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Libra is a challenging, disturbing and delightful book
BOOK REVIEW
By Derryll White
DeLillo, Don (2006). Libra
This is what we end up doing, he thought, spying on ourselves. We are at the mercy of our own detachment.
— from ‘Libra’ by Don DeLillo
Men are what their mothers made them.
— from ‘The Conduct of Life’ by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Don DeLillo plugs one into a lot of things that no longer exist in the common mind. When he mentions the colour filters people could buy for their black-and-white TV sets, turning the screen into horizontal thirds of blue, pink and green – I had to laugh. I was so there. People of my age all remember where we were on November 22, 1963 – at the swimming pool, in school, hanging in the pool hall, BANG! We were pulled to the images coming out of Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas, Texas, where John F. Kennedy the 35th President of the United States had just been assassinated. It felt like it all changed, a déjà vu for Princess Diana’s tunnel requiem. As the author points out time and again, we are living in dangerous times.
All my life I have thought of secrets, what it costs to keep them! Why do we need them? Think of Lee Harvey Oswald, his family – the secrets. Don DeLillo takes the assassination of President Kennedy as the opportunity to explore the American need for sudden death, the need for men with secrets to draw together. His exploration of the myth surrounding the Kennedy assassination is compelling, chilling and ultimately revealing.
DeLillo has a distinctive writing style in ‘Libra’, somewhere between fragmentary gossip and cinematic editing. Stylistically he is quite amazing. Thoughts come in staccato fashion as if fired from a Thompson machine gun. Within that somehow fluid framework there are many beautiful sentences that made me stop, think and wonder. There are all these stand-alone sentences in the middle of a dense flow of language, such as “Trotsky is the pure form.” Without exception they make me pause, focus and ponder the dense layers of Lee Harvey Oswald’s life and the political life of America launched on a descending track of unity and purpose ever since the Civil War. I have never read anything quite like this.
DeLillo writes about the CIA inventing Lee Harvey Oswald, and in doing so he invents the assumed assassin himself – in the most convincing manner. It is all details, smokescreens of the most beautiful language set in the most dreary places. The history of Oswald that DeLillo lays out is enough to make any thinking person cry. The poor sad bastard! And even more sadly, it all reflects America. This is where America has gone, to empty lives in empty rooms buying handguns by mail with credit cards. And looking to shoot someone so that the insatiable demand for more pornographic news – FOX, the papers, CNN – can be fulfilled. Kennedy, Castro, Clinton, Trump all irrelevant in the unfolding story of the great American myth of Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame. With indelible poetic vision Don DeLillo unmasks the real whores of America.
As a sub-text the reader gets a very good sense of just how debilitating dyslexia can be. When DeLillo has Oswald trying to learn typing, looking at the keyboard and seeing Chinese – “a picture of his humiliation” – I thought about the struggles of people I have known, dyslexic and fortunately learning pathways around and through the disability. Each of us walks such a fragile path.
DeLillo blends fact and fiction so creatively that new speculation is possible. Maybe the assassination of JFK was a political act screaming out of the southern ghettos of despair. Maybe it was a calculated internal act to derail the social marches toward integration and freedom. Whatever, with the unfolding of November 8, 2016, and the election of Donald Trump as President it seems clear that DeLillo’s fictional speculation has indeed been clothed in brand new facts. America is more divided and in trouble.
We lead more interesting lives than we think. We are characters in plots, lovers in the imagination of observers. Our lives abound with suggestive meaning. This is the most challenging, disturbing and delightful book I have read in many years.
“Maximum exposure as the admen say, and who wants a president with a pigeon’s heart?”
“Facts are lonely things. Branch has seen how a pathos comes to cling to the firmest fact.”
-from ‘Libra’ by Don DeLillo
Excerpts from the novel:
HISTORY – “There’s more to it. There’s always more to it. This is what history consists of. It’s the sum total of all the things they aren’t telling us.”
WITHDRAWL – If the world is where we hide from ourselves, what do we do when the world is no longer accessible? We invent a false name, invent a destiny, purchase a firearm through the mail.
ASTROLOGY – Astrology is the language of the night sky, of starry aspect and position, the truth at the edge of human affairs.
AMERICA – After Oswald, men in America are no longer required to lead lives of quiet desperation. You apply for a credit card, buy a handgun, travel through cities, suburbs and shopping malls, anonymous, anonymous, looking for a chance to take a shot at the first puffy empty famous face, just to let people know there is someone out there who reads the papers.
PREMONITION – “The barrier is down, Frank. When Jack sent out word to get Castro, he put himself in a world of blood and pain. Nobody told him he had to live there. He made the choice with his brother Bobby. So it’s Jack’s own idea we’re guided by. And once an idea hits.”
THE AMERICAN WAY – To his left was another basket, this one filled with news stories clipped by an aide. Here is Ted filing for election in the Democratic race for governor, a primary in which the Control Apparatus will see to it. That he finishes sixth out of six candidates, which is dead last by any reckoning. Here he is with dear mother Charlotte outside a hearing room in Oxford with the leaves rustling down from the sweet gums and maples. This is when they tried to justify putting him in a mental ward with a bunch of gap-tooth idiots. The Apparatus in its grimmest stage, right out of the communist handbook, trying to put a decorated vet in the rubber room. This is what the general is up against, ladies and gentlemen, fellow patriots, loyal Birchers, members of the White Citizens Council, Boy Scouts, Christians, Mother dear.
THE ASSASSINATION – Six point nine seconds of heat and light. Let’s call a meeting to analyze the blur. Let’s devote our lives to understanding this moment, separating the elements of each crowded second. We will build theories that gleam like jade idols, intriguing systems of assumption, four-faced, graceful. We will follow the bullet trajectories backwards to the lives that occupy the shadows, actual men who moan in their dreams. Elm Street. A woman wonders why she is sitting on the grass, blood spray all around. Tenth Street. A witness leaves her shoes on the hood of a bleeding policeman’s car. A Strangeness, Branch feels, that is almost holy. There is much here that is holy, an aberration in the heartland of the realm. Let’s regain our grip on things.
ALTERNATE WORLDS – “I was with the Office of Naval Intelligence in the war, just like young Jack Kennedy.” He took a swallow. “Spy work, undercover4 work, we invent a society where it’s always wartime. The law has a little give.”
JFK – “We’re supposed to believe he’s the hero of the age. Did you ever see a man in such a hurry to be great? He thinks he can make us a different kind of society. He’s trying to engineer a shift. We’re not smart enough for him. We’re not mature, energetic, Harvard, world traveler, rich, handsome, lucky, witty. Perfect white teeth. It fucking grates on me just to look at him. Do you know what charisma means to me? It means he holds the secrets.”
U.S. TODAY – These socialist writings showed me the key to my environment. The material was correct in its thesis. Capitalism is beginning to die. It is taking desperate measures. There is hysteria in the air, like hating Negroes and communists. In the military I’m learning the full force of the system. There is some thing in the system that builds up hate. How would I live in America? I would have a choice of being a worker in a system I despise or going unemployed.
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
