Broad Sound

A man stares at a county courthouse. It is a warm spring day—April 17th, 1963. Perhaps it is the warmth of the sun, or the mythic purpose he carries with him, but he feels life affirmed in this moment: “I look at these ornate old buildings in bustling town squares and I find them full of a hopefulness I think I cherish. Look at the thing. It’s so imposing. Imagine a man at the turn of the century coming to a small Southwestern town and seeing a building like this. What stability and civic pride. 

“It’s an optimistic architecture. It expects the future to make as much sense as the past.” 

The man is here, in front of this North Texan courthouse, to set in motion the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

This scene in Don DeLillo’s Libra unfolds with sly dissonance that holds both nostalgic American pride and unthinking American violence together in its open palm. Yet further behind this is a second dissonance. Where the former is sneaky and oddly charming, this one is wrenching, alienating. The first is accessible to all, at hand in the text; the second is personal. Mine, alone. 

~

The courthouse of optimistic architecture happens to be my courthouse. Or at least it once was mine. Look at the thing. It is surrounded by a well-kept lawn on which students lounge, soaking in the spring heat. Other than the makes of cars, the immediate scene isn’t all that removed from how it looked six decades ago. Gone is Shrader’s Pharmacy, but an old-timey soda fountain-cum-ice cream shop attempts to keep the vibe firmly in the mid-century. The Mini Mall burned down about eight years ago, I suppose, leaving a gaping absence where this man gazed at a brick façade.

This is the city square of my childhood. Of my adolescence. Young adulthood. For anyone who grew up in a place that’s largely unknown, there must be a certain thrill in discovering your home in fiction. But thrill is the wrong word for finding your hometown in the pages of Don DeLillo. Dissonance fits better. A quickening of the pulse. The phrase “thrown into psychological discomfort” comes to mind. Libra is a novel about fake names and seeing straight through such aliases. At its core is the conspiracy, the ur-conspiracy at the heart of modern American existence. Or maybe just the conspiracy is an empty vessel, and that heart is really our fixation on mythmaking.

I first felt a slight hesitation about 15 pages into Libra, as Walter Everett Jr. sits dazed in the grogginess of morning: “The Record-Chronicle was at his elbow, still fresh in its newsboy fold.” There mustn’t be that many newspapers with such an odd name, but surely more than one out there. Then came the reference to a women’s college, sealing it. “My God, they buried you.” “Texas Woman’s University. Savor the name.”

Libra was not my first encounter with DeLillo. White Noise, Zero K, and an aborted attempt at Underworld all introduced me to the disaffected American landscape that slips under the reader’s skin. This was something else. Nothing slipped under my skin. Instead, it was as though I was the one being submerged. The past rushed at me, but the time was out of joint. 

This was a DeLillo fantasy, not reality. 

It was also the reality that I spent 18 years in. 

~

Denton is not a suburb. I was adamant on this point while in college with kids from McKinney or Frisco or Grapevine—you know, the real suburbs. Denton was sufficiently independent, separated from Dallas and Forth Worth by enough towns. It had its own raison d’être. In addition to TWU, it’s also home to the University of North Texas. A city with not one but two universities couldn’t be a suburb, right? Even now, I still largely hold to this contention.

Those colleges also give Denton its sensibilities, particularly UNT with its arts and music program: Denton boasts a musical heritage that includes Norah Jones, Parquet Courts, Midlake, and Snarky Puppy, not to mention a notable death metal band. There were always two sides to Denton. One was a town like any other in Texas: suburban neighborhoods oriented on families, Southern values and all the attendant connotations, a tenor of conservatism that—to a child in that setting—often seemed like the only way of life; on the other hand, it was permeated with young people pursuing arts and academics who brought with them a liberality and playfulness. Somehow, the two spirits merged. All the kids and families would turn out to the Arts & Jazz Fest every spring, lineups filled with local bands. The hipsters and hippies introduced a slant to the style, especially near the square, distancing Denton from the monotonous vision of the other towns near us. With all the intermingling, Denton imagined itself as a miniature Austin (though it certainly wasn’t).

In the taxonomy of hometowns, Denton was of the genus that becomes greater in hindsight. Growing up, it was, of course, just mundane. Looking back, though, it was a gift such that it offered encounters with other ideas, people, and ways of life. Denton wasn’t outright countercultural, but it was never an enclave. I didn’t realize until I left for college how intoxicated many places were as they drank from that well of presumed Southern culture—no, that Texan culture. There is still a part of me that fiercely loves that town, though I’ve spent the last decade of my life in Seattle—a far cry from the South’s insulated conservatism—and I have no intention of looking back. There are times, though, in which I’m unwillingly, unwittingly thrown back into that place, that past, and left to sort it all out. 20 pages into Libra, Don DeLillo yanked me back and forced me to confront the questions of my hometown. 

While one strand of Libra follows the welter of Lee Harvey Oswald’s life across the globe before he meets (and makes) fate in Dallas, another follows a slithering conspiracy. Walter—Win—is an out-of-favor CIA agent who finds himself forcefully semi-retired, sequestered in the basement offices of TWU. It’s here in Denton that Win is visited by Larry Parmenter, a former colleague from the Bay of Pigs. They are both men of bitterness after that very public failure, and that grudge—along with their paranoia concerning the state of the nation—seduces them into a plot to assassinate JFK. Frustrated by their past, they want to reclaim the sense they expect of the future. Their spycraft will make them world-historical, entrapping Oswald, murdering Kennedy, and enlivening the conspiratorial soul of America for decades.

Juxtapose this with Parmenter’s description of the Denton square: full of hopefulness. Naïve, something innocent. Across the street, the courthouse itself is imposing, characterizing stability. Parmenter speaks of civic pride even as he considers assassination. To view those things as intrinsically disconnected is to misunderstand a particular strain of the American spirit. 

In DeLillo’s hands, the landscape of my hometown typifies the psyche of Win and Parmenter. It’s an idyll—perhaps a fake one, but no less a powerful one. A representation of the past that should also dictate the future, though that will require the rending of the present and the burial of the past. DeLillo is after the soul of our country, but I couldn’t wrest myself away from the question about my hometown: Was this description accurate?

~

Denton had its hidden streets, its sense of languorous history, an old American stillness, wistful and unchanged, and these older traces too, older ideas and values scored in limestone and marble, in scroll ornaments atop a column or in the banknote details of a frieze. The Old Main, the county courthouse, the broad-fronted homes, the homes with deep shady porches, the trees, the streets named for trees—all this pleased her, made her think that happiness lived minute by minute in the things she saw and heard.

So run the thoughts of Everett’s wife, Mary Frances. She’s not wrong, exactly. The courthouse sits between Elm and Locust, Hickory and Oak. It had its British zone, too: Pickwick, Stratford, Avon, Nottingham. My middle school was on Windsor. I lived just off Kings Row. In her vision, however, she stands askew from the spiritual truth. For a person who grew up in the South, who knows the South, languorous seems a loaded, pointed term. The inertia evokes the dead, dread heat of summer, a heat truly inescapable except for the perceptible falseness of air conditioning at full blast; but languor is endemic to the South beyond the reach of seasons. It represents a listless quality, a laziness; an unwillingness to move, to examine how things truly are. It may be that happiness is lived minute by minute—that is, in the present. But such present happiness is a façade over past pain. Happiness persists, in part, from refusing to see and hear, to acknowledge. 

DeLillo’s novel is a tale of American conspiracy, but one doesn’t have to imagine clandestine meetings organizing a presidential assassination to see the machinations of power at work. Denton was at one point home to Quakertown, a community of freed former slaves that thrived until the town voted to build a park in the same area, dismantling Quakertown and driving its residents away. Libra is well aware of the dissonance between the image of American life and the detritus it covers over, though the Everetts are not. DeLillo slyly notes that the university Win now works at was originally called the Texas Industrial Institute and College for the Education of White Girls in the State of Texas in the Arts and Sciences. An interminably unwieldy name, but the founders determined that every single clause in it was pivotal in communicating their purpose. So back to my own dissonance, which was never spawned simply by DeLillo’s language. His words only conjured it. Called it forth and handed it a blade. I’ve felt the unease about Texas’s willful ignorance of the past long before I picked up Libra. I was already questioning, unraveling the truth from falsehoods. 

There’s another thread woven throughout Libra that follows Nicholas Branch. Branch is another CIA agent, but his role is archival, “a career of paper.” Really, though, Branch is a vessel for time. We cannot understand the JFK assassination without watching how its effects rippled forward through society. Years after the plot’s unfolding, Branch rummages through endless files to shape it into some narrative whole. “He uses hand and eye, color and shape and memory, the configuration of suggestive things that link an object to its contents.” 

Philosophers of history across the last half-century have articulated our existential impulse toward emplotment, the dynamic of looking back on history in a way that provides a sensible narrative in which we can understand our lives. We arrange history as a puzzle—the events, the documents, the photography and footage, the sweeping arcs of nations and movements—until it forms an image. This is what Branch is doing, what he effectively is: if Win and his cadre represent the conspiratorial history-making force, Branch embodies the force of emplotment. He becomes the act of giving history a narrative. 

And I suppose that is what I’m doing, as well. Folding over memories and perceptions, trying to understand how the experience of growing up in Denton—the triviality, the sun-soaked summers, the taken-for-grantedness of it—can withstand the reflection, the realization of unstated truths. Hoping for a way to align these into coherence, though some elements reject rearrangement. As Branch puzzles out the government files, the eyewitness testimonies, the diagrams of ballistic trajectories, the crime scene photos, he senses that some pieces remain apart: “There is much here that is holy, an aberration in the heartland of the real. Let’s regain our grip on things.” An aberration, indeed; but it’s DeLillo who caused my grip to falter.

~

Let’s regain our grip on things. Back to the basements of TWU. For Win, his office is “a place to sit and think, searching for a grim justice … a place to refine and purify, to hone his sense of the past.” Of course our senses of the past are, crucially, our own: “Here he worked patiently on his bitterness, honing and refining.”

I have stated that part of me loves my hometown. But what of bitterness; does that also factor in? To a degree. I am bitter that I had to ask and answer so many questions in hindsight. Texas’s role in the repugnant Confederacy was plain, only celebrated (at least back then) by small, seething pockets of society. But Quakertown I knew about only peripherally; I can’t say I ever heard people really talk of it. Furthermore, I only learned about the original name of TWU while reading Libra. These were meaningful silences, deceptions carried out by that trenchant Southern languor. Yes, I am bitter about these.

More so, however, it’s an underlying dissatisfaction at the gap between the image offered and the reality behind it. The gap intermingles and flows with time like a calm, constant stream. The water nourishes; the water erodes. What a gift—a rare gift—it would be to be able to trust a place’s story about itself. This is what I wish for, what I begrudge the lack of. Perhaps no hometown can promise such a gift. The deconstruction of histories is exhausting, though ever more necessary among powers that wish to further bury truth. 

Perhaps disenchanted is the best term for it. I’m no longer wrapped up in the narrative of Denton, or of Texas, or of the United States. I’m no longer seduced by it. As Win machinates the death of a U.S. president, he reflects that “plots carry their own logic. There is a tendency of plots to move toward death.” What is a false narrative of history if not a plot? A false narrative told with intent distorts, selectively setting apart and excluding. A Holocaust denier layers death upon death. Ignorance about racism and oppression allows for places to claim an empty nobility (which few places are innocent of; redlining was a common practice throughout Seattle neighborhoods well into the 1960s). Pretending as though Quakertown is not a part of Denton’s history is to silence the historical thriving of Black Americans. 

The whirlwind of data surrounding JFK’s assassination begins to confound Branch’s efforts. “He concedes everything. He questions everything, including the basic suppositions we make about our world of light and shadow, solid objects and ordinary sounds, and our ability to measure such things, to determine weight, mass and direction, to see things as they are, recall them clearly, be able to say what happened.” Once more, there’s something philosophical beneath DeLillo’s staggered prose. Emplotment is hopeless without the reliability of perception. The confusion of the latter dismantles the possibility of the former, throwing us into a world without coherence. We have lost our grip on things themselves.

~

“Think of two parallel lines … What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a third line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of the self. It’s not generated by cause and effect like the other two lines. It’s a line that cuts across causality, cuts across time. It has no history that we can recognize or understand. But it forces a connection.”

The tensions at the molten core of Libra are the gaps between conspiracy and history, between deterministic causality and terrible human agency. Here, there’s a shared spirit with Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, another work that depicts an uncanny valley of American violence—and where I was once more jarred by the appearance of my hometown, where Ed Tom Bell once was sheriff. (I can hardly think of a pair of authors who could conjure greater discomfort by depicting one’s hometown.)

The volleys loft across Libra’s pages: “There’s a hidden principle. Every process contains its own outcome”; “This plan speaks to something deep inside me. It has a powerful logic. I’ve felt it unfolding for weeks, like a dream whose meaning slowly becomes apparent”; “Branch has become wary of these cases of cheap coincidence”; “Destiny is larger than facts or events. It is something to believe in outside the ordinary borders of the senses”; “We don’t know what to call it, so we say coincidence. It happens because you make it happen.” At the end of it all—of DeLillo’s novel, and of my reflection on my history—the questions pare down to these: do we make history or suffer it? Do we stumble upon history as a hermetic, fully formed thing, or can we gather its pieces and arrange it into something understandable? How do we connect personal history and that history which stands apart from and before us?  

There were always two sides to Denton. The Denton-memory and Denton-sensation, my Denton, on the one side. Parallel to it, there’s the Denton of record, of Quakertown and its erasure and its recollection, a locus for the waves of cultural history. On their own, they refuse to meet. Perhaps the work of reflection—of emplotment, of developing an authentic sense of history—is akin to drawing that third line “out of the deepest levels of self.” A line that crosses both my own experience and the place that stands apart from me. A line oriented by historical fact and personal contingency. A line that respects but does not succumb to causality or to the grandiose vision of human agency. 

There was much I didn’t know of Denton, but Denton was still mine. Maybe every hometown is a conspiracy in itself, and every work of reflection an unveiling. Or else every hometown is a mess of facts that fails to coalesce, and every work of reflection a futile attempt to narrativize. I believe the truth is somewhere between these, connected somewhere on that third line. Only then can I regain my grip on Denton and confront the absurd reality that Libra captures as well as the languorous falsehoods I never questioned until I left. I can make some sense of the past without having to contort it into the answer for everything. I can hold the love, the bitterness, and the dissatisfaction together in an open hand. And I can cross my fingers that I’ll never experience the psychological discomfort of finding Denton in a Barbara Kingsolver novel.