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A review by ishevlin
Libra by Don DeLillo
5.0
Normally not drawn to historical fiction, I was happily coerced into reading this fictional account of the life of Lee Harvey Oswald. While a lot of the looping facts and speculations are hard to keep track of unless you're fairly well-versed in the JFK assassination mythology, the novel itself is a faithful exploration of the intricate, often contradictory and marvelously coincidental nature of causation, the profound impact of the most subtle influence of one human on another, and the shockingly organized disarray of tormented minds. As usual, DeLillo's most potent genius is in his details: Oswald sees a dime on the floor of the book repository, picks it up and wipes it off before pulling his trigger, demonstrating the mindless humanness of an ordinary moment right before a catastrophe.
As he did in White Noise's "Most photographed barn in America" and in Underworld's meditation on the American obsession with baseball, DeLillo explores the peculiar tenor of group experience in the crowd scenes at Dealey Plaza: "A contagion had brought them here, some mystery of common impulse...They were here to be an event, a consciousness..."
And while the story follows many individual and collective voices, the most haunting is that of Marguerite Oswald, Lee's mother, weaving in and out of the narrative, grasping to piece together the larger story of her son's life-gone-wrong. A woman with limited education, reasoning, and self-awareness asking "Who arranged the life of Lee Harvey Oswald?" A question that points both to a sense of conspiracy and a more pervasive sense of helplessness and chaos.
On the subject of conspiracy, DeLillo offers this: "If we are on the outside, we assume a conpsiracy is the perfect working of a scheme... Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach." What he presents in Libra isn't an outline of a conspiracy or an argument for chaos, but an illustration of how easily the scales can be tipped in one direction or the other.
As he did in White Noise's "Most photographed barn in America" and in Underworld's meditation on the American obsession with baseball, DeLillo explores the peculiar tenor of group experience in the crowd scenes at Dealey Plaza: "A contagion had brought them here, some mystery of common impulse...They were here to be an event, a consciousness..."
And while the story follows many individual and collective voices, the most haunting is that of Marguerite Oswald, Lee's mother, weaving in and out of the narrative, grasping to piece together the larger story of her son's life-gone-wrong. A woman with limited education, reasoning, and self-awareness asking "Who arranged the life of Lee Harvey Oswald?" A question that points both to a sense of conspiracy and a more pervasive sense of helplessness and chaos.
On the subject of conspiracy, DeLillo offers this: "If we are on the outside, we assume a conpsiracy is the perfect working of a scheme... Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach." What he presents in Libra isn't an outline of a conspiracy or an argument for chaos, but an illustration of how easily the scales can be tipped in one direction or the other.