This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon.

Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II. But these are flaw-specks in a book that is genuinely dread-filled-a story that everyone knows he doesn't really know, and which DeLillo worries, and prods, and deepens with sure artistry. DeLillo mars the book a little with overly portentous intellectual meditations (by one of the CIA operatives) on the nature of plots-murderous or fictional-and by Jack Ruby's hopelessly awkward Jewish-gangster manner of speaking.

Brilliant interior monologues (with the exception of that of Oswald's mother, Marguerite, which is largely hokey and theatrical) suggest deep seriousness at the total whim of accident. Oswald keeps slipping from their grasp, for instance, and real organization is an illusion. For them, ideology is more than slippery, it's of no-account: process is all-and yet everything is always at the lip of chaos. As speculation, this is nothing new, but DeLillo's novelistic powers become very keen indeed, especially when forming scenes for the plotters. That the shot is supposed to miss (kill a Secret Service man at worst)-and that the furor resulting from it would then be pointed in Cuba's direction, as a Castro plot to kill Kennedy-gets quickly forgotten as the conspiracy begins to take on a life of its own: the multiple gunmen in place, Oswald as the gun they'll let the police find and do with as they will.

Which makes him a too-good-to-be-true instrument for a plot by current and ex-CIA operatives (as well as by disgruntled Bay of Pigs veterans) to find someone to take a shot at President Kennedy. The ex-Marine who defected to Russia and returned (and yet who called himself a Marxist even more doggedly back in the States with his Russian wife) is, in DeLillo's version, the completely marginal man, utterly without qualities. Lee Harvey Oswald is, of course, the center, the Libra of the book-his scales tipped lifelong by ugliness, outsider-ness, a smothering mother, a desperate need to distinguish himself somehow. And with the style honed by his most recent novels, White Noise and The Names (which this book seems closest to), he is able to construct a half-speculation, half-tragedy very finely. DeLillo's fascination with conspiracy, apocalypse, and public events-tesselated from a hundred chips of separate, small human misery-turns to the Kennedy assassination almost inevitably.

Don delillo's libra