Libra by Don Delillo

[Rakhmetov]

Conservative political critic George Will has called this book "literary vandalism and bad citizenship" --- which is more reason to read it.

Literary scholar-Professor Harold Bloom of Yale University has put this book on his list which in his opinion constitute the "Western Canon."

http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/grtbloom.html

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_miShaSxv6bo/TCJul8Nl7tI/AAAAAAAAAD0/o5y_u9CSntY/s1600/libra_large.jpg

[Rakhmetov]

George Will

The famous George Will article appeared in the Washington Post, Sept 22, 1988 (p.A25). Here are a few choice snippets of Will's feelings about DeLillo and Libra:

...the book ... is an act of literary vandalism and bad citizenship.
DeLillo says he is just filling in "some of the blank spaces in the known record." But there is no blank space large enough to accommodate, and not a particle of evidence for, DeLillo's lunatic conspiracy theory. In the book's weaselly afterword, he says he has made "no attempt to furnish factual answers." But in a New York Times interview he says, "I purposely chose the most obvious theory because I wanted to do justice to historical likelihood."
History, says a DeLillo character, is "the sum total of all the things they aren't telling us." Of course. "They." That antecedentless pronoun haunts the fevered imaginations of paranoiacs. For conspiracy addicts like DeLillo, the utter absence of evidence, after 25 years of search, proves not that there was no conspiracy but that the conspiracy was diabolically clever.
It is well to be reminded by books like this of the virulence of the loathing some intellectuals feel for American society, and of the frivolous thinking that fuels it.
What was unfairly said of a far greater writer (T.S. Eliot, born in St. Louis 100 years ago this Monday) must be said of DeLillo: he is a good writer and a bad influence.

This was DeLillo’s response to Will:

"I don’t take it seriously, but being called a bad citizen is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind. That’s exactly what we ought to do. We ought to be bad citizens. We ought to, in the sense that we are writing against what power represents, and often what the government represents … In that sense, if we’re bad citizens, we’re doing our job."

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