Kudos, DeLillo

I don't know if I'm particularly  "enjoying" the reading the novel, though time seems to crawl a little faster while I'm reading it now that the plot is nearing the actual assassination. Even so, my attention is not quite captured. Maybe it's purely a generational thing, but I just don't find the Kennedy assassination to be something worth obsessing over. I guess I've always just taken the facts at face value. Plus, we know a lot more facts about the assassination now than people did when it initially happened. However, after attempting to create my own historical short story, I have much more respect/appreciation for what DeLillo had to go through to write this book that I find so hard to read, especially since the internet wasn't mainstream until the 1990s so he had to do all of his research without all the information at his fingertips.

There is so much detail, and research that must've been done to provide that detail, which is pretty unmatched in the books we've read thus far (though perhaps somewhat in Ragtime). I can imagine there was also a lot of pressure on DeLillo since there were probably a lot of people who were Kennedy assassination junkies and would be scouring the book for errors, along with the general pressure to represent a historically significant event in America well. I think DeLillo really did a great job representing all the known information, and even adding some speculated information with the grassy knoll shooter, as unbiased and accurately as possible. We talked a bit in class about how Branch really represents DeLillo in the novel, showing how varied, random, and obscure much of the evidence and data was on the Kennedy assassination. I really like the image of Branch sitting in his paper-covered office and spending hours sifting through it all and trying  to find what's important out of it, because I imagine DeLillo had a very similar experience.  (I experienced a minute version of this while writing my own novella, though I never encountered any photographs of goat heads filled with gelatin.)