Rating: 
Summary: Good Book
Review: Libra deals with the Kennedy assassination from Lee Harvey Oswald's perspective. Oswald is presented as one of a number of trigger men, but as only a small player in a much larger conspiracy involving former CIA operatives. At first it appears that the conspiracy's goals are to use a failed attempt on the president's life as a ruse for re-invading Cuba, however somewhere along the line that plan is forgotten and the president becomes the real target of the operation.
Oswald is presented as a confused and misguided individual, with big ambitions but little direction and with no clear goals. The story takes the reader through Oswald's service in the military, a defection to Russia, a failed marriage and a number of other misadventures. Libra presents Oswald as a not entirely willing participant in the plot to assassinate Kennedy. This fictional Oswald is a pathetic, but disturbingly sympathetic character.
The book is a good one. One of its themes which I greatly appreciated is the banality of evil - while conspiring to assassinate the president, the plotters also deal with their day to day problems, such as taking care of their families, worrying about their careers etc. From this perspective the book is fascinating and unique. However, I never found myself fully gripped by the plot nor did I feel any suspense. Libra is a good book, it may even be great from a literary perspective, however I read novels for entertainment and not for literary genius. From this perspective I feel that the book came a bit short.
Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful "idea" novel
Review: Libra is a fictional "biography" of Lee Harvey Oswald following his life and the plans that were underway during the seven months before the Kennedy assassination to make him the scapegoat. DeLillo, of course, takes liberties with the facts but he has produced a real page-turner and made Oswald into an entirely sympathetic character who may not have had the purest of motives but was not the one who fired the fatal shot. Interestingly, DeLillo attributes an inordinate amount of luck to the fact that the motorcade appeared when and where it did. Several coincidences occurred to make the assassination possible, totally out of the control of those planning it. And yet it still worked. The most fun part of reading it was noticing the ideas presented in the film JFK (filmed three years after Libra was published) appear in this book, making it a familiar territory. David Ferrie, in particular, is a major character and Guy Bannister appears often, also, as does Jack Ruby. De Lillo has obviously done his research. Having just seen JFK again, I picked this up as sort of a "companion" novel and it worked well in that capacity. I felt that the movie did not really touch on so much of Oswald's life and that Libra filled in those gaps well. DeLillo's sense of time and place are commendable and I think this was probably a good training ground for his epic Underworld, which has sat on my bookshelf, collecting dust for many years and which I will most likely now pick up and read.
Rating:
Summary: Scales out of balance
Review: Prior to 9/11, the assasination of President John F. Kennedy was the most public of American tragedies. Regardless of an individual's personal feeling toward the President, that person was emotionally drawn into the assasination by television and the other mass media. It might be argued that this event shaped the face of televison journalism for decades to come. The story had everything: drama, tragedy, conspiracy theories and the live televised murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. Few of us who were alive on that fateful day in Dallas cannot remember what he or she was doing at the exact moment the news was first heard. That Don DeLillo decided to treat the event in a "fictionalized" manner gave him great latitude to combine well documented facts with the novelist's own creative talents. The result is absolutely brilliant. Although DeLillo centers his narrative around Oswald, he uses real and invented characters to give his book the feel of a novel while at the same time the immediacy of journalistic reporting. Although the reader is well aware of what is to come, DeLillo builds up the suspence by his masterful manipulation of time. He interweaves chapters that deal with Oswald's early life with chapters that are in "present" time as well as with chapters dealing with the period immediately preceeding the assasination. As the reader moves through the book, Oswald and the plotters all move inexorably toward that day on which their fortunes were to meet. By the time of this meeting DeLillo has so developed each of the characters to a point that their actions and the scenario that the author presents are completly believable. Particularly impressive is the way the author developed some of the subsidiary characters such as the disaffected Cuban, Raymo; Oswald's mother, Marguerite; and the G. Gordon Liddy clone, Mackey. The testimony of Marguerite before the Warren Commission is one of the most riveting pieces of monologue I have read, completely defining the speaker's character and all her misconceptions, tenderness, and cunningness. Thankfully, DeLillo avoids falling into the conspiracy theory trap and he neither preaches a particular point of view nor uses the hindsight of history to draw conclusions from events which followed the assasination (as did Oliver Stone). That there are among us "men in small rooms" who deliriously inflate their own importance and who by a single act of violence can insure their place in history is all too real. DeLillo sees it as his task not to try to "furnish factual answers", but only to "fill some of the blank spaces in the know record" so that these misguided individuals might be better understood. He has succeeded in his task.
Rating:
Summary: DeLillo's Best Work
Review: The manner in which the author links up the life of Lee Harvey Oswald (the Libra of the title) with the multiple and convoluted conspiracies to stage an assassination attempt is completely engrossing. Oswald's imagined life on its own is fascinating, and if the depiction of the workings of the CIA is anything like the reality, we should all have a long deep look at how our world works.
Unusually for DeLillo, the minor characters, mainly invented, are all brilliantly portrayed and the reader cares about how each and every one of them ends up. DeLillo's notorious way (or lack of it) with dialogue actually works in this novel (whereas for me it fails utterly in a novel like Underworld).
The assassination scene finally arrives after 400 pages of intrigue and is well worth the wait. It's so well written that the events seem to flash in slow motion across your eyes as you read.
The only bum note for me was the depiction of Jack Ruby, who is written as a kind of afterthought. The author is obviously constrained by the factual basis, but Ruby's own story could have been more thoughtfully interweaved.
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