Libra is a 1988 novel by the great American writer Don DeLillo. He is probably most known for 1985’s White Noise which was recently adapted (unsuccessfully) on Netflix by Noah Baumbach.
I have the hardcover Viking version shown below. Mine is protectively wrapped, with the stamp of Public Library | Redwood Falls, MN 56283 on the inside cover. I must have purchased this book years ago at an event called Book’em. This event was magical. People would donate books to support the local firefighters and they sold them at $0.50 for a softcover and $1.00 for a hardcover. Over the years I picked up many a book at this glorious offering.
This is my third DeLillo novel. I started with White Noise (probably the natural starting point) and then read 1997’s Underworld. I enjoyed both novels. I particularly remember absolutely loving the final 30 pages or so of Underworld. They were mesmerizing. I had attempted to start this book previously, but was in a deep streak of non-fiction reading and just couldn’t summon the emotional energy to pour myself into a narrative fiction. Now, in more of a fictional streak, there was no impediment.
The summary for Libra is simple. It’s the story of the John F. Kennedy assassination told through the eyes of Lee Harvey Oswald with Jack Ruby and an assortment of rogue CIA operatives. The primary narrative and emotional heft of the novel center around DeLillo’s representation of the odd and isolated figure of Oswald.
DeLillo is an interesting writer in the way he seeks to get to the heart of American consciousness. He specifically writes about the monumental events present in the second half of the 20th Century. Nuclear war and consumerism as prime examples of this. The JFK assassination is no exception to this trend.
I have no direct relationship with the JFK assassination. I’ve noted November 22, 1963 as a historically significant date. I’m aware of the intrigue and conspiracy surrounding the event. I have a surface level understanding how the assasination really became the origin point for modern conspiracy, fear of the deep state, distrust of the CIA, and so on. I can imagine how shocking the murder of a president must have felt to the nation, especially during a time where people felt that widspread positive change was occurring.
Not having a closeness with the assassination surely must color my reading of this novel. In short, the book is DeLillo’s attempt at making sense of what happened. Of coming to terms with a confusing and confounding series of events which seem only to point towards conspiracy. It’s like he’s seeking catharsis in his explanation.
They had to take it all the way. It was a revelation to him that in the moment he saw what had to be done, feeling the crash of air on the hood of the car, he felt the oddest goddamn sympathy for President Jack.
For me, and maybe many of you, the defining event of my lifetime is 9/11. America was irrevocably changed on that day. It’s been 22-years since the towers fell. In some ways I think we are still grappling with what happened. It is through this lens that I am attempting to understand the power of this novel. Libra was published 25-years after the assassination.
The novel is told in the third person. It’s a very modern style and flows so well you barely notice. I’m very much a fan of 19th Century novels, but it is remarkable how the they have evolved over time. For example, in something like David Copperfield, you very much feel Dickens. He’s there, coloring the world, guiding you through it. In Libra you don’t sense an omniscient DeLillo, just the characters themselves.
We begin with Oswald as a young boy in New York City. The narration follows him as as he grows older. He enlists for the Marines and finds himself in Japan. He becomes enamored by leftist-marxist theory. He longs for the Soviet Union. To be a cog in the great machine of progress.
Oswald’s story is intercut by flitting through the viewpoint of various ex or current CIA operatives who were responsibly for planning the invasion of Cuba. These men were all involved in the disastrous Bay of Pigs. These men are capable, intelligent, and highly disillusioned. They are betrayed by their country, left as outcasts now, men without purpose who cannot face what happened.
The beginning of this book can be a bit confusing. It’s easy to track the path of Oswald. The many faced conspirators can be difficult to keep hold of. Eventually the focus tightens and we begin to grasp the main players in the drama. Near the middle of the book this narrowing of focus really helps the novel to move well
The conspiracy continues to grow and Oswald becomes a defector and marries a Russian woman. He eventually gives up on the Soviet Union and crawls back to the United States, living in New Orleans and Dallas. He becomes the perfect embodiment of the wraith of an assassin the conspirators long for. Eventually their paths collide.
We know where the story is headed. We know what Oswald did that day. We know what Jack Ruby did. We cannot really answer the biggest question of why? The why is what DeLillo offers. To me though, it’s not the mechanics of who did what and where, it’s about the how and the why. Those are the interesting questions.
So the novels pulls us along and we cling to the story, not asking these standard questions as if in a Sherlock Holmes story. No, we are more interested in the representation of emotional truth. Of following the trajectory of someone willing to stand in a window sill and pull a trigger.
Three times he’d asked her to live with them in Dallas. Three times she’d said no. She stood by the bureau thinking. It was a well-known pattern, things that happened in threes. There was a certain dark power to the number three. She’d noticed all her life how it meant bad luck.
The power of this novel is in the crafting of that story. In the creation of something plausible. It becomes emotionally real. In that realness it becomes easy to accept this story as the truth of what happened. If you can accept it, does it cure the fever of speculation?
You blend the soothing of a fake truth with a cast of wild characters, as if out of a Michael Mann thriller, that are bent on conspiracy and personal justice, and you have a compelling story. Weave in the brilliant writing and insights from DeLillo and you have something worth reading.
“I’ll tell you what it means, these orbiting sensors that can hear us in our beds. It means the end of loyalty. The more complex the systems, the less conviction in people. Conviction will be drained out of us. Devices will drain us, make us vague and pliant.”
Musical Pairing: Half Life I, Arcade Fire