Branch thinks this is the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he’d moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred.” There is also the Warren Report, of course, with its twenty-six accompanying volumes of testimony and exhibits, its millions of words. “He has his forensic pathology rundown, his neutron activation analysis.

There’s no end in sight.”īranch shows up periodically throughout the pages of Libra, always struggling with the data, the facts both pertinent and impertinent, musing upon any number of irresolvable issues. He sits in the data-spew of hundreds of lives. “Sometimes he looks around him, horrified by the weight of it all, the career of paper. This fictional character is a retired senior analyst of the CIA, “hired on contract to write the secret history of the assassination.” We first meet him on page 15, and already he is overwhelmed by facts, fictions and factions. In fact, interlarded with the story of Lee Oswald and the assassination of President Kennedy in Libra (NAL/Penguin, 1989, 456 pages) is the tale of a researcher, Nicholas Branch.

Scads of books have been published since November 22, 1963, all trying to answer questions that arose on that date.

The interviewer asked her what question she would ask Lee, were he to return somehow miraculously from the dead. What happened, how and why, and by whom was it made to happen? She isn’t sure she knows even the least thing about the man she married in the USSR and lived with, bore two children with. In an interview that she gave some fifty years after the fact, Marina Oswald Porter is still puzzling over the whole business.

Libra by Don DeLillo