Libra, Dom DeLillo
I selected this as my next book because I’d been wanting to read one of the more modern celebrated authors. Maybe the movie adaptation of White Noise was lingering in my consciousness? What sealed the deal for me was an Amazon review stating that Libra was recommended by James Ellroy, who wrote the incredible American Tabloid which also deals with the JFK assassination.
American Tabloid stands as an obvious comparison point to Libra. I think I like Ellroy’s novel more, because of the insane plot and action. Plus the dialogue is a bit punchier. But DeLillo’s take reaches deeper places because of its focus on Lee Harvey Oswald. By sticking with one character for the most part and really exploring his idiosyncrasies, DeLillo is better able to lay bare the psychological aspects of being America’s most famous assassin.
Reading Libra, I found myself connecting to Lee, which is disconcerting because he is obviously such a heel. Lee lives in a series of fantasies, and he hurts himself and others by trying to enact those fantasies onto the real world. He fancies himself a Marxist and a spy, but blunders about in his attempts to defect to the Soviet Union and marks himself as someone who cannot be trusted by anyone. Lee clearly wants to be a great man of history, someone who is studied in classrooms and books (something he envisions for himself as he sits in a jail cell after shooting Kennedy). But his lack of character keeps him from making any progress–as the book posits, he isn’t even the one who finally assassinates JFK. Lee is a twisted version of the American aspirational loser archetype, the guy who always has another get-rich-quick scheme around the corner (for him it’s fame and importance that he’s most after), and fuck you if you think he doesn’t have what it takes.
I did very much like Libra because it demonstrates that the facts of the JFK assassination–facts which will likely never be known in their entirety–are less important than what we as a nation took away from the act. As DeLillo says, “There are only two things in the world. Things that are true. And things that are truer than true.” The real truth of what happened on 11/22/63, or on any day, matters less than the deeper machinations which fueled it, those actions which we cannot describe with any real clarity but whose pulse we can feel under the skin of reality and which ultimately drive our understanding of our lives.