Libra by Don DeLillo

First published: 1988

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of work: The 1950’s and the 1960’s

Locale: The United States, Japan, and the Soviet Union

Principal Characters:

• Nicholas Branch, a retired member of the CIA
• Walter “Win” Everett, Jr., a member of the CIA relegated to teaching xcollege
• David Ferrie, a flamboyant pilot with connections to the CIA
• T. J. Mackey, a renegade CIA agent
• Lee Harvey Oswald, a maladjusted young man
• Marguerite Oswald, Lee’s manipulative mother
• Laurence “Larry” Parmenter, a CIA agent
• Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner with connections to the underworld

The Novel

Libra is Don DeLillo’s fictional re-creation of the life of Lee Harvey Oswald, alleged assassin of President John F. Kennedy, and of the conspiracy that many believe lay behind the assassination.

DeLillo has woven his novel from three major strands. The first is the story of Oswald himself, from his childhood in New York City until his death at the hands of Jack Ruby. The second strand follows the growth of a conspiracy to commit some act that will focus the anger of the U.S. government on Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. The plot is originally intended to fail; as DeLillo notes, however, “There is a tendency of plots to move toward death.” In the third and simplest strand of the novel, retired CIA analyst Nicholas Branch is trying years later to write a classified history of what took place.

As Libra opens, young Lee Harvey Oswald is living in the Bronx with his widowed mother, Marguerite Oswald. Her efforts at finding another husband have failed, as have her attempts to make a home with relatives. In what will become a familiar pattern, Lee and his mother always seem to be on the move to increasingly cheaper apartments. Eventually, mother and son return to New Orleans. Lee was born there, and Marguerite’s sister still lives there, but once again there seems to be no home for them. Along the way, Lee discovers Marxism, which offers him an explanation for his marginalized situation in society, but he also enlists in the Marines. He is assigned to Atsugi Naval Air Station in Japan, from which U2 spy flights are launched over the Soviet Union. In Japan, he also begins an affair and makes contact with Soviet agents, expressing his belief in Marxism and offering to defect.

When he learns that his unit is scheduled to leave Japan, Lee shoots himself in the arm in a vain attempt to remain behind. A second incident—a fight with a sergeant—earns him a court martial and a brief sentence in the brig.

When Marguerite suffers a minor accident, Lee secures an early separation from the Marines. Rather than take care of his mother, however, he travels to the Soviet Union to defect. There, he marries but fails to find a meaningful role. Repeating the pattern established in his youth, he returns to the United States only to pass through a series of dead-end jobs. He becomes obsessed with making a place for himself and becoming a part of history. His attempt to assassinate right-wing General Edwin A. Walker fails, but he attracts the attention of conspirators plotting a far more important crime. The group needs a patsy with ties to the Communist world, and Oswald seems made for their purposes.

The conspirators are Win Everett, Larry Parmenter, T. J. Mackey, and David Ferrie. Bitter at American failure to support a rebel invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, Everett concocts a phony assassination attempt, complete with carefully planted clues that will lead to Fidel Castro’s doorstep. Parmenter uses his contacts in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to identify a likely patsy, a young man with increasingly violent tendencies who has recently returned from the Soviet Union. Mackey assembles a backup team of assassins. Unknown to Everett and Parmenter, however, Mackey neglects to explain to his team that they are supposed to miss.

Years later, CIA historian Nicholas Branch concludes that the assassination of JFK was largely a matter of chance. The conspirators focus their plans on Miami, but chance dictates that the Secret Service increase its security in Miami. Chance then takes the President to Dallas, placing him in a motorcade scheduled to pass by the very building, the Texas School Book Depository, where Oswald now works. Conspirator David Ferrie, who knew Lee as a child, persuades the increasingly unbalanced young man that fate is handing him his next target.

By November 22, 1963, Lee has fallen in with Ferrie’s plan. From his window in the depository, he fires three shots at the presidential motorcade. The first hits Kennedy near the neck, the second strikes Texas governor John Connally (riding in the limousine with Kennedy), and the third misses completely. A member of Mackey’s team actually fires the fatal shot to Kennedy’s head. Lee flees the building for his rendezvous point, the Texas Theater. On the way, he is stopped by Patrolman Tippit, whom he shoots. Mackey plans to have Lee murdered in the theater, but police apprehend him before the murder can take place.

Suddenly in need of help, the conspirators approach Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby. Knowing that Ruby owes thousands of dollars in back taxes, they promise to loan him money and forgive the debt. Genuinely distraught over Kennedy’s death, Ruby is easily persuaded that the public will idolize him for murdering the president’s assassin. Ruby slips into the Dallas jail, where he is a well-known local figure, and shoots Lee. Libra concludes with a rambling, embittered soliloquy by Marguerite Oswald over the grave of her dead son.

The Characters

Lee is the “Libra” of the novel’s title, the primary character around whom DeLillo builds his plot and its meaning. The astrological sign for the Libran is a pair of scales, a highly appropriate symbol for Lee, who by novel’s end is ready to be tipped either way. Ambivalence has marked much of Lee’s life. An avowed Marxist, he nevertheless joins the U.S. Marines. He longs for life in the Soviet Union, but once there is disappointed and returns to the United States. He admires and identifies with Kennedy, and in his growing delusional state, he believes that assassinating the president will irrevocably complete the identification.

Marguerite Oswald is, next to Lee, the novel’s most compelling character. Even more than Lee, she sets the novel’s tone. She is presented not so much through her actions as through her distinctive manner of speech. She often addresses some ultimate judge (“your honor”) to explain her poverty and her son’s problems. She is both fascinating and repellent; early on, readers sense Lee’s need to escape the manipulative web of words his mother seeks to spin around him.

Conspirators Win Everett, Larry Parmenter, and T. J. Mackey exemplify varying degrees of divergence from the controls of the CIA. Attempting to carry on the work of invasion after the disastrous Bay of Pigs episode, Everett has been found out and banished to Texas Woman’s University, ostensibly to identify potentially friendly students. Equally guilty but less conscience-stricken, Parmenter has managed to carry on smoothly within the agency. Mackey (who reminds Everett of a cowboy) also retains the agency’s full confidence, but Mackey has given himself over completely to the Cuban rebels’ cause. Conspirator David Ferrie operates as a free agent. A commercial pilot until his sexual involvement with boys costs him his job, he is obsessed with patterns, signs, and methods of control. At one point he assures Lee that he believes in everything.

Nightclub owner Jack Ruby is, like Lee, an essentially weak individual ripe for manipulation. Like Lee, he comes to identify with his target; after his imprisonment for shooting Lee, Ruby becomes convinced that he himself is responsible for assassinating the president. Like Marguerite Oswald, Ruby comes alive for the reader through his peculiar and idiosyncratic speech patterns.

Nicholas Branch is a puzzled, wary researcher who finds himself—perhaps like many readers—drawn into the mystery of the assassination. Overwhelmed by a library of data, he nevertheless comes to the tentative conclusion that Kennedy died as a result of a combination of conspiracy and chance. Within the fictional world DeLillo has created, the reader comes to the same conclusion.

Critical Context

Upon its appearance in 1988, Libra became Don DeLillo’s most successful novel. DeLillo’s earlier novels had explored the various forces responsible for shaping and misshaping contemporary American society, including advertising, the media, technology, and drugs. This first phase of his career culminated with the publication of White Noise in 1985. White Noise, which described the effects of an “airborne toxic event,” won the American Book Award and a nomination for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Libra was nominated for both these awards and became a best-seller as well, perhaps in large part because of its subject. Polls confirm that most Americans discount the verdict of the Warren Commission—which concluded that Kennedy was killed by a lone gunman—and believe instead that a conspiracy was involved. In an author’s note, DeLillo stresses that his novel is “a work of imagination,” but he goes on to explain that it provides “a way of thinking about the assassination.” Clearly, many readers have welcomed this opportunity.

Bibliography

Cain, William E. “Making Meaningful Worlds: Self and History in Libra.” Michigan Quarterly Review 29 (Spring, 1990): 275-287. A long, thoughtful, detailed review aimed at readers somewhat familiar with DeLillo’s other novels. Praises DeLillo’s “astute, off-beat, defamiliarizing curiosity about everyday life.”

DeLillo, Don. “American Blood: A Journey Through the Labyrinth of Dallas and JFK.” Rolling Stone, December 8, 1983, 21-22. An early article by DeLillo stressing “our uncertain grip on the world.” Provides an opportunity to examine the materials the author would assemble into a novel five years later.

DeLillo, Don. “The Art of Fiction, Part 135.” Interview by Adam Begley. The Paris Review 35 (Fall, 1993): 274-306. DeLillo talks about the creative process of his works, including his visualization of scenes, which leads to the formation of sentences. He considers the language and architecture of a book to be important. His characters are often paranoid and complex, as in the case of his characterization of Lee Harvey Oswald in his novel Libra. A portion of the manuscript draft of Libra is also included with this interview.

DeLillo, Don. “ An Outsider in This Society’: An Interview with Don DeLillo.” Interview by Anthony Curtis. In Introducing Don DeLillo, edited by Frank Lentricchia. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991. An expanded version of an interview that appeared in Rolling Stone magazine in 1988. DeLillo discusses Libra in relationship to his other work. DeLillo grants few interviews, making this example especially important.

Keesey, Douglas. Don DeLillo. New York: Twayne, 1993. A thorough introductory study of DeLillo. Covers DeLillo’s major works and includes a chapter devoted to Libra.

LeClair, Tom. In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. LeClair asserts that DeLillo should be acknowledged as one of America’s leading novelists. In this study, LeClair examines eight of DeLillo’s novels in detail from the perspective of systems theory.

Lentricchia, Frank. Introducing Don DeLillo. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991. A collection of critical essays that form a solid overview of DeLillo’s art and the social and intellectual context of his writings.

Lentricchia, Frank. “Libra as Postmodern Critique.” South Atlantic Quarterly 89 (Spring, 1990): 431-453. Examines Libra as a novel of “social destiny,” but one in which images have come to play a more important role than such factors as class and race. Also appears in Lentricchia’s Introducing Don DeLillo.

Michael, Magali Cornier. “The Political Paradox Within Don DeLillo’s Libra.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 35 (Spring, 1994): 146-156. Examines the complex proliferation of conspiracies whose plots interweave in the novel. Michael also analyzes the function of Oswald’s mother, Marguerite, who figures centrally as a means of grounding characters and events.

Mott, Christopher M. “Libra and the Subject of History.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 35 (Spring, 1994): 131-134. An analysis of DeLillo’s use of American mythology and ideology in Libra. Examines DeLillo’s belief that the assassination brought into focus a new way of perceiving reality.

Tyler, Anne. “Dallas, Echoing Down the Decades.” The New York Times Book Review, July 24, 1988, p. 1. A long, accessible review by a fellow novelist. Stresses DeLillo’s mastery of the commonplace events of his characters’ lives and calls the book “a triumph.”

Willman, Skip. “Traversing the Fantasies of the JFK Assassination: Conspiracy and Contingency in Don DeLillo’s Libra.” Contemporary Literature 39 (Fall, 1998): 405-433. An analysis and response to George Will’s criticism of Libra as “an act of bad citizenship” and “smacking of paranoia.” Explores DeLillo’s recurrent theme of conspiracy, culminating with Libra.