Called upon to choose, I would argue that the 5 great American novels of the late 20th Century are Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973), Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (1985), Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987), Libra by Don Delillo (1988), and American Pastoral by Philip Roth (1997). There may be better American novels out there that were published between 1945 and 2000. One cannot read everything, but I’ll rest with these books as the ones that tell the story of a nation coming apart. Throw in the reporting in Dispatches (1977) by Michael Herr and you’ll have a good idea how the genocidal violence of the American West, slavery and its terrible effects and aftereffects, assassination, World War II and the Vietnam War have all shaped our present day.
Of those 6 books, Libra tells the story of the origins of our present paranoia, that sense of enormous forces being manipulated in secret, in ornate plots, by cabals of powerful men. Lee Harvey Oswald is its main character and one of 2 shooters in Dallas. Jack Ruby is also vividly created. Delillo describes the assassination of President Kennedy as payback by the CIA, the Mafia and Cuban survivors of the Bay of Pigs for his lack of support for that attempt to overthrow Castro. As put together by Delillo, Kennedy’s death is also meant to lead back to Castro and thus provoke a successful American attempt to invade and ‘take back’ Cuba.
This is a novel, an imagining of the actions many believe may have occurred that led up to and took place on November 22, 1963. However, its portrayals of Oswald and Ruby are root and branch believable as is its description of a possible plot, and of a “History [that] is the sum total of all the things they aren’t telling us (321).”
Delillo gives us a novel that is a map of how centrifugal forces works – a drawing in of mutually agreeable atoms closer and closer together until they coalesce in one point of action, in this case, the assassination of a President. This is “a world inside the world (47),” an American paranoia where “we are all locked in a vast and rhythmic coincidence, a daisy chain of rumor, suspicion and secret wish (57).”
Delillo’s Oswald may be the best illustration of the alienated, resentful, lonely young man killer literature has given us. Unable to find a place where he might anchor himself and make a meaningful life in the US or Russia, he believes that “life is hostile …. the struggle is to merge your life with the greater tide of history (87),” and thus “be swept along … in the stream of no choice, the single direction (101).” Failing at ordinary life, eventually, such men believe in a special fate for themselves. So Oswald “wanted subjects and ideas of historic scope, ideas that touched his life, his true life, the whirl of time inside him (33).” Such “desperate men give their solitude a purpose and a destiny (147).”
Oswald consciously looked for institutions or men who “would give him tasks to perform, night missions that required intelligence and stealth. He would wear dark clothes, cross rooftops in the rain (37).” Men like Oswald are always fantasists, and soon enough their eyes come to rest on another who will make them known: “He had Jack Kennedy’s picture stuck in his mind, and nobody knew he was out here (220),” and as “summer was building toward a vision, a history, he felt he was being swept up, swept along, done with being a pitiful individual, done with isolation (322).”
Jack Ruby, strip club owner, in debt to the Mob, one who feels for Jack and Jacqueline an intense kind of familial/celebrity crush, is also one more “anonymous” man: “Who was he? Why should anyone care about him (348)?” Both discover “… how strangely easy it is to make your existence felt (373),” through public acts of political murder.
In 1988 Delillo showed how the circumlocutions of power, then hidden, operated in this country. Now that raw power is broadcast, bragged about – Look at what we can do. Nothing stops us. We are without restraint.
Delillo sensed then what was coming. He knew that “the police state is not Russian. It is whenever we have a mind that can think up manuals full of rules for killing (106).” He understood the time had arrived for tribal ideology, for the American era of “we’re the only ones who aren’t them (266).”
