The novel’s plausibility is unnerving, even for its author: “as I reread parts of the novel now,” DeLillo writes in his new preface, “I’m not always sure whether certain characters belong to history or fiction.” In DeLillo’s virtuosic retelling the shadowy figure of Lee Harvey Oswald becomes a complicated figure depicted with subtlety and depth, even as the act that brought him onto the stage of history remains hauntingly uncertain.
The fruit of extensive research in the historical record, Libra (1988) fuses novelistic invention and factual detail in its sweeping account of the assassination of John F. Part campus satire, part midlife character study, the novel is DeLillo’s enduring depiction of a civilization whose banalities seem apocalyptic, and vice versa. This eerie episode fuels the insistent fear of death felt by Gladney and his wife, who has secretly enlisted in the testing for Dylar, a drug purporting to cure the human dread of mortality. Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler Studies living in an imperfectly blended family in a middle-American college town, finds himself a temporary refugee when a Bhopal-like “airborne toxic event” necessitates the town’s evacuation. In White Noise (1985), a wickedly funny vision of American consumerism and the weirdness of modern domestic life frames an ominous tale of ecological catastrophe. When Axton uncovers evidence of ritual murders committed by a cult obsessed with ancient languages, investigations lead deeper and deeper into a bewildering and disturbing world of shifting identities, disconnection, and unsettling violence. Written in Greece and inspired by DeLillo’s travels through the Middle East and India, The Names (1982) follows James Axton, a risk analyst tasked by his corporate clients to assess economic threats from terrorism and other forms of political upheaval. Here, with new prefaces by the author, are three essential novels from the 1980s, DeLillo’s breakthrough decade.
For more than fifty years, in pathbreaking works of postmodern fiction, Don DeLillo has been uniquely attuned, in Diane Johnson’s words, “to the content, not to mention the speech rhythms, dangers, dreams, fears” of modern life.
This Library of America volume launches a definitive edition of a modern American master.
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