Don DeLillo. Libra. 1988.

Why people hate DeLillo

DeLillo seems better writing sweeping pretentious sentences about trivial things. White Noise reveals the striking depths of shallow surfaces. Libra sculpts a thin dirty candy shell over unplumbed depths. In both books he reuses a tiring and pretentious line about how all plots move deathward. In White Noise, this bit of overblown philosophy throws grit into the mix. In Libra, it provokes groans: obviously a book about the plot to assassinate Kennedy has at least two definitions of plot moving deathward. Is it the case that when DeLillo takes on bigger themes, he reveals more limitations? Compare this to Slaughterhouse Five, a book about an enormous theme—one of the worst massacres in history—without any sentences that attempt to fix the universe in a hypnotic syntax. I kept plowing through this dull, dim, and murky novel because I didn't think DeLelllo could fail to deliver a riveting Kennedy assassination scene. After all, the events and trajectories of that day are already plotted, analyzed, scripted down to the second. All he needed to do was breathe his fire into them. But he walks us through it, phones it in, and any writer could have done as well. He might have skimmed The Communist Manifesto before sitting down to write his novel about the most salient ideological conflict of the past two centuries, but he doesn't taste the sweat, grease, or despair of the proletariat.