Libra

The test is subtractive, and the double structure resists it at its core. Oswald’s life and the plot each need the other, since the book’s claim is that they converge without either causing the other. Branch must stay: he is the reader of the archive, the present from which the whole is seen, and the proof that the event cannot be closed. Marguerite’s monologues stay, since Oswald is made out of her. Where the test bites is the conspiracy’s middle. The plot passes from Win Everett to Laurence Parmenter to T. J. Mackey and down through a widening set of operatives, exiles and hired men, and several of these figures, and the meetings among them, add personnel rather than turns; the mob strand and some of Ruby’s preliminaries say again what has been said. The widening chain is itself the argument, that a plot escapes its makers as it passes down, and it cannot be cut to two men; but perhaps a tenth of the whole could go without the knowledge changing, and that holds the axis lowest of the twelve.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. The central American event of its century can be understood as the meeting of two orders that do not know each other: a secret state’s plots, which carry their own logic and tend toward death beyond what their makers intend, and a dislocated young man in a small room who wants to enter history and invents himself as he goes. Neither explains the other; the book names the space where they meet as something deeper than cause. The second disclosure is of the media age: the event becomes endless data, Branch’s room of paper growing faster than he can read it, and the lone man becomes a face on television, aware of being watched. Both are found by the action, and neither turns on who fired; the Note says the book does not settle the case. Held a tenth above the bar, not more, because some of the meaning is spoken as theory by Ferrie and Everett, and Marina and the Soviet years are seen from outside.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The heights are many and mostly dreadful. The opening, the boy riding the subway to the ends of the city, rises through its own rhythm into a vision of the underground as the self’s only freedom. The chapter of 22 November, told from inside the depository window and then in the confusion after, is a set piece of terror held in exact detail. Oswald’s death, rendered from within as the pain and the darkness close and as he sees himself on television, is the book’s coldest height, and Marguerite’s grief, in her own voice, reaches a grotesque grandeur. Branch alone before paper reaching to the ceiling is a quiet sublime of the unknowable. Held below the higher reaches because long stretches are procedural by design, the plotters’ meetings and the operatives’ talk running level, and because the heights gather in the last hundred pages.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The title names the pattern, and much of it is built. Libra is Oswald’s sign, the scales: a man balanced so that he can be tipped either way, and the book makes his life an oscillation between poles, Marxist and Marine, defector and returner, loner and joiner, until a push decides it. The convergence of the man and the plot is built as fate in the old sense, and the book gives it a theory: Ferrie’s account of a third line that cuts across cause and time and puts a man on the path of his destiny. The killing of the king and the scapegoat killed in turn are load-bearing, and Ruby’s shot completes the pattern. The particular stays particular. What holds the axis two tenths short of the bar is that the destiny is often spoken, by Ferrie and in Oswald’s own self-mythologising, rather than left to the structure, and that the book’s irony keeps the archetype at a distance.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The inheritance is the historical novel and its American variants: Doctorow’s Ragtime, Coover’s The Public Burning with its real figures at a national execution, Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, and the paranoid fiction of Pynchon. The turn is real: a novel that enters the minds of the actual assassin, his mother and his killer, invents a conspiracy around them, declares in its Note that it is imagination, and claims for imagination a truth the official record cannot reach, about an event only twenty-five years old and still contested in public. The stake was considerable: a novelist laying claim to an unhealed national wound. Held three tenths below the bar because the means are inherited: the imagined interior of real figures was Coover’s and Doctorow’s, and the alternating structure is a proven instrument. The swerve lies in subject and stake more than in form.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Change the form and the book loses its knowledge. The chapters titled by place move through a life by its rooms and cities; the chapters titled by date count down a plot by its calendar. One is a biography and the other a clock, and their alternation makes the reader feel two orders approaching without contact until they meet on one day: coincidence and design converging, the book’s claim made by its form. Branch, set inside the countdown, makes the form also a statement about knowing: the novel we read is what his archive cannot become. The Author’s Note completes it, placing the whole as imagination. Held below the top because the strands meet earlier and more often than the design implies, Oswald being in contact with the plot’s agents for much of the last part, so that the convergence is more gradual than the form promises; and because Branch’s sections are few and thin for the weight the form puts on them.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Evidence over thirty-eight years. The book has drawn sustained criticism from the first studies of DeLillo onward, and it is a standard text in the study of postmodern historical fiction and of conspiracy as an American culture. The readings multiply and do not cancel: a novel of history as fiction and of fiction as history; a study of the self formed by the media; a portrait of the secret state in the Cold War; a family novel of a mother and her son; a religious novel, in Ferrie’s mysticism and the language of destiny. The questions stay open: whether the third line is the book’s belief or Ferrie’s; what Oswald wanted; whether Branch’s failure is the reader’s. Each release of the government’s records on the assassination returns readers to it. Held below the top because the span is short and part of the yield is the event’s rather than the book’s.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The field is the American novel of the 1980s. The force is a reorganisation of what the historical novel could do with a recent public event: the book showed that a novelist could take the most documented and contested American crime, admit invention openly, and produce a version with its own authority, in which the inner life of an obscure actor carries the meaning of the public catastrophe. What holds it three tenths below the bar is that the reach is concentrated in one subgenre and in criticism: it did not redirect the American novel at large, and the forms it used were already available. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a finalist for the National Book Award for 1988; its standing as the defining fictional treatment of the Kennedy assassination; its place among the books by which DeLillo’s standing is reckoned; and its use as a model for the novel of secret history in the decades after, of which James Ellroy’s American Tabloid (1995) is the clearest case.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Survival is demonstrated over thirty-eight years. The text survives whole, as published, with nothing lost and nothing in its fabric to charge. Presence is continuous and fairly wide: the book is taught and reread, and each anniversary of the assassination and each release of its records keep it in view. Its surface is not fixed to 1988: its matter is 1963, and the period’s furniture is its subject, not the accident of its making. What holds the axis at the bar is presence: it is read less widely than the most widely read American novels of its decade, and some of what keeps it in view is the event rather than the book. Four decades demonstrate less than the centuries behind the summit, and the axis credits survival shown, not survival foreseen.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Judged on DeLillo’s English, with no translation between. The command is of voice and sentence across an unusual range. The first sentence, “This was the year he rode the subway to the ends of the city, two hundred miles of track.”, sets a cadence that carries Oswald’s whole boyhood. Marguerite’s monologues are a feat of ventriloquism, aggrieved, self-pitying and magnificent; Ruby’s patter is exact; Oswald’s written words, in the diary the book gives him, carry their misspellings as character. The shooting and the death are controlled at the level of the single gesture. Three charges hold it below the top: the plotters sound alike, Everett, Parmenter and Mackey sharing one reflective idiom that is the author’s own; the operatives’ scenes are less pressed than the rest; and Ferrie’s speeches tip at moments into the author’s theory.

Score: 8.7 / 10

One law governs the whole: plots, a state’s or a man’s, carry their own logic toward death, and the space between design and chance is where history happens. Take the two most distant elements: Branch, aging in a room of documents in the present of the book, and the thirteen-year-old riding the subway in the Bronx in 1953. They obey the same law: both are men in small rooms trying to make a pattern of a world that exceeds them, and both fail. The law also covers Marguerite’s self-justification, Ruby’s sentimental violence, Everett’s plan that escapes him and the death on television, and the range is wide, from the domestic to the state. Charged: the mob strand and some of the operatives follow a thriller’s looser physics of motive, and the book’s theories, stated by characters, sometimes do the work of the law rather than the events.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Many orders, held by one event. Consciousness, Oswald’s above all, from within. The family: Marguerite and her sons, Marina and the children, a marriage under strain in a strange language. Labour: Oswald’s jobs, the radio factory in Minsk, the photographic firm in Dallas, the warehouse. Class: the poverty of the Oswalds against the officer class of the plotters. The state: the CIA, the FBI, the Marine Corps, the Soviet bureaucracy, Cuba. History: the Cold War from the U-2 to the Bay of Pigs. Crime, in the mob and in Ruby’s world. The media, as the medium in which the event exists. The sacred, in Ferrie’s mysticism and the language of destiny. They are integrated, not listed: each is a line converging on Dealey Plaza. Held below the top because the natural order is absent, the women other than Marguerite are thinly held, and the Soviet and Cuban worlds are glimpsed.

Score: 8.5 / 10