A Character Assassination

Libra

by Don DeLillo

456 pp.

Viking, $19.95

LIBRA is the story of Lee Harvey Oswald. Don DeLillo's fascination with American paranoia has carried him, almost inevitably, to the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

DeLillo reconstructs an Oswald and a series of events from the 26 volumes of the Warren Report. Because this is fiction, the outlines of Oswald and of the events are clear. Everything in the novel has a hard factual edge. Everything sounds reported, even what must be pure speculation. When the characters descend into dialect or private associations, DeLillo often lets his narrative voice accompany them, but this is not a relaxation of his distant, researched style. The diction or the sentence structure may change, but the tone never slips; DeLillo remains detached.

It is as though he were able to follow his characters into slang or thought disorder not because he identifies with their madness or participates in their emotion, but because he is such a knowledgeable and transparent narrator. From moment to moment, on the level of detail, DeLillo lets the reader understand, but he refuses to feel the material or to give it a larger meaning.

THERE is a revisionist explanation of the motives of Judas Iscariot that goes something like this. Judas was a nationalist. Christ wasn't turning out to be the strong military leader that some of his followers had hoped for. These followers Judas among them, expected Christ to lead a successful revolt against the Romans. They did not understand His reluctance to seize temporal power. According to this explanation, Judas betrayed Christ to the Romans in order to force His hand. Judas hoped to trigger a showdown between Christ and Caesar, a showdown that he expected Christ to win.

DeLillo's hypothesis about the Kennedy assassination is similar. American intelligence officers, frustrated by the Bay of Pigs fiasco and Kennedy's diplomatic reconciliation with Castro, hoped to force Kennedy's hand. They planned to stage an attempt on Kennedy's life, a near miss. They would plant clues that would point back to Havana. Kennedy would be likely to believe a link to Cuba, because Kennedy had secretly ordered the C.I.A. to consider and research the assassination of Castro. If the plan succeeded, President Kennedy would be tricked into renewing hostilities with Cuba. Somewhere along the line, of course, the plan got out of control, escaped responsible hands, and Lee Harvey Oswald, alone or assisted, did not miss.

Despite DeLillo's fictional explanations, Oswald remains a cipher. He is a confusion, even to himself. He reads and writes with pain and difficulty. He repeats to himself, as if it were a mantra, his suspicion that, "There is a world within the world." Everything, he believes, is about him; everything has meaning for him.

Instead of a revelation, a change in character, or the resolution of a difficulty, Libra has at its center the chill that rises in the back of your mind when you see that the rays of paranoia are approaching, and you know that they are going to converge. It is a different sort of excitement, and it is not meant to give the reader a nice warm feeling.