Lee Harvey Oswald’s death was also the event that gave rise to the most feverish outburst of conspiracy speculation in American history, far exceeding that following the death of Lincoln. In Libra DeLillo turns back a quarter-century to the double event that fixed death most intimately in the collective consciousness of America: the assassination of John Kennedy and the incessant replay, on TV, of the murder of his assassin. The ultimate cataclysm, whether toxic or nuclear, is not far off. Death becomes a cultish preoccupation in Running Dog, and in DeLillo’s subsequent novels, The Names and White Noise, it is presented as the central object of worship in a shrine festooned with the trappings of Nazism, pornography, and international terrorism, and humming with a myriad electronic devices. The weapons-obsessed leader of the organization called PAC-ORD in that novel will suggest the arms dealer Edwin Wilson to some readers, General Secord to others. As far back as 1977 he “foretold,” in the cinematic novel Running Dog, the development of lawless outgrowths of the intelligence community-covert organizations that cancerously infiltrate the tissues of the body politic, breaking down the boundaries between governmental policy and private enterprise, amassing wealth or dealing out death with impunity. Beginning as a fantasist, he has moved stealthily toward realism while retaining a dark and at times prophetic vision of occult conspiracies and correspondences and technology-gone-mad. Though he is yet to write a work as prodigious as Gravity’s Rainbow or as sensational as An American Dream, Don DeLillo has, with nine novels to his credit, supplanted both Pynchon and Mailer as chief shaman of the paranoid school of American fiction.

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