Libra

by Don DeLillo

(New York: Penguin Books, 1988)

Hardcover, 458 Pages, Fiction

From the Cover: In his eight previous novels, Don DeLillo has taken on large tracts of the contemporary American experience and created a distinctive world where all ambiguity, dread, and surpassing strangeness of our own time stand forth in high relief. In Libra, DeLillo has given us the novel the shaken American psyche has been awaiting for twenty-five years – a superbly veracious, artistically impeccable, and eerily convincing speculative fiction of the events leading up to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The antihero of Libra is Lee Harvey Oswald, who is as hauntingly real in the book as he was elusive to us in reality. Here he is, as large and as small as life – joining the Marines, poring over Marxist texts, defecting to Russia, taking a potshot at General Edwin Walker, handing out leaflets for the Fair Play for Cuba, imagining himself as an agent of history. Then, “history” presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives, who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on JFK’s life, one that could be linked to Fidel Castro, is the only way to put Cuba back into geopolitical play – and that Oswald is the perfect instrument for their ambitions. We are plunged into the strange half-world of Bay of Pig veterans, rogue agents, right-wing fanatics, Mafia thugs, the whole peculiar mélange from which emerged the most shattering event of postwar history. Oswald’s sign as Libra, the scales – and how he tilts will determine whether Dallas will be just another stop on the political itinerary or the locus of exploded American dreams. From its first page, Libra grips the reader with inexorable fascination; the seams between fact and invention in this book never show, and the characters – both real and created – are imagined with a novelistic virtuosity that is uniquely DeLillo’s. Libra is grave and haunting and brilliant – Don DeLillo’s finest novel to date and surly one of the most important novels of the decade.

My Review: How does one even begin to describe and review such an important book as Libra and do it any sort of justice? When I learned that we would be reading this book in my Contemporary American Literature class, I was ecstatic. I have read Don DeLillo’s White Noise (excellent) and his Falling Man (disappointing), and I have to say that I am impressed beyond words with what DeLillo has done in Libra. This is a novel that is about – perhaps – the seminal event in American history of the 20th-Century (9/11 happened in 2001, and therefore would be part of the 21st-Century) and yet DeLillo gives his Readers no easy answers, and this is what Libra is all about. It is a book that is much bigger that the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. This is a book about history and our perception of history. This is a book that is about how futile it is to try and create a definitive history of something like 12:30 P.M. CST on November 22, 1963 because there are so many threads leading into and away from that moment in Dealey Plaza that one has to answer three important questions: What is significant? What isn’t? And how can I tell the difference? DeLillo’ answer … you can’t tell the difference between the significant and insignificant for a variety of reason, chief of which are (1) it is entirely subjective and (2) how can you know the significance of an event if you don’t even know what really happened in the first place? This quest by the Reader or the Historian to find answers for past events like the JFK Assassination is mirrored by the character of CIA Analyst and Historian Nicholas Branch who is tasked with writing the “secret history” of the shooting. However, in spite of the vast amounts of documents and evidence and files that he has access to, he is unable to get a handle on the shooting and find a “through-thread” that connects all of the evidence into a coherent timeline. This is, I believe, what DeLillo is trying to get at with Libra: history is a complicated and difficult thing to get a hold of, and to try to do so makes it even harder because there is no way to know exactly what is important and what isn’t. What Libra does is takes the JFK Assassination and blows it into a vast million part exploded diagram but it is an exploded diagram that doesn’t make anything because it is impossible to know where every part fits and which parts are important and which aren’t. I know I have been beating that point into the ground, but that’s what I took from Libra: that significance is something subjective and that no matter how many points in history you are able to nail down, there will always be a point of uncertainty that will make so that no historical event can be completely nailed down and have “CASE CLOSED” stamped across it. In Libra DeLillo does this masterfully by using Lee Harvey Oswald as his main character. In this role, Oswald becomes a metaphor for history. The more Branch, or the other characters (including Oswald himself), try to understand him, the harder it becomes to pin him down. The same could be said of history: the more we try to understand history, the harder it is to pin it down. With Oswald, DeLillo is playing with the concept of indeterminacy. Oswald is not a person, he is an ideal. Oswald is an ideal human subject in the same way that history is an ideal social subject. This is because of indeterminacy. We will never know who Oswald was, just as we will never fully know what history is. The bottom line, get a copy of Libra and prepare to have your concepts of history and our understanding of it challenged and exploded into something so vast and with so many parts that you might not be able to be put back together into a coherent narrative ever again.