In this near-perfect novel, Delillo gives a fictionalized account of the assasination of President Kennedy. The story is told mostly from Oswald’s perspective, but Delillo also shows us how things might have looked from a myriad of perspectives, including the CIA operatives involved in the conspiracy, the anti-Castro supporters who motivated the killing, Jack Ruby, Oswald’s mother, David Ferrie, the Secret Service, and the wives of the men who planned the whole thing. By confusing perspectives every few pages, Delillo keeps us wondering exactly what he has planned for Oswald on November 22nd, 1963.

With short, simple sentences, Delillo conveys more about what it means to be American than perhaps any other living writer today. He captures the pathos of late 20th-century America. And is there anything more pathologically of that era than the Kennedy assasination, with its Texas location, its televised reality, its symbolization of the death of American liberalism? The story of the assasination as told by Delillo is the master American writer meeting the master American plot.

Delillo writes, “If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It’s the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find some coherence in some criminal act.

“But maybe not.”

Libra is the story of that maybe not.