Tag Archives: Don DeLillo

[Thursday 3pm #13] A weekend of assassination texts : Libra, JFK and Death of a President

25 Thursday Jun 2009

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On Saturday, I finished DeLillo’s Libra and the Kennedy assassination was going through my mind so much, I was desperate to finally watch JFK. But Nicole had already seen it, so I also got out Death of a President as well, a mock documentary made in 2006 about the assassination of George W. Bush. Death of a President was so weak, Nicole went to bed after half an hour and I turned it off to start watching JFK. I stayed up late, but still only got halfway through. I woke up early and put it on at 7am to watch the second half, the earliest I’ve ever seen a film. I think I was dreaming about it all.

Libra and JFK make for interesting comparison. DeLillo uses the contradictions and paradoxes of the assassination and of what we know of Lee Oswald to create a complex situation and a paradoxical character, represented by the scales of Libra – a man weighing contradictory things at the same time, ready to tip one way or the other. The paradoxes make for a postmodern novel, a postmodern character, a postmodern world like DeLillo always evokes.

In JFK, Stone takes the same contradictions and paradoxes and irons them out with a much more elaborate conspiracy theory. A surface reading makes it much more convincing than DeLillo’s vision, but that is exactly because it is so neat, so unwilling to accept that the truth of JFK’s assassination might be impossible to get to.

So, for example, what are we to make of Oswald setting up a pro-Castro organisation in the same building as Guy Bannister, a far-right private detective working against Castro? For DeLillo, it is about Oswald’s own contradictions, wanting attention and taking it wherever he can get it, giving some information to FBI agents, applying for work with a  man like Guy Bannister – anything to get noticed. For DeLillo, pro- and anti- Castro forces in this context are not opposing forces, but two sides of the scales, the same type of men, disenchanted, extreme men. In Libra, Oswald doesn’t know what he actually wants, beyond being listened to, glory, vindication of his genius, of his confused view of the world. And this, in its own way, is utterly convincing.

Stone’s interpretation of the same event? Jim Garrison, the DA heading the New Orleans investigation, sees it as clear proof that Oswald is not a communist at all, but an undercover agent for a nefarious coalition of the Office of Naval Intelligence, the FBI, the CIA, all three with offices within a block of the building. Which, in the context of a conspiracy thriller is, in its own way, utterly convincing.

While Libra is a brilliant novel and JFK is an excellent film, Death of a President is a competent waste of time. It has the exact feel of what a decent, uninspired documentary might be like if George W. Bush had been assassinated in 2007. As I watched, I imagined how fooled a class of sixteen year olds would be in a few years if I was an English teacher showing it to them. It has all the tedious overnarration and overexplanation of certain documentaries, intercutting each action scene with interviews with key players. Utterly convincing; but because we know none of it happened, rather boring.

It needed an edge to it. Think Woody Allen’s Zelig, the fake documentary of a man with chameleon abilities who manages to make it into every significant event of the early twentieth century. It was worthwhile because it was funny, the fake documentary had a purpose.

But they didn’t have to make this one funny. They could have made it hallucinatory and surreal, using the plausibility of the documentary style to lead the viewer not just over a tedious fake assassination but one with outrageous elements. Or it could have been political, with some interesting point about either Bush or the anti-Bush protestors, about what it meant for a country to live under his rule for eight years. But it studiously avoided doing this. It did exactly what it was trying to do and gets marks for that, but what it was trying to do was so unremarkable.

Buttering the toast : DeLillo capturing the everyday

09 Tuesday Jun 2009

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In my writing, I want to find beauty in everyday life. I don’t manage this very often. Don DeLillo does it very well. I was smiling to myself reading the first few pages of Libra, smiling with private delight in the wonder of his pages, the intricacies, defamilarisations, astute observations.

Mary Frances watched him butter the toast. He held the edges of the slice in his left hand, moved the knife in systematic strokes, over and over. Was he trying to distribute the butter evenly? Or were there other, deeper requirements? It was sad to see him lost in small business, eternally buttering, turning routine into empty compulsion. (16)

I haven’t put flesh like this on the scenes I’m writing at the moment. They’re bare bones skeletons, they don’t live and breathe, they haven’t been called into being with deep acts of imagination.

After the planes : a review of The Falling Man

29 Monday Dec 2008

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The Falling Man / Don DeLillo (2007)

DeLillo’s novels always become better in my mind a few weeks, a few months after I’ve read them, when they start to haunt me. Presumably this one will be the same. But it starts with ‘the planes’, the towers coming down on 9/11, and it feels like his characters don’t know what to do afterwards and they drift away, which might be what life is like, but isn’t how a novel should be.

Keith, who was in the tower, returns to his estranged wife, Lianne, and son. He’s there but he’s not there. A private, inscrutable man. He returns the briefcase he grabbed in the tower to its owner, an overweight black woman. He listens to her talk about the haunting memory of going down the stairwell, down and down with thousands of others; it’s a powerful image. After starting an affair with her, he ends it out of guilt. In a well-handled scene he imagines her different responses when he confesses to what he did. But then he doesn’t confess to what he did.

Instead, he becomes obsessed with gambling. He starts going off to Las Vegas for weeks at a time. Lianne can only ever have a little piece of him. The novel ends with a description of his escape from the tower; it is, of course, the beginning of the novel and reflects DeLillo’s problem (or theme?) that he has started with the climax. There’s nowhere to go after the towers have come down. Just dissipation in both senses of the word.

Keith’s son, Justin, takes to watching the skies with binoculars, waiting for ‘Bill Lawton’ (Bin Laden) to send the coded message that he will be returning. (In Justin’s worlds, the towers haven’t come down, they’ve only been damaged, and it’s not too late to save them.) These sections – and many others – are beautiful.

Lianne is coping simultaneously with ‘the planes’ which have brought her husband back and her mother’s decline. She’s sick in 2001; in the final part of the book, we jump forward three years to anti-war protests and her funeral.

Her coping mechanisms are much less destructive: she runs a writing therapy group for Alzheimer’s patients; later she turns to religion. Through it all, is the shadow of her mother’s lover, a man living under an assumed name, who was involved in a European terrorist group in the 1970s. The parallel to the present day terrorists is mentioned without being explored. She also encounters ‘the falling man’, a performance artist who hangs himself in a pose like that of the famous photograph of the man jumping from the tower.

The third section carries the falling man’s real name. The second section carries her mother’s lover assumed name. The first section carries the name Justin gives to his myth of Bin Laden – Bill Lawton.

There are two anomalous interludes from the pov of one of the terrorists; beautifully written but not fitting in. These interluding chapters have no numbers but location titles. Significantly, the second, as the terrorist waits on the plane about to smash into the tower, segues from the terrorist to Keith inside the tower at the point of impact. Or I assume it’s significant, and it is a powerful image, from the terrorist watching a water bottle roll in the corridor seconds before oblivion to the man feeling the shock of that impact. But I feel like I don’t get it, or many other important things about this novel. Yet we’re probably not meant to get DeLillo.

And even if I don’t get it, in the midst of it, there’s DeLillo’s beautiful non-sequitors, his repetitions, his delightful dialogues. He is one of the best dialogists I have read and a writer I feel that I’m going to have keep engaging with.