by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
No Grisly Hashtag Here
Don DeLillo’s 1988 novel Libra must be the most sense-making book so far published about the Kennedy assassination — and plenty of books about the assassination have been published lately. The critic who called the novel “beneath contempt” for fictionalizing the lives of living people probably couldn’t have imagined the National Geographic Channel’s campaign for its current documentary series, complete with ersatz-1963 newsstand and grisly hashtag. But DeLillo could have.
The Paris Review posted a page from the Libra manuscript on its website. Lee Harvey Oswald was dyslexic, DeLillo style:
He could not find himself in the world of little symbols. They were in the hazy distance. He could not clearly see the picture that is a word. A word is also a picture of a word. He saw spaces, incomplete features, and tried to guess at the rest.
