Now that we're 100+ pages into Libra, I can say that this is definitely more my taste than Kindred. That book was exciting, but Butler's writing never caught me the way DeLillo's does. Part of that might be the sense of humor; the JFK assassination is still a serious topic, but DeLillo obviously feels much more free to joke around in his writing than Butler did about slavery. Just to pick one thing, I've been really enjoying the wordplay with the name "Hidell," especially the rhyming. I know it's silly, but little things like that bring me more into a book, and in a weird way they make me take the ideas more seriously just by virtue of making pause and focus on them a little longer. I think that's something that a lot of writers don't quite get, that it's okay to have fun and joke around while still writing a serious book, and in a lot of ways humor can help you get your point across better than if you just stated it dryly.
One of the ways this comes across best is with the actual character of Oswald. In a lot of ways, we're supposed to find him ridiculous; here's this megalomaniacal kid with a punchable face who can't quite decide what he believes and tells the other marines all about Communism. When we look at him there's this whole sense where we can't quite believe that this guy is the one who changed so much so easily. It doesn't seem fair; he doesn't deserve to actually be as big as he thinks he is. That's the problem that a lot people have with Oswald, ultimately, and DeLillo definitely tries to cultivate that. At the same time, even knowing what we know, it's hard not to feel some sympathy for the guy. Sure he's misguided, but the same part of us that hates him for his arrogance has to admire him for his conviction -- and that part, at least, isn't quite what DeLillo is making fun of. After all, he doesn't just say he's a part of history -- he's Lee Harvey Oswald, he'll be in the history books for as long as America is, and that's all basically just because he decided he could. For better or worse, he actually lives his beliefs about the world to an impressive extent.
The most interesting of those beliefs (at least to me) is his sense of what history means to the individual. We get a good amount of that in the Atsugi chapter, and it's all pretty great. DeLillo treads a fine line here -- you can definitely see the marks of a self-assured but cut-off young man with a tendency to dress up other peoples' views as his own, and whose level of knowledge doesn't necessarily go as deep as his level of determination. There's definitely a sense that he's adopted Marx's deterministic, big-picture view of history even if he doesn't explicitly say so. Basically, Oswald's idea (developed while he's in the brig) is that history is an enormous, relentless process, into which all individuals are eventually subsumed. "The purpose of history is to climb out of your own skin... We live forever in history, outside ego and id." With that in mind we can start to understand some of his megalomania, and maybe identify some of the early sentiments that lead to his deciding to take history into his own hands. It really does help to humanize Oswald: even if we don't necessarily agree with the conclusions he comes to, we can at least recognize why he would choose to act the way he did based on them, and hopefully even that they're not totally unreasonable conclusions to come to. And this is where the style of writing really plays an important role. If all we got was a totally straight description of Oswald's beliefs at the time of the Kennedy assassination, it would be dense and somewhat inexplicable. By seeing Oswald's psyche develop, we get to understand a little better why someone might believe the things he did, and the little jokes (like Hidell) just bring it one step further: they show us that Oswald isn't just sitting around reading and coming to conclusions, he's actually actively thinking in the same way that anyone else would. If his mind works a little differently than most of ours, there's still something very human there; even the man who shot the president is capable of making little rhymes out of his private jokes. And for all that idea seems like it's just there so we can read some funny lines, what it implies really is important.
You may already be picking up on this, but Lee's own view of history as this moving current that the individual can join and submit to will dovetail with the plot we see being hatched in the dated chapters, where they're looking for a character to fill the blank space at the middle. Lee wants to be a part of history, and he already thinks of his own life as historical--which in some ways makes him the ideal candidate for the crazy scheme Win has been hatching. The novel's plot itself is carried along by these parallel currents, both moving inexorably toward November 22--history sure takes on this sense of inevitability when events are viewed in retrospect.
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