For a few years, this book was everywhere-if by everywhere one means used bookstore shelves and remainder tables-a very visible reminder of what happens when the publishing industry misjudges a print run. I bought three or four copies of the book, not because I didn't remember buying it but because every six months the price would be even lower. The copy I read was a two dollar paperback, but I'm sure there's the dollar hardcover still on my shelves, probably right next to where the three dollar and four dollar hardcovers used to sit. Stupidly, I assumed that this meant Libra was a bad book, an assumption my seven dollar copy of Infinite Jest should have disproved. But even after reading and enjoying White Noise, I didn't think of reading Libra. Only recently, scrambling around on my shelves for prose that would actually inspire me, did I pick it up. I'm ashamed to admit I was desperate, yet the shame is mitigated by the rewards I received.
Libra is proof that the best authors can do anything they want. A book about Lee Harvey Oswald, Libra manages to get into Oswald's head and yet leave him a mystery because DeLillo knows the degree to which some men are enigmas even to themselves. A book about the history of event, and the John F. Kennedy assassination, Libra is also a study of the men who shape history, and the men who record history. And best of all, a book about society and the forces sweeping through it, Libra feels like a personal statement, an honest challenge to measure oneself, an expression of intimacy in recounting an event in which so many have lost themselves by creating paranoid spirals that are both joyous and dreadful celebrations of the helplessness of the self.
DeLillo accomplishes this by doing what I believe is a fairly radical act: daring to empathize with Lee Harvey Oswald (I can't help but think this is what led George Will to denounce Libra as 'an act of literary vandalism and bad citizenship'). I barely know anything about DeLillo, and yet even to me, the very first section, In The Bronx, a section that opens with an anonymous 'he' riding the subway to the ends of the city ('There was so much iron in the sound of those curves he could almost taste it, like a toy you put in your mouth when you are little.'), seems an acknowledgment of equivalency-DeLillo grew up in the Bronx, and generously gives young Oswald, who is living there at the book's opening, the keenly observed details only a longtime resident or a talented artist might notice. From this, DeLillo measures Oswald's meandering grasping life in terms with which any struggling artist, feeling adrift and alone in the grip of a desire to accomplish something great, could identify. (Until finally, after the shooting of Kennedy, Oswald making his way through the poor section of Dallas avoiding police, there is this: 'A dozen old hair-drying machines stood along the curbside. A mattress on a lawn. He wanted to write short stories about contemporary American life.') By the end, DeLillo gives us Oswald as someone almost like Kafka's hunger artist ('He is commenting on the documentary footage even as it is being shot. Then he himself is shot, and shot, and shot, and the look becomes another kind of knowledge. But he has made us part of his dying.'), revealing the horror of art and its motivations when they cannot escape into art's abstract realm.
Libra also considers the men who might have been involved in the plot to kill a president, moving inside the heads of George de Mohrenschildt, crime lord Carmine Latta, Jack Ruby, Agency spook T.J. Mackey and most stunningly David Ferrie, the odd hairless man somehow always at the center of everything. Ferrie was a man who might have been famously eccentric on his own, what with his rare disease that rendered him completely hairless, and resultant crazy wigs and glued on eyebrows, and pilot's uniforms, and open homosexuality, and links to crime figures, gunrunners, and other figures not normally given to mi
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