Libra (1988)

I was hoping to like Don DeLillo’s 10th novel (and nominee for a National Book Award) more than I actually did. It reminded me of three things that all came later: director and cowriter Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie JFK, Norman Mailer’s lengthy journalistic account of Lee Harvey Oswald in his 1995 Oswald’s Tale, and Stephen King’s 2011 science fiction novel 11/22/63. In all cases the author (or auteur) marinated for years or decades in JFK assassination lore, with all its tantalizing red herrings, and then regurgitated a unified field theory of just what happened, more or less. Libra is among the early versions of this exercise, favoring the sinister CIA bloc of theorists. It’s early enough that it predates what has evolved into the before and after debunking of Gerald Posner’s Case Closed in 1993, which I still haven’t read. I know it says something about me that I know the others and not that one. DeLillo focuses more on Oswald, tracking his youth and his time in Russia and after. His assassination attempt on conservative activist Edwin Walker is here, his marriage to the Russian Marina, his travels from Dallas to New Orleans back and forth, his mysterious street activities. George de Mohrenschildt. David Ferrie. Guy Banister. All here. Jack Ruby too. And finally November 22. Such strange characters populating this murky submerged historical scene. I probably should have read Libra sooner. I’m sure it was revelatory in its time and fascinating as one of the first and best of its kind (the overheated paranoid kind). It has lost some of that by now, and honestly that’s probably more me than the novel. Although I will say, having previously slogged through Underworld, it may simply be that I don’t get along well with DeLillo’s writing, which is discursive and suggestive unto the death. I would recommend it as part of any plunge into the JFK assassination mythos, maybe even one place to start. Of the four I’m talking about here, I like Oswald’s Tale best and then 11/22/63. I haven’t seen Stone’s JFK since it was new. I suspect it might grate more now but I remember it as entertaining and think it could well be so still. As for Libra, I think it gets Oswald right, which would have been harder to do without the KGB transcripts Mailer had access to. But Libra, at this juncture, even as fiction, might be a little too open to amorphous conspiracy theories.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

Underworld (1997)

Although it was published very near the end of the 20th century, in 1997, Don DeLillo's Underworld has already earned outsize acclaim as one of the great novels of that century. It's big, it's mythic, it's—as Wikipedia puts it—"a non-linear narrative that has many intertwined themes": nuclear proliferation, baseball, the Bronx, and a general sense of desperation and despair. It might add up, but I thought it was too much work to confirm. In fact, its willfully counterintuitive strategy of isolated incidents recounted the wrong way in time too often annoyed. There are flashes of brilliance scattered everywhere—and that's not just a pun on the mushroom clouds populating it (or should that be depopulating it?). But nuclear anxiety under the shadow of twin towers of superpowers already feels like a painfully dated trope, and the constant resort to it here is reflexive and rote. (What's weird is the original cover design, which shows a church in the foreground behind which looms a World Trade Center tower with a small airplane approaching, but that's more likely a designer Scribner's hired than DeLillo, right?) Underworld swims the waters of Robert Coover and Thomas Pynchon, remote and befuddling. It reminds me most of Coover's The Public Burning, especially when historical figures such as J. Edgar Hoover start showing up and we are afforded speculative interior views. Lenny Bruce also appears in nightclub scenes that read as built off verbatim transcripts. I guess, with Libra alone, DeLillo has already shown this bent, which admittedly can be vivid and evocative, of setting documentary passages into "fictional" context. I will say, understanding it amounts to damning with faint praise, there's no denying DeLillo's ability to craft fine sentences, with a really nice ear for the gaps and strange leaps of intimate dialogue. So maybe that's a net plus overall because it's what kept me going, and make no mistake, it is a book of over 800 pages and it can be a slog. That's the level where he reminds me of Pynchon, another craftsman of wondrous sentences that unfortunately do little to elucidate the confusing action. Where Pynchon goes to slapstick and broad humor, DeLillo pretty much stays close to the paranoiac anxiety. There's a lot of everything here except narrative momentum, which I missed.

In case it's not at the library.