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PARTISAN REVIEW
away from a national nightmare that has generated countless tangled
theories to explain the murder in Dallas? The author's note in
Libra,
describing the novel as "a work of imagination," disclaims any attempt
"to furnish factual answers to any questions raised by the assassination."
What he does furnish, beyond the historical reality of Lee Harvey
Oswald, is an invented horde of anti-Castro Cuban exiles, Mafia big
shots, and, most prominently, underground CIA operatives, bitter about
the Bay of Pigs fiasco, who concoct a plot outside the rules to win
Cuba back.
It was these imagined conspirators, and DeLillo's rejection of the
lone-gunman theory, that incurred the wrath of some conservative jour–
nalists and critics who condemned
Libra
as "an act of literary vandalism
and bad citizenship," and impeached his "ostentatiously gloomy view of
American life and society." Whatever one may think of these charges,
DeLillo's critics overlooked his genuine achievement in the book: his
brilliant re-creation of the dismal life of Lee Oswald, his appalling
mother, Marguerite, and that deranged and sordid avenger, the strip-club
owner Jack Ruby. With a flawless ear, DeLillo perfectly captures Mar–
guerite Oswald's daffY talk, as when she complains: "They talk and make
up stories, which I am not surprised ... They say I fly off too quick on
the handle." He gives us a chilling idea of how destructive a mother she
was.
Yet even in this most skillfully drawn of DeLillo's novels, he cannot
abstain from driving his indictment of America to a fanatical extreme.
There's no reason not to assume that the novelist is speaking for himself
when he has a cynical FBI agent sputter, long before Dallas, "The dan–
gerous secrets used to be held outside the government. Plots, conspiracies,
secrets of revolution, secrets of the social order. Now it's government
that has a lock on the secrets that matter. All the danger is in the White
House, from nuclear weapons on down." Far from persuading, such
haymakers make us feel that DeLillo is only aggressively asserting - the
whole damned country is rotten and corrupt, top to bottom, the mur–
derer no worse than his victim - what he has failed to demonstrate.
DeLillo's latest novel,
Mao II,
published last spring, begins and ends
with weddings: one, the mass marriage of sixty-five hundred Moonie
couples in Yankee Stadium, the other a single couple in Beirut, just
married, dancing through the rubble of civil war. The wedding celebra–
tion in Lebanon is glimpsed from her hotel balcony by Brita, a Swedish
photographer who, in an earlier chapter, takes pictures of DeLillo's cen–
tral figure, the novelist Bill Gray. Like
J.
D . Salinger, Gray has long been
living in reclusive isolation, and hasn't published a word for over twenty
