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DeLillo and I are friends now!!
We had started off on the wrong foot, but Libra has patched things up. I too share Paul's suspicions about Libra and White Noise having been written by the same person. Had I been handed these two books without the cover, I wouldn't have known those words had flown out of the same figurative pen.

Libra is a terrific piece of work. It has a huge cast of characters and a very complex web of events, all handled neatly and elegantly. While DeLillo's characters never really open up to the readers, they can still be haunting and memorable. The writing is very dense and can have a lot of sub-textual meaning. Instead of directly telling the readers what the mood of a scene is or how a character feels, he creates the atmosphere with his words and conveys the feeling quite effectively. Among other things, I liked the way he would give one the sense of slowly or rapidly passing time without saying as much (I have lost my copy, otherwise I could have pulled out a few quotes to show you what I mean. Oh well.) Oswald's mother's neurotic behavior, his wife Marina's feelings of helplessness, dilemmas of many characters are portrayed so well that even minor characters carve a niche for themselves and stay with the reader.

Unlike typical thrillers where characters are mere caricatures blindly running after power/money ***, DeLillo's characters are quite real. They do stop long enough to breathe and think. The reader is privy to their objectives, their motivations, their hesitations and dilemmas. Despite knowing how the story is going to end, it is never uninteresting.

For me, the most outstanding part of Libra is the realization of the character Lee Harvey Oswald. He is terrifyingly real and complex. He doesn't conform to either hero or anti-hero stencil. I neither like him nor dislike him, but I feel great sympathy for him. His whole life seems to be something of an accident (I mean more accidental than most lives are). It is as if one day he closed his eyes, spun around and then started walking in the direction that he had ended up facing. As a very young teenager, Marxism and communism caught his fancy, without anyone directing him that way. And this very passion acted as his guiding light. What if something else had caught his eye at that stage? He would have been an altogether different person. Though his behavior is far from ideal, he has so many great qualities that could have led him to an exemplary life. He is man of great commitment. He stands by what he believes in and would go to any lengths to support his beliefs. How painstakingly he kept at writing and reading despite his dyslexia is mentioned often in the book. If only....

Like Lee's life, the theme of accidental happenings is something DeLillo highlights too. Agent branch trying to solve the confusing maze of the events leading upto JFK assassination finds it impossible to know how much of the history was planned and how much of it was coincidences and destiny. For any scheme to be pulled off, lot of things do need to fall into the right place.

I am holding off the fifth star only because political thrillers and conspiracy theories don't hold much interest for me. But Libra really is very impressive.


*** I am looking at you American Tabloid. I loved Ellroy's stacatto writing, but it was 600 pages of pretty much the same thing.


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UPDATE:

Libra has been on a long hiatus as I have been occupied with a hundred other things. While I have not been reading this book about JFK's assassination, I did recently happen to drive by the actual location of Kennedy's assassination and the .

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Second and last chance for DeLillo to impress me. All my GR friends have rated this either 4 or 5 stars (mostly 5). So I am setting my expectations high.
If it begins to sound anything like White Noise, it is going straight out of my window.

Mr. DeLillo there is a lot of pressure on you. Pull up your socks.