This was the year he rode the subway to the ends of the city, two hundred miles of track. He liked to stand at the front of the first car, hands flat against the glass. The train smashed through the dark. People stood on local platforms staring nowhere, a look they’d been practicing for years…His body fluttered in the fastest stretches. They went so fast sometimes he thought they were on the edge of no-control. The noise was pitched to a level of pain he absorbed as a personal test. Another crazy-ass curve. There was so much iron in the sound of those curves he could almost taste it, like a toy you put in your mouth when you are little.
This is from the opening paragraph of Don DeLillo’s masterful novel, Libra. The novel is a sprawling, brilliant, imaginative fictionalization of the JFK assassination. The opening chapter, “In the Bronx” comes largely from the point of view of Lee Harvey Oswald, DeLillo taking a deep dive into envisioning the myriad forces that shaped his mind and worldview—and brought him to fire that fateful shot. The writing throughout all 457 pages retains this sharp-edge, DeLillo’s prose like that grinding, on-the-brink-of-control subway car, the whole of the novel a wild ride through the events and strange cast of characters who still linger in the shadows from this dark moment in U.S. history on that November day in Dallas nearly 60 years ago.
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