and yet leave him a mystery because DeLillo knows the degree to which some men are enigmas even to themselves."
Another strong point of Libra is DeLillo's ability to maintain tension even though we all know how this will end, that Kennedy will be assassinated and Oswald killed in turn. The reader cannot wait to find how DeLillo's vision of the assassination will fall into place. The author manages to reconcile both the conspiracy/grassy knoll and lone gunmen versions of the event. Oswald proves to be both a despicable thug and a pitiful patsy.
Libra was the follow-up to DeLillo's breakthrough novel White Noise, which depicted America in the 1980s as exhausted by media overload and consumer choice. This concern appears in Libra as well. The sheer amount of data available to DeLillo's CIA librarian writing a secret history of the assassination -- ballistics reports, a computer-enhanced Zapruder film, photographs of the myriad figures implicated -- serves only to obfuscate what really happened on November 22, 1963, not to clarify it. The assassination of JFK and Oswald's murder by Jack Ruby two days earlier was mediated to millions of Americans by television and film, and the endlessly occuring rebroadcast of the events has served to mythologize it like no political assassination before.
Libra is an enjoyable novel and many aspects of it have stuck with me. What holds me back from giving it a full five stars is that too much of the domestic dialogue between the CIA men and their spouses is the kind of unrealistic, oddball conversations DeLillo already indulged in with White Noise: dry listings of factoids, vapid, inane commentary and characters who seem to be talking to themselves in a trance. Nonetheless, don't let that critique hold you back, Libra is fun.
Lee Harvey Oswald is the Libra of the title, born in October and like scales wildly out of balance, he constantly teeters between extremes: a juvenile delinquent who joins the Marines and then becomes Communist and defector to the USSR, only to be disillusioned by the Soviet Union's political system. DeLillo's treatment of the assassin is remarkable: Oswald's innermost thoughts and motivations are on display, everything that makes him tick, and yet we can never crack him like we can the other characters. As David Foster Wallace wrote in the introduction to one edition of the novel, "Libra is proof that the best authors can do anything they want. A book about Lee Harvey Oswald, Libra manages to get into Oswald's head and yet leave him a mystery because DeLillo knows the degree to which some men are enigmas even to themselves."
Another strong point of Libra is DeLillo's ability to maintain tension even though we all know how this will end, that Kennedy will be assassinated and Oswald killed in turn. The reader cannot wait to find how DeLillo's vision of the assassination will fall into place. The author manages to reconcile both the conspiracy/grassy knoll and lone gunmen versions of the event. Oswald proves to be both a despicable thug and a pitiful patsy.
Libra was the follow-up to DeLillo's breakthrough novel White Noise, which depicted America in the 1980s as exhausted by media overload and consumer choice. This concern appears in Libra as well. The sheer amount of data available to DeLillo's CIA librarian writing a secret history of the assassination -- ballistics reports, a computer-enhanced Zapruder film, photographs of the myriad figures implicated -- serves only to obfuscate what really happened on November 22, 1963, not to clarify it. The assassination of JFK and Oswald's murder by Jack Ruby two days earlier was mediated to millions of Americans by television and film, and the endlessly occuring rebroadcast of the events has served to mythologize it like no political assassination before.
Libra is an enjoyable novel and many aspects of it have stuck with me. What holds me back from giving it a full five stars is that too much of the domestic dialogue between the CIA men and their spouses is the kind of unrealistic, oddball conversations DeLillo already indulged in with White Noise: dry listings of factoids, vapid, inane commentary and characters who seem to be talking to themselves in a trance. Nonetheless, don't let that critique hold you back, Libra is fun.