Plots carry their own logic. There is a tendency of plots to move toward death.

—Libra, Don DeLillo

The vague and inexorable motions of history. Paranoia. The machinations of power. Violence. The dark meaning that thrums beneath the chaos of modern life. Death.

These are the topics that have preoccupied Don DeLillo throughout his career, and in Libra, he finds a subject matter that encapsulates them all: the John F. Kennedy assassination. It’s arguably DeLillo’s finest work—and certainly the best novel to consider the historical event that took place 50 years ago on November 22, 1963.

Libra. I find myself at a loss to write about it, tempted instead to simply quote it to you. Here, for instance, is Nicholas Branch, the CIA analyst who has been tasked by the Agency to pore through the records, the mounds of raw data, to write a “secret history” of the assassination. I defy you to read this paragraph without being seized, at once, by the urge to go out and buy the book immediately:

Six point nine seconds of heat and light. Let’s call a meeting to analyze the blur. Let’s devote our lives to understanding this moment, separating the elements of each crowded second. We will build theories that gleam like jade idols, intriguing systems of assumption, four-faced, graceful. We will follow the bullet trajectories backwards to the lives that occupy the shadows, actual men who moan in their dreams. Elm Street. A woman wonders why she is sitting on the grass, bloodspray all around. Tenth Street. A witness leaves her shoes on the hood of a bleeding policeman’s car. A strangeness, Branch feels, that is almost holy. There is much here that is holy, an aberration in the heartland of the real. Let’s regain our grip on things.

This is the novel’s central conceit: the investigator surveying the clues to find the real story. The CIA analyst is a stand-in for the reader. He’s also a stand-in for the novelist. Branch’s project is DeLillo’s: to create meaning out of chaos.

DeLillo’s meaning begins with Win Everett, a fictional CIA agent and Bay of Pigs veteran. Exiled after the debacle, he’s angry, disaffected, still obsessed with Cuba. He wants to galvanize the Agency, the military, the nation to bring the fight to the communists. But how? Finally he hits upon a solution: an electrifying event. An attempt on the life of the president, with evidence pointing to Cuba.

This all sounds familiar, of course—it’s a fairly common conspiracy theory about the JFK assassination, that it was somehow in retaliation for JFK’s withdrawal of support for the CIA operation against Cuba. But DeLillo introduces an interesting wrinkle: Everett doesn’t plot to kill the president. He plots to fail.

Of course, as so often in DeLillo, human motivations are entirely beside the point. History, he suggests, moves with a logic and aim all its own. Win Everett may not wish the president dead, but by moving forward his plan he opens a sort of Pandora’s box, setting loose a chain of events that he has no control over. Midway through the book, he observes:

Plots carry their own logic. There is a tendency of plots to move toward death. He believed that the idea of death is woven into the nature of every plot…He worried about the deathward logic of his plot. He’d already made it clear that he wanted the shooters to hit a Secret Service man, wound him superficially. But it wasn’t a misdirected round, an accidental killing, that made him afraid. He had a foreboding that the plot would move to a limit, develop a logical end.

This is the brilliance of Libra: its refusal to reassure the reader with the traditional explanations of the JFK assassination. Both the Warren Commission’s lone gunman interpretation and the common conspiracy theories have their comforts: they posit a world where everything makes sense, and where humans—however malevolent their intentions—still have control over what happens in the universe.

In the face of these two appealing explanations of the event, DeLillo offers a third: the JFK assassination was neither the work of a lone gunman nor, properly, a conspiracy. A conspiracy implies collusion, shared knowledge, control—yet in Libra, not even the conspirators really know what’s going on, who’s involved, what’s going to happen and when. As the plot gains momentum, developing its own deathward logic, multiple groups and individuals are pulled into its gravitation: David Ferrie, Clay Shaw, George de Mohrenschildt, Guy Banister, Jack Ruby, Lee Harvey Oswald. Each has his own motivations, his own schemes; each is only dimly aware of his place in the larger plot and of the forces that move just outside his perception. In the place of one plot, one conspiracy, we get a handful, some working unknowingly in concert, others at cross-purposes, each unaware of the result that this constellation of cloak-and-dagger schemes will bring about.

In the face of this kind of interpretation of history—as a machine that clanks along independent of any human intention, powered by some dark, deathly logic—the human characters practically disappear. They’re just cogs in the machine, and none more so than Oswald. Of all the characters in Libra, DeLillo spends the most time on Oswald. Yet even by the book’s end, the gunman remains a cipher, an unknowable mystery. He’s so small, so insignificant—how, we might wonder, did such a man become the hinge upon which history turned?

Though DeLillo’s Oswald is hardly innocent of involvement in JFK’s death, he is, ultimately, what he claimed to be in real life: a patsy. Like everyone else in this unsettling novel, he’s a tool of history. Much is made of his astrological sign, giving the book its name: “Libra. A Libran…The Scales…The Balance.” There’s something almost classically tragic about the movement of fate in this book. Is Oswald’s fault in his stars or in himself? Was it because he was born under the wrong sign that he ultimately tipped the scales of history?

I find myself reaching for answers to these questions—yet to do so would, I think, be contrary to DeLillo’s intentions in Libra. To DeLillo, ultimately, history is inscrutable. The true meaning of things lies outside our grasp, transcending our ability to fully perceive it. Then as now, with years of bloody history in between, the only thing we can truly understand is the brute reality of the event: the shot ringing out, the violent intrusion of the real into the humdrum everyday. DeLillo said it better than I ever could, so I leave you with his words:

Here again is death, the event that cannot be re-interpreted, the hard factual reality that cannot be doubted. This is your history. Surrounded by seekers after knowledge, those desperate to understand, Oswald alone understands. He has at last been granted his knowledge, his secret. Here is lead penetrating bone. And so he passes, leaving the rest of us to carry on analyzing the blur. Leaving us only his name.