In earlier times, the bullet had been other things, because Pythagorean metempsychosis is not reserved for humankind alone.—Borges, "In Memoriam, J.F.K." (trans. Andrew Hurley)Literature is the attempt to interpret, in an ingenious way, the myths we no longer understand, at the moment we no longer understand them, since we no longer know how to dream them or reproduce them. Literature is the competition of misinterpretations that consciousness naturally and necessarily produces on themes of the unconscious, and like every competition it has its prizes. —Deleuze, "Desert Islands" (trans. Michael Taormina)Much of the literature of the twentieth century is a warning against the dream of absolute knowledge. This is less some new thing, some modernism, than a resuscitation of pre-realist narrative modes, from meta-fiction to satire, from Homer to Sterne. Conrad's and Faulkner's broken and partial narratives, Joyce's linguistically constructed reality, Woolf's and Lawrence's insistence on the unconscious, Borges's self-parodic idealism, Nabokov's "game of worlds," and more. The ethical postulate here, compatible both with belief (because God works in mysterious ways) and skepticism (because what do I know?), is that the world will always elude every abstraction. Every abstraction, therefore, should be regarded as the aesthetic production that it manifestly is, and evaluated on its usefulness or beauty. Granted sufficiently rich accounts of beauty and usefulness, accounts capable of encompassing what we think of as knowledge and morality, this ethic has to our artists seemed superior to the murderous self-assurance of the Enlightenment's worser offsprings, legitimate and illegitimate, such as religious fundamentalism and scientific socialism. DeLillo's Libra is a bravura contribution to this tradition. A fictional hypothesis as to the nature and purpose of the Kennedy assassination, the novel portrays a gallery of various intelligence operatives, right-wing extremists, Cuban exiles, and mobsters as they conspire to lure the U.S. into war against Fidel Castro. Their first plan is to simulate a communist assassination attempt against the President, but they eventually get around to plotting an actual assassination for which they will frame a young mysterious man with communist ties. That man, of course, is Lee Harvey Oswald, and Libra gives us in alternating chapters his bidungsroman-cum-tragedy from his youth in the Bronx through his period in Japan with the Marines and his defection to Russia to his falling in with the conspirators in New Orleans and his eventual death at the hands of Jack Ruby. The Oswald chapters of Libra—named for Oswald's astrological sign, symbolic of the suspended judgment in which he lingers—are the novel's glory. I have read about half of DeLillo's novels and so far Oswald is the deepest and most complicated character has has created. A man who feels himself fated to join the current of history, he is in fact subject to chance, whim, and authority. But in the course of his quest for higher meaning, he becomes a kind of roving eye, an observer of the world's panorama, a Cold War flâneur on the cross-haired boulevards. A frustrated writer, dyslexic and desiring to write short stories about American life, Oswald is a largely sympathetic warning about how the aesthetic imagination may go wrong by confusing its visions with the shape of history. DeLillo astoundingly reinvents Oswald as a kind of Raskolnikov or Dedalus, a brilliant young man lost in the labyrinth of his confusion and verging on violence or abandonment. In this way, Oswald mirrors the men who use him to bring their own visions into reality, though all they get of their vision is the President's head half blown off, rather than the deposition of Castro. Likewise, the novel shows through its own elaborate mirroring structures the identity of left- and right-wing totalization. Above or below it all, as the writer's and reader's surrogate, is the CIA historian Nicholas Branch, tasked with writing the history of the assassination but increasingly aware that the construction of a coherent narrative out of the factual morass will be impossible. That this impossibility is convenient to his masters does not escape him, nor should it escape us, but DeLillo takes the step Branch does not and provides an aesthetic reconstruction—literature, an interpretation—out of the event that is both too large in its mythic proportion (slain king, dying young god) and too small in its infinitude of quotidiana to understand. DeLillo's interpretation is partial but openly fictional, and in its quiet emphasis on aesthetic perception, it invites its own critique and contestation, it summons rival visions into being. I haven't look into the Kennedy assassination in many years, but DeLillo's version seems not wholly implausible, at least in its assignment of motives to deep state agents, Cuban exiles, and mafiosi. It bears a superficial resemblance to the case laid out in Oliver Stone's sublimely ludicrous JFK, but whereas Stone presents a paranoiacally seamless and all-but-overt conspiracy, complete with LBJ saying things like, "You'll get your damn war," DeLillo far more convincingly depicts a ragtag operation dogged at every turn by accidents, coincidences, cross-purposes, and mixed motives. If DeLillo's version is not what happened—and he doesn't claim that it is—it is probably a good approximation of how something like this might have happened. Stone's agitprop extravaganza, like so many works of the fascistic imagination ("Remember our fallen king"), is avenged by history through camp. But DeLillo's seriousness of purpose and eye for irony achieves something close to tragedy; he even rescues in advance David Ferrie, one of the novel's most fascinating and sympathetic characters ("This man is strange even to himself"), from Joe Pesci's unforgettably and unforgivably over-the-top performance. (I should note here that students of the historical record argue that Ferrie has never been justly dealt with by any theorists of conspiracy.) These questions of history and politics are all somewhat beside the point, though, due to the novel's own all-but-overt fictionality, its recursive reflections on what it means to be in or to understand history. No arid philosophical exercise, this is a fully inhabited novel. In the famous preface to an infamously ill-named book, Conrad wrote, "A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line." That a novel could aspire to the condition of art in this sense was a new idea in Conrad's time, and he helped set the standard. The standard involves a richness of thought and sensation—what Nabokov called "sensuous thought"—on every page. James said the novelist is a person on whom nothing is lost. A novel is an invention, sentence by sentence; in a potboiler, each sentence must advance the plot, but in an art-novel, each sentence must advance the vision. Libra is so inventive, so surprising on an almost paragraph by paragraph basis, that DeLillo seems never to lose anything. You watch him as if he were a live performer. I can quote almost at random. How a secretary laughs with Ferrie in the homophobic Cold War years:"Why are homosexuals addicted to soap opera?" Ferrie said absently. "Because our lives are a vivid situation."Delphine fell forward in bawdy laughter. Her upper body shot toward the desk, hands gripping the edges to steady her. She sat there rocking, a great and spacious amusement. David Ferrie was surprised. He didn't know he'd said something funny. He thought the remark was melancholy, sadly philosophical, a throwaway line for an aimless afternoon. Not that this was the first time Delphine had reacted so broadly to something he said. She considered his mildest comic remarks automatically outrageous. She had two kinds of laughter. Lewd and bawdy and abandoned, the required worldly response to Ferrie's sexual status, her sense of a kind of anal lore that informed the sources of his humor. Softer laughter for Banister, throaty, knowing, wanting to be led, rustling with complicities, little whispery places in her voice, a laughter you could not hear without knowing they were lovers.How a garage looks, how money looks, how a conspiratorial Sunday feels in New Orleans:Sundays the street was empty and the garage was closed and looked like an abandoned Spanish church inside the lowered grille, with light falling through the high dusty windows. This was where he met Agent Bateman, who had a key to the office. They went through the office and sat in one of the cars set aside for the Secret Service and FBI. He told Bateman what he'd learned at 544 Camp, which wasn't a hell of a lot. He wanted to use the Minox but Bateman said no, no, no, no. He gave Lee a white envelope containing a number of well-wrinkled bills, like money saved by children."Like money saved by children"—and these are incidental moments, near throwaways. But as Woolf also argued, the basic unit of a novel is not the sentence but the chapter. Quoting can't give a sense of the novel's long rhythms, a staccato swell, the tap-tap-tap of DeLillo's little imagist/cubist typewriter paragraphs gathering to a crescendo through a series of advances and retreats. Libra also works by this measure, though aided by history, to be sure. Given the subject matter, this book perhaps has more in common with classical tragedy—the fated hero, the slain leader, the hidden knowledge, the chorus authoritative and aghast—than most modern novels, but by its last sixty or so pages it is positively roaring with the noise of everything coming together, even the things not planned for, with a mystique that only fictional narrative can treat with anything like dignity because all fiction, unlike all conspiracies and conspiracy theorizing, comes under the saving sign of irony, the sign of true-and-not-true, the sign of it-feels-like-this-and-it-seems-like-that, the highest freedom, as Lukács said before making his own entrance into history and into Russia, in a world abandoned by God:That's how it went, that's the kind of summer it was. One day he was going after roaches with a pancake flipper, mashing them flat—one of those soft plastic flippers that are always on sale. He'd lost his job. They fired him because he didn't do the work, which seemed reasonable enough. Storms shaking the city. They shot Medgar Evers dead in Jackson, Miss., a field secretary of the NAACP. Later they would dynamite the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, four Negro girls killed, twenty-three injured. One day he was hunting down roaches in his kitchen, unshaved, wearing clothes he hadn't changed in a week. The next day found him in a gawky Russian suit and narrow tie, with his looseleaf notebook at his side, engaging in radio debate on Conversation Carte Blanche, another public-affairs show on WDSU. This time they'd checked up beforehand and had questions ready about Russia and his defection, catching him by surprise. Working the bolt on the Mannlicher. Cleaning the Mannlicher. They had plans for him, whoever they were. Heat lightning at night. It was easy to believe they'd been watching him for years, working things around him, knowing the time would come.I could criticize elements of Libra, certainly. There are a few conspirators too many, I think, and by the end even DeLillo seems to have lost interest in firmly differentiating between Parmenter and Everett, among Frank, Raymo, and Wayne. I suspect, though obviously cannot prove, that the novel began with an Underworld-like ambition to canvas the America of the Kennedy years, but the tragedy of Oswald becomes grander and more compelling than anatomizing America; at times, I thought the conspiracy material might be usefully relegated to a bookending prologue and epilogue around Oswald's story, however much hard-won research DeLillo would sacrifice and however much stunning prose we would miss. But it it seems ungrateful even to complain about a novel this good written in my lifetime, its characters rescued from the real world and made to live in art, Jack Ruby and Marguerite Oswald, its vision of roiling outcast America, far from New York and Washington, far left and far right, black and Cuban and Catholic and Jewish, a true diversity traduced in today's paeans to "diversity" as dreamed by grim and anesthetic bureaucracies. I would put Libra without hesitation among the great works of assassination and apocalypse and irony and skepticism and national or sub-national epic, with Macbeth and Demons and The Secret Agent and Under the Volcano and Invisible Man, and with all the great warnings not to confuse the map for the territory. Metempsychosis (met him pike hoses) is a real intuition—DeLillo can make us feel that we are Oswald, and Borges's bullet now seems to be incarnate everywhere—but proper material for the artist, the only responsible truth-teller, the one who admits it is all a lie. I would give up this novel for Oswald to have forgotten about history and written those short stories, but I needed this novel to know that.
- Quando è il tuo compleanno?- Il diciotto ottobre, - rispose Lee.- Libra. La Bilancia.- Sì, la Bilancia, - disse Ferrie- L'Equilibrio, - disse Shaw.Quelli della bilancia. Alcuni sono positivi, padroni di sé, equilibrati, con la testa a posto, saggi e rispettati da tutti. Altri invece sono negativi, cioè piuttosto instabili, impulsivi. Tanto, ma tanto, ma tanto influenzabili. Propensi a spiccare il salto pericoloso. In entrambi i casi, la chiave è l'equilibrio.A volte finisci dei libri e non è che ti senti privato di un amico. Ti senti privato di un mondo intero. Finisci dei libri e ti chiedi cosa succede là fuori, perché mai tu sei dentro casa a leggere. Ti portano via un universo. Le ultime pagine. Le lacrime che colano sull'inchiostro. E le domande, le migliaia di domande prima dell'ultima riga. Ti hanno derubato, quando finisci dei libri. Così io mi sono sentito: come se mi avessero tolto ogni certezza. Le certezze derivate da un mese di lettura, da un mese di lettura sulla vita di Lee Harvey Oswald. Ventiquattro anni. Una vita giovane, eppure una vita immensa. Adesso ho bisogno di aria. Ho finito un libro che è poesia. Quando finisci un libro che è poesia è normale che ti venga voglia di uscire a respirare un po' d'aria fresca. È il disfacimento interiore delle proprie convinzioni. Le parole che graffiano, stridono, si artigliano ai tuoi vestiti, ti si accalcano addosso. Non puoi farci niente. Sono gelide e secche, sono lì per fare del male.Ma che cos'è Libra?Io penso che Libra sia Lee Harvey Oswald, e che Lee Harvey Oswald non possa essere altro che Libra. Il romanzo stesso. Tutti i dettagli della sua vita. L'infanzia, la giovinezza, l'amore. L'Unione Sovietica, l'odio per il sistema capitalista. Lee Harvey Oswald è conosciuto dalla maggior parte di noi semplicemente come l'assassino del trentacinquesimo Presidente degli Stati Uniti d'America, John Fiztgerald Kennedy. Ci fermiamo qui e lo odiamo. Pensare a un complotto sarebbe troppo complesso. Un complotto implica centinaia di piste da seguire, centinaia di dati su centinaia di personaggi, tutti coloro che sono entrati in contatto con Lee Harvey Oswald. Perché alla fine gira tutto intorno a lui. Tutto riporta a lui. Sono un capro espiatorio, disse prima di venire ucciso da Jack Ruby."C'è abbastanza mistero nei fatti così come li conosciamo, abbastanza complotto, coincidenza, questioni irrisolte, vicoli ciechi, molteplicità di interpretazioni. Non c'è bisogno, pensa, di inventare la grande macchinazione magistrale, la congiura che si ramifica impeccabilmente in dieci direzioni diverse."Non ce n'è bisogno, già. Ma alla fine non si può far altro. Fu veramente Oswald a uccidere il presidente. Era l'unico a sparare, quel giorno? Ventidue novembre millenovecentosessantatre. Come mai tutte le persone che entrarono in contatto con lui negli ultimi mesi della sua vita morirono pochi anni dopo? De Lillo intreccia ai fatti reali sulla vita di Oswald gli eventi fittizi che darebbero vita a un grande complotto per assassinare il presidente e far pensare che Oswald fosse stato inviato da Cuba, e alimentare quindi una nuova invasione dell'isola dopo il fallimento della Baia dei Porci. Ancora oggi, dopo tre inchieste (una delle quali è la famosa e abnorme Commissione Warren), non si è riusciti a dimostrare che si trattasse di un complotto. E così hanno deciso che è stato lui e basta. Lee Harvey Oswald ha ucciso il presidente. Da solo. Ma noi non leggiamo Libra per sapere questo. Questo lo sappiamo già. Noi leggiamo Libra per sapere se la vita di L. H. Oswald era una vita come tante oppure una vita speciale. E scopriamo, quasi con sorpresa, che era entrambe le cose. Che tutte le nostre vite soneo entrambe le cose. Speciali e normali. Che l'amore è speciale e normale. Che avere una figlia, diventare padre, è insieme una cosa meravigliosa, inaspettata e incredibile, tanto quanto una cosa quotidiana e noiosa.Chi è Lee Harvey Oswald?"L'assistente sociale scrisse: «Le risposte alle domande rivelano che il ragazzo sente fra sé e le altre persone un velo che lo rende irraggiungibile, ma preferisce che il velo resti intatto»."Lee H. Oswald è un ragazzino maltrattato dai compagni di scuola che vive da solo con la madre. Si spostano in continuazione. A dieci anni ha già cambiato sei scuole. Cresce leggendo il manuale dei marines di suo fratello Robert, già arruolato. Poi inizia a leggere letteratura marxista. Si arruola a 18 anni. Nell'esercito gli capita di sbagliare, e viene spedito nel carcere di rigore ad Atsugi, Giappone. Conosce il sistema della prigione americana. Poi, passando per la Finlandia, va in Unione Sovietica. Si innamora di Marina, la sposa, e quando si accorge che il comunismo è tutto tranne quello che pensava, torna in Amerca. Qui viene preso di mira dai servizi segreti americani, ex agenti della CIA che tramano per uccidere il presidente e far partire un'invasione di Cuba. Viene preso di mira perché ha tutte le caratteristiche del personaggio di cui questi congiurati hanno bisogno. È l'uomo perfetto."L'obiettivo principale è che Kennedy muoia.Il secondo obiettivo è che muoia Oswald."Secondo la classica ricostruzione dei fatti, quella che - più o meno - tutti conosciamo, Lee Harvey Oswald sparò tre proiettili in meno di sei secondi. Il primo ferì lievemente il presidente sotto il mento. Il secondo mancò il bersaglio. Il terzo aprì un buco nella testa di JFK. In Libra, quando Oswald sta mirando per sparare il terzo proiettile, nel mirino del suo fucile vede la testa del presidente esplodere, ma non per il suo colpo. Sono un capro espiatorio, disse. E noi, ancora oggi, non sappiamo quale sia la verità.Ma Lee Harvey Oswald era anche il ragazzo che ha saputo amare con tutto se stesso come qualsiasi essere umano. Il ragazzo che passava le notti a fissare la figlia, tanto l'amava. Tornato in America si mise a picchiare Marina, è vero, ma paradossalmente non smise mai di amarla."Il saluto con cui le rispondeva era infantile, un agitar di mano, un piacere profondo e toccante. Sembrava dirle, dalla sua barchetta: - Guardaci, siamo un miracolo, così autentico e sicuro."Quali sono i personaggi che ruotano attorno all'universo di Libra, al mondo di Lee Harvey Oswald?Ce ne sono tanti. Ogni attentatore ha la sua storia, la sua famiglia, i suoi sentimenti. Ogni membro dell'operazione volta ad assassinare Kennedy richiede pagine e pagine di approfondimento. Niente è messo lì a caso. il più rilevante è forse David Ferrie (pilota della marina), omosessuale convinto di avere il cancro."- Dave, tu in cosa credi?- In tutto. Specialmente nella mia morte.- La desideri?- La sento. Io sono la pubblicità vivente del cancro.- Ma ne parli così volentieri.- Perché, avrei altra scelta?"Poi c'è Marguerite Oswald, la madre di Lee. Nei suoi capitoli sembra sempre parlare a un giudice in un'aula di tribunale. Dice che non può spiegare la vita di suo figlio con una semplice deposizione. Deve raccontarla tutta. E i toni con cui racconta sono drammatici, forti, impregnati di un opprimente senso di perdita allo stesso tempo umano e storico. E dopo Marguerite c'è Marina. Marina e il suo amore sincero per Lee, convinta che le cicatrici che lei e il ragazzo portano sulle braccia siano un segno del destino, un segno che li ha fatti incontrare e li farà stare insieme. Ma quando lui comincia a picchiarla, lei inizia a chiedersi se l'ami veramente, pur rimanendo invariato il suo amore per lui.A Marguerite e Marina si aggiunge una carrellata di personaggi più o meno importanti. Ma ognuno di loro, a modo suo, è tragico e malinconico. Ognuno si porta dietro una tristezza infinita, e il lettore sa perfettamente che tutto dovrà culminare con la morte del presidente. Perché è l'anima del complotti, terminare con una morte.Win Everett, ideatore dell'attentato, a tal proposito formulerà questo pensiero:"Le trame possiedono una logica. C'è una tendenza, nelle trame, a evolvere in direzione della morte. Lui era convinto che l'idea della morte fosse insita nella natura di ogni trama. Nelle trame di narrativa come in quelle di uomini armati. Più la trama di un racconto è fitta, più è probabile che approdi alla morte. La trama di un romanzo, credeva, è il nostro modo di localizzare la forza della morte fuori dal libro, di esorcizzarla, di contenerla."Qual è il senso di Libra?Forse DeLillo non aveva un secondo fine. Forse lo scrittore americano voleva solo scrivere un bel romanzo sulla questione documentandosi molto. Ma io credo che abbia voluto dare anche un segnale. Che la vita di ogni essere umano non è semplice. Non si può giudicare da un gesto. Non si può rinchiudere in un istante di tempo e lasciarla lì. Kennedy era un simbolo prima ancora che un uomo. E Lee Harvey Oswald o coloro che sono rimasti nell'ombra l'hanno distrutto. Ma perché? Non sono umani anche loro? Non sono simboli anche loro? Simboli di un America, di un sistema sbagliato?
What do You think about Libra (1991)?
I unintentionally finished this days before the 50th anniversary of JFK's death, which made the whole thing even more enjoyable, if that's the right word. Aside from a bit of the good ole American prose (and its general fear of syntax more complex than subject-verb-object), and brief moments of postmodern angst (can we know anything???), this is an excellent, excellent book. It's easy to read but doesn't ignore the possibility that writing may (I'd go as far as 'should') be noticeable. But most importantly, it's very, very smart. What is an historical novel* meant to do? One character in 'Libra' suggests that history just is the sum total of what we don't know--presumably what we do know being either 'present' or, perhaps, knowing history makes it less likely to have unpleasant effects: if I know x has a history of beating his girlfriends, I'd warn my friend against dating him. Another character suggests that Oswald, who thinks that he wants to enter history, really wants *out* of history: he doesn't want to be a concrete thing, he wants to be a symbol. And of course he has become just that. Most of us know nothing about LHO except the image of him being shot, and despite this ignorance, we also feel that he's the image of America's shift (massive generalization alert) from confidence to neurosis. What we know, in this case at least, is just the symbol. But the symbol is not 'in' history; symbols float free of history. So yes, LHO wanted to get out of history, and he did. He's known. But only as a symbol. What we don't know is the real history. And that's what the historical novel, and narrative art more generally, offers us: some way to understand the messiness of 'history', to burrow under the symbols and decontextualized factoids. Art suggests and plays with what we don't know--here, LHO's personality, wishes and dreams on the one hand, and a possible conspiracy on the other. In other words, the historical novel and conspiracy theories do much the same thing: they try to contextualize symbols, to ground them in history, in the things we don't know. Libra achieves the almost impossible: it confers dignity on LHO and his family by paying attention to history. Conspiracy theories, on the other hand, dignify nobody, except perhaps the theorist in her own eyes. That's not to say that the urge to produce conspiracy theories is blameworthy. They're attempts to understand and get behind the symbols, just like DeLillo's novel. And the novel itself makes it hard to see what difference there might be between art and theory (aside from intelligence and style). I'm sure there is one, but how can I describe it? Right now, I just don't know. *: McCarthy's 'Blood Meridian' was published in 1985, three years before 'Libra'... and both feature a villainous, pederastic man who suffers from Alopecia universalis. Conspiracy?
—Justin Evans
This fucking book, man, it just leaves me at a complete loss for words. I've heard people discredit the terrific work DeLillo did to make Oswald a compelling and complex character - maybe DeLillo's most compelling and most complex character - because Don was working with a real person and therefore had plenty of raw material to go with, but I insist that it takes just as much talent to sculpt what is known of Oswald (his upbringing, his politics, his time in the war) into a real and weirdly relatable anti-hero. DeLillo pulls him out of the realm of history and makes a goddamn person out of him, and all it takes is a maybe-implausible - but certainly, you cannot deny, all sorts of fun to read about - conspiracy to do so. DeLillo uses that conspiracy as a jumping-off point for an in-depth study of Oswald's motivations; his determination to make a mark on history is pulled against by the plot he finds himself wrapped up in, a plot that puts Oswald on strings and pretty much leaves the strings visible. This is what they talk about when they say "character-driven writing."So what does that make Libra? Proof that DeLillo can do character and write in a more traditional mode? Well, it's still DeLillo, so that's not quite the case. Libra may be a character-driven novel, but it's also a thriller, and a thriller in the DeLillo mode, which means he spoofs some thriller conventions (notably the sudden escalations and ridiculously tangled webs of players vs. players), affirm others (the fast pace, the violence, the political undertones), and stay in the DeLillo-space for still others (the paranoia and conspiracies). DeLillo's a smart guy, so it's hard to take this as some YouTube nutjob yelling his head off about the Grassy Knoll and the holes in the Warren Commission, and yet it's equally hard for me to fully buy into DeLillo's disclaimer at the beginning that insists Libra is intended to be pure speculation and isn't supposed to provide any answers. Which I'm sure is the idea, and could even be a little joke on DeLillo's part, since I'm sure he's aware that he's perceived as existing on the brilliant/crazy faultline by his fans and his detractors alike, but it's hard for me to know what to make of this novel, if it was intended as a straight-but-sophisticated historical thriller (I feel Running Dog is more obviously parody, but this isn't Running Dog), even an attempt to legitimatize the genre, or an Eco-style parody of our fascination with the currents of history. It's also hard for me to know if DeLillo honestly believes what he puts out here. I know Kennedy had his enemies and am not naive enough to believe that politicians don't throw other politicians under the bus on the daily, and yet I wonder if this is the ravings of an exceptionally talented lunatic. I know it's an in-depth analysis of the currents of history centered around a fascinating and often demonized figure, but it could also be completely crazy. Or dead the fuck on. Either way, DeLillo's prose is the best it's ever been, the portrayal of Oswald is masterful, and the montage-style climax is out of this world good. Due for a reread.
—Sentimental Surrealist
Kaelan: me too, but I have to disagree. There are two stories in this novel--one good, the other poor (imo). Delillo tries to build up a massively implausible conspiracy story, one that is intermixed with Oswald's story, which is good in its own right. But to be honest, I wasn't even that taken with that element either. I read White Noise and I thought that was just meh too. Delillo has this chopped, parred down style which is serviceable but it is not a style that I would rank with any of the great writers. What he's good at is throwing in these pearly aphorisms or telescoped descriptions--but usually after half a page of pedestrian prose. Perhaps I just expect too much. But having just read Updike's Rabbit Run my opinion has only been strengthened. Just read two pages of that novel and then two pages of this one. There's no comparison who is the better writer (imo).
—James
