Libra:

...In short, yes, this is a story based on fact, but it would take an awful lot of willingness to suspend your disbelief on this version of it...

...This is the Joycean Book of America, remember-the novel in which nothing is left out...

...Libra also has some real problems...

...He is a retired CIA analyst, now on one last special mission for the agency, to digest a veritable roomful of documents relating to the assassination that happened twenty-five years before and produce a definitive report...

...For me the looming one is its sheer pretension...

...Though the sections from Oswald's point of view may turn rather one-dimensional in portraying him as the diminutive loner all his life, those from the points of view of Oswald's mother and Jack Ruby are moving...

...Needless to say, DeLillo has taken on some hefty issues here...

...He joins the Marines, then later defects to Russia...

...We see Oswald, a libra, and those who supposedly come in contact with him...

...Libra has some solid moments...

...to get as close to the truth on this subject as is humanly possible with his endless theorizing (novelizing...

...DeLillo has written a not-so-great novel about some people who are tabloid favorites heading toward that very known November day in Dallas...

...Early on, the book seems to announce itself as significant because this supposedly is the big subject in recent America, one that supposedly demands a big novel, as the character Nicholas Branch observes...

...Joyce wrote the great Joycean novel about some everyday characters, in all their heartbreakingly everyday hopes and sadnesses, going through life on just another June day in Dublin...

...there is a vivid sense of place when Oswald is in New York (which DeLillo surely knows), a sad lack of it when Oswald is in Russia and Texas (which DeLillo obviously doesn't know...

...and tough-guy spy dialogue that would embarrass even Frederick Forsyth on a bad day...

...The art that Branch alludes to-everything that goes into a novelist's craft-simply doesn't effervesce here, and with sketchy, staccato scenes and too much perfunctory characterization, only the premise remains, as happens in the mentioned earlier DeLillo novels...

...Tired, overwhelmed, "Branch thinks this is the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he'd moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred...

...He goes to a high school in the Bronx, where he is taunted by other kids for being a Texas cracker...

...He has admittedly written novels that never move beyond their premises (college football as a metaphor for what is wrong with America in End Zone, rock-and-roll as a metaphor for the same in Great Jones Street...

...Maybe something quite essential concerning what good novel writing is all about lies in that juxtaposition-but don't try to convince your literary agent or the Book-of-the-Month Club folks of that...

...there he keeps a diary (full of misspellings) cataloguing his own "role" in history, and one evening he attends a government dance and meets a beautiful young Russian woman who becomes his wifer He finds himself in and out of work back in the American South, finally taking the elevator high up in the Texas Schoolbook depository building in Dallas, lunching on chicken and pop, and shooting the president of the United States with a mail-order Italian rifle...

...But overall the package never delivers what fiction must to be successful, what separates it from, let's say, psychology or history: to make us feel that we are indeed living it, that its reality is as real as, or more re-vealingly real than, our own reality...

...We also see, periodically, a character named Nicholas Branch...

...The case will haunt him to the end," Branch realizes...

...Sentence-by-sentence the prose itself is more than disappointing, plagued by leaden one-liners ("Dreams sent terrors you could not explain...

...The basic plot line makes the assassination the mistaken result of a conspiracy organized by a handful of disgruntled CIA men who just want to "scare" Kennedy into taking seriously the fall of Cuba to the Communists, and that as a theory is engaging...

...but he has also produced some wonderfully haunting fictions that tell us a good deal about the inexplicable nervousness, the dread, that seems to permeate so much contemporary American life-among them his first novel, Americana, about a young television executive, and his last novel, White Noise, about a professor of Hitler Studies in a small Midwestern college, plus several fine stories that have appeared in Esquire, but never collected...

...And this book, backed by a lot of advertising and its Club "main selection" status, comes from a man who is certainly one of the more intriguing contemporary American novelists...

...Later in the book, Branch seems even more buried by the task, knowing that he can never produce a perfect document, and knowing too that he can never escape his passion (the novelist's drive...