INTERVIEWERDeLillo wrote, among other things, a masterful novel about the Kennedy assassination, Libra. And while, like Sondheim, he seems to view the assassination as almost mystically important, unlike Sondheim, he spends a great deal of time (about a hundred thousand words) justifying his case. So when he talks about "the true and lasting power of [Lee Harvey Oswald's] name," you've got reason to believe it.
You’ve said that you didn’t think your books could be written in the world that existed before the Kennedy assassination.
DELILLO
Our culture changed in important ways. And these changes are among the things that go into my work. There’s the shattering randomness of the event, the missing motive, the violence that people not only commit but seem to watch simultaneously from a disinterested distance. Then the uncertainty we feel about the basic facts that surround the case—number of gunmen, number of shots, and so on. Our grip on reality has felt a little threatened. Every revelation about the event seems to produce new levels of secrecy, unexpected links, and I guess this has been part of my work, the clandestine mentality—how ordinary people spy on themselves, how the power centers operate and manipulate. Our postwar history has seen tanks in the streets and occasional massive force. But mainly we have the individual in the small room, the nobody who walks out of the shadows and changes everything.
(Also interesting, from the Author's Note in Libra: "Any novel about a major unresolved event would aspire to fill some of the blank spaces in the known record. To do this, I've altered and embellished reality, extended real people into imagined space and time, invented incidents, dialogues, and characters.")
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