Not necessarily in the plot department but in the CONSPIRACY department, because I was desperately breathing for some concrete conflicting evidence after the rather dry account of Oswald's life. Don't get me wrong, the doc was very good for summarizing the life and works of our buddy Lee and catching us up to speed with the vaguer aspects of his narrative sections in Libra, but the different historical tangents for which there could have been a conspiracy departure never really elaborated as far as I wanted. And I mean, I'm a conspiracy buff (COUGH Lizardmen killed JFK COUGH), but I also heard agreement from my peers, one in particular saying "it could have been Oswald, the mafia, the KGB, the CIA, or something Cuban that assassinated JFK. Simple!" So yeah, a bit blue-balling with the unresolved conspiratorial threads.
I'm loving Libra for it's dedication and entertainment of these themes. Totally a breath of fresh air after so much confusion and doubt to the previous theories! Best of all, Libra has been perfectly (and sometimes chillingly) intertwining the real events with some serious conspiracy suggestions. I was legitimately shocked on page 58, when Nicholas Branch was rattling off all the extremely coincidental, but very real deaths that occurred surrounding the case. I had to pick my jaw up off the ground when I looked this stuff up and it was all factual, and yet I'd never heard of it in my life! There's an excellent mind-blowing effect in foreboding the deaths of characters we just met only pages ago, dropping readers so quickly back to history and fact that a scintillating sinking feeling occurs upon reading it. That's a good conspiracy and it's what I came to see, gosh-diddly-darn it!!
That said, it seems like we're only scratching the surface at the moment; most of the conspiracies have just been splayed out to observe and ponder upon, rather than enacted quite yet. It's an admittedly enjoyable purgatory in the conspiracy novel, entertaining the plausible theories and gauging just how awry these plans might go in the course of Libra. Delillo is off to a good start.
