This page lists the known reviews of Don DeLillo's 1988 novel, Libra.
Not to have read DeLillo is to have missed out on our most original and talented writer.
The density of DeLillo's ideas and observations can produce a kind of circuit overload, making this a book that needs to be absorbed over time. And the moments in Dallas, when they come, pale before the immense tension and expectation that has developed by then. But Libra is electrifying, a book alive with suggestion.
Libra also has some real problems. For me the looming one is its sheer pretension. Early on, the book seems to announce itself as significant because this supposedly is the big subject in recent America, one that supposedly demands a big novel, as the character Nicholas Branch observes. But overall the package never delivers what fiction must to be successful, what separates it from, let's say, psychology or history: to make us feel that we are indeed living it, that its reality is as real as, or more revealingly real than, our own reality.
But in Oswald's mother DeLillo has come up with the most striking fictional innovation in a decade or more. What he has discovered is that the true dialogue of the underdog is the monologue, because nobody listens or answers.
In addition to its impressive array of characters, Libra is also broad in scope - from the Bronx to Japan to Russia, and inevitably, Dallas. In fact, it is this inevitability that gives the book its greatest strength. Readers already know how it's going to end; it's the why that DeLillo makes us care about most.
Although the author seems to be averse to the term, Libra is a form of fictionalized history. It has some of the form's disadvantages, which I will get to, and the strengths as well. In the hands of a writer of DeLillo's fierceness and subtlety, the strengths are supercharged.
DeLillo's touch isn't always flawless. Branch's philosophical ruminations about the assassination and the nature of reality are often wearying. His toying with shades of meaning perhpas reflect DeLillo's doubts more than his own. Still, Libra is a masterful thriller, as suspenseful as Day of the Jackal viewed through the Jackal's eyes.
What's most impressive about Libra besides its intelligent, comprehensive, logical, and believable reading of the mysterious facts of Oswald's life, is the author's restraint. In DeLillo's earlier fiction, hyped and wildly imagined, plots are legion, ironies bloom at every turn, and cynicism is as present as the air.But in Libra he has found a story beyond imagination, one whose significance is indisputable and ongoing (Bay of Pigs veterans are linked not only to Dallas but to Watergate and Iran-contra), and he carefully hews to known facts and approaches all events with respect, even awe. By giving Oswald and the forces he represents full body, DeLillo has writen his best novel.
DeLillo, of course, has other matters on his mind, like a CIA conspiracy, and the Mafia, and Cuban swamp rats. What he's saying about modern America is that there's no coherence, no community, no faith, no accountability, merely hum. In a faithless culture, death is the last kick left to us, paranoia is a kind of explanation, and conspiracy is almost religious. In a random and conincidental universe, we require a new black magic, a theology of secrets. Against anarchism, nihilism, terrorism, why not an occult of the intelligence agency, the latest in Gnostic heresies? But with Marguerite he has also given us the Monster Mother indispensable to male American novelists.
But language is DeLillo's plastique. He composes out of gnarled speech - funny, vulgar, gnomic - stunning cantatas for the damned to sing. Libra is as choral as it is cinematic. Marguerite's the scariest mother since Faust, and David Ferrie, with his homemade eyebrows, mohair toupee and the land minds in his kitchen, seems to speak to us through the cavities in our teeth.
For Branch, the Warren Report is "the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he'd moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred."Libra is itself an achievement of this order and, while stressing the scale and complexity of its themes, one should also emphasise the innumerable incidental felicities that await the reader: obliquely formulated glimpses of landscapes, weather, streets and gestures; sentences that come out sounding like long corrugated nouns; ideas that explode on impact... And who else but DeLillo would have a husband turn to his wife and say, "Men swaggering into saloons. Thirsty from cattle drives"?
Though he is yet to write a work as prodigious as Gravity's Rainbow or as sensational as An American Dream, Don DeLillo has, with nine novels to his credit, supplanted both Pynchon and Mailer as the chief shaman of the paranoid school of American fiction....
There is a price to be paid for all of this staccato vividness. One hardly has time to become absorbed in a particular episode before there is a sudden cut to a very different, equally spotlit scene. The result is a fragmentation of the reader's attention and a consequent diffusion of emotion. No doubt this effect is deliberate - one has encountered it before in DeLillo's fiction, notably in Running Dog. It suggests that the author intends to create a kind of Brechtian alienation, to put a distance between the reader and such highly charged material in order to focus on the more abstract or ideational elements of the case.
Why then, lacking great surprise or tension, does the novel eventually work so powerfully, starting slowly, almost tediously, but gathering momentum like thunder from a far horizon that finally splits the sky?
At what point exactly does fact drift over into fiction? The book is so seamlessly written that perhaps not even those people who own both upstairs and downstairs copies of the Warren report could say for certain. Oswald's mother, for instance, with her nonstop, plaintive, sometimes unwittingly comic stream of talk, was probably willing to speak to any newsman who poked a microphone in her face; and therefore Mr. DeLillo had merely to transcribe her long-ago monologues. Or did he? Other voices are equally convincing, and yet obviously not all of those could have been taped.
The thrill of reading Libra is at least partly illegitimate: we're startled, and disturbed, at taking such keen aesthetic pleasure in this terrible story, at watching ourselve submit so helplessly to the grip of DeLillo's feverish reverie. The novel leaves us feeling spooked, and vaguely guilty over our enjoyment of it, and thus identifies us both with DeLillo, the self-spooked author of this fantasy history, and with the character he has invented as the author of the assassination plot.
In Libra he's chosen a subject that gives his dire imagination a firm grounding in catastrophic history. He boldly enters the minds of Lee Oswald, his wife, Marina, and Oswald's bizarre mother, Marguerite, inventing a convincing interior voice for each of them. He is particular successful in bringing to life the sweaty, pill-popping club owner Jack Ruby, who kills Oswald, in DeLillo's version of the story, to settle a $40,000 debt to the mob.
Often the novel seems less devoted to the events of 1963 than to general considerations of the mind's ability to turn itself into a hopeless tangle of facts, memories, fears and hopes. Most of all, it is about the allure, the addictive power of secrecy. "Secrets," says one of the CIA veterans, "are an exalted state, almost a dream state. They're a way of arresting motion, stopping the world so we can see ourselves in it."
Like incantations, compounding secrets echo in the minds of DeLillo's characters, shaping their private worlds and replacing conventional morality. "This is a world inside the world," the young, bullied Oswald tells himself. Meanwhile, his own burgeoning schizophrenia echoes in CIA operatives ("spawning secrets that quiver like reptile eggs") who seek a pro-Castro crackpot to miss the president and get caught. They are the ones who turn the White House into "a summit of unknowing ... as if an unsullied leader redeemed some ancient truth which the others were forced to admire only in the abstract, owing to their mission in the convoluted world."
DeLillo develops his intricate plot with cinematic bravura. There are flashes back and forward in time, and jump cuts between the conspirators and Oswald, who is growing up to be exactly the kind of person the CIA renegades had planned to invent: a malcontent and misfit with a known fondness for Castro and guns. Slowly, dimly, Oswald begins to realize that his is being watched, people have designs on his destiny. Someone who knows what is cooking spells it out for him: "You're a quirk of history. You're a coincidence. They devise a plan, you fit it perfectly." The lecturer concludes, "There's a pattern in things."
DeLillo's language is new and far removed from the European roots of American novelists that included Updike and Bellow. It is the voice of a different civilization - alien, spare, and impressive.
Libra is not perhaps the Great American Novel that everyone seems to want from DeLillo. There are brilliant fragments, there is the rare spectacle of an author entirely at home with his material, but the reader stumbles away conscious of a story that is rather too concerned with its own inner logic. "The tighter the plot of a story, the more likely it will come to death," somebody speculates early on. This is just portentous. But where DeLillo succeeds he does so convincingly. Even at a quarter of a century's remove, even with all the swirling contradictory data, this you feel, is America, and the bad news starts here.
The main events took place on television and yet are still opaque. The official story was empiricism pushed to the point of obfuscation. No one will ever get beyond hypothesis - a term of abuse these days anyway - which means, as Moynihan feared, that the argument will go on forever, coming up empty. Only a novelist can attempt to decode it now, and DeLillo has made the attempt with scruple as well as with considerable dramatic panache. Cutting along the ragged seam that run between politics and violence, between the grand peurs of the century and the localized, banal madness of "ordinary" life, he has shown what monstrosities result when reason even so much as nods off.
DeLillo books are inward surveys of the white supremacist soul - on the run from mounting eveidence that its days are (as the latest in black militant button-wear loves to inform us) numbered. The suspicion that history, the Hegelian verison with a capital H, is about to revoke their membership privileges rears up in these protagonists as neuroses, superstitions, and full consciousness that they're strutting around in the emperor's new clothes. DeLillo delivers portrayals of the white supremacist male as Other, as the savage with the heart of darkness whose civilization has become his jungle. Describing in name-brand detail the degree to which that jungle runs on irrationality has become DeLillo's stock-in-trade.
DeLillo's attempt to "follow the bullets' trajectories" back into the minds of Lee Harvey Oswald and others becomes yet another exercise in blaming America for Oswald's act of derangement. It is valuable only as a reminder of the toll that ideological virulence takes on literary talent.
Leaving aside for the moment the problems inherent in fictionalizing the actual, the greatest disappointment of Libra is that DeLillo does not come within shouting distance of making a plausible or interesting character out of Lee Harvey Oswald. This strange, unknown and perhaps unknowable man was the instigator of what DeLillo calls "the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century," yet here he is portrayed as little more than an anonymous American of "mixed history" who sees himself as "a zero in the system" and longs "to reach the point where he was no longer separated from the true struggles that went on around him."