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    Pafko at the Wall: A Novella
    Pafko at the Wall: A Novella
    Pafko at the Wall: A Novella
    Ebook78 pages1 hour

    Pafko at the Wall: A Novella

    By Don DeLillo

    4/5

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    About this ebook


    "There's a long drive.

    It's gonna be.

    I believe.

    The Giants win the pennant.

    The Giants win the pennant.

    The Giants win the pennant.

    The Giants win the pennant."

    -- Russ Hodges, October 3, 1951


    On the fiftieth anniversary of "The Shot Heard Round the World," Don DeLillo reassembles in fiction the larger-than-life characters who on October 3, 1951, witnessed Bobby Thomson's pennant-winning home run in the bottom of the ninth inning. Jackie Gleason is razzing Toots Shor in Leo Durocher's box seats; J. Edgar Hoover, basking in Sinatra's celebrity, is about to be told that the Russians have tested an atomic bomb; and Russ Hodges, raw-throated and excitable, announces the game -- the Giants and the Dodgers at the Polo Grounds in New York. DeLillo's transcendent account of one of the iconic events of the twentieth century is a masterpiece of American sportswriting.

    Editor's Note

    Baseball & nuclear war…

    A lyric and panoramic evocation of a lost time, this haunting novella about Cold War dread also happens to be one of the most sublime pieces of sportswriting in American literature.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribner
    Release dateJun 30, 2008
    ISBN9781439105443
    Author

    Don DeLillo

    Don DeLillo is the author of seventeen novels including White Noise, which was made into a Netflix film, Libra, Underworld, Falling Man, and Zero K. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work, and the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His story collection The Angel Esmeralda was a finalist for the Story Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 2013, DeLillo was awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, and in 2015, the National Book Foundation awarded DeLillo its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. 

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    Reviews for Pafko at the Wall

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      I didn't come to this with a ton of knowledge about the Kennedy assassination - I know the basics, but I feel like I might have enjoyed what DeLillo was doing more if I had a solider background there. It's an interesting conspiracy theory that underlies the narrative, and DeLillo doesn't shy away from making his characters look ugly or ridiculous when it's called for.
    • 4/5
      I'm rating this novel with 4 stars, in spite of the fact that I didn't really enjoy reading it very much. This is a fictional account of events leading up to and including the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. If you didn't live through that time, or if you only know the barest outline of what happened and who was involved, this could be an outstanding literary adventure for you. I appreciated it, without loving it, and I believe that is almost entirely due to the fact that I was once so completely immersed in reading about the Kennedy assassination that I simply cannot distance myself from the history and let the fiction carry me away. This is post-modern stuff, and I soon realized that DeLillo was doing something quite remarkable with his multiple characters and points of view. I think the novel is a masterpiece of imagination, as DeLillo put himself (and me, very often) directly and brilliantly into the heads of Lee Harvey Oswald, his mother, his wife, and many of his associates. He made it clear in an author's note that he "made no attempt to furnish factual answers to any questions raised by the assassination". And by changing the perspective from one character to another throughout, DeLillo also made it difficult to come to any conclusions about what "really" was happening. Any given character only knew--or told-- part of the story, and many of them were thoroughly unreliable narrators. Nevertheless, it's hard not to come away from Libra with a strong impression that in this version of events, Oswald himself didn't believe he fired the shot that killed Kennedy. It's fascinating stuff, but it didn't need fictionalization for me to find it so. Having said that, though, I'm a bit disappointed that I couldn't have read this unquestionably fine piece of work without knowing a blessed thing about the historical events it is based on. I'm pretty sure I would have loved it in that case.Review written December 2016
    • 4/5
      I skipped this story in college, in a semester when I was so overloaded with books that I couldn't read them all. Being the compulsive person that I am, I always knew that one day I would get back to it. Now, ten years (Ten years! I can't believe I just wrote that.) after graduating, I finally did. Libra is a complex book. It weaves the most intricate conspiracy theory about the assassination of President Kennedy that I have ever read (granted, I don't usually read conspiracy theories), based on the understanding that this is just a fictional reconstruction of what might have been. The book is split between multiple points of view; chapters alternate, focusing either on Lee Oswald's personal history or the various intelligence men who constructed an elaborate back story to justify their attack on the president's life. There are so many voices in this book that I can't begin to capture them all. Lee is a prominent figure, of course, as he gets primary attention for half the novel. The other men, and occasional women, who comprise the narrative are involved in layers of deception, deception of others and themselves. Lee is the worst of all the deceivers, as he constantly tries to reinvent his identity and, at the same time, create aliases to hide behind. He deludes himself into believing that he is this other persona, such as the Communist Lee who defects to the Soviet Union (until he is sick of the life there), or the Military Lee who will be an expert marksman and fighter (except he is never more than mediocre), until his illusion cracks and ugly reality thrusts into his carefully crafted life. He then retreats to his well-groomed mantras of hatred and blame and tries to find some other channel that will allow him to be who he really is. Yet how can that ever happen, when he can never form a solid idea of his own identity? The only constant in his shifting mental landscape is this idea that he is meant to be a part of history. Lee is forever pursuing this goal, and it always eludes him. Until, of course, he takes part in killing the president (according to this book, Lee is not the one who actually kills him, missing terribly on all of his shots). Once Lee has finally found his way in to history, it's not at all what he wanted; no glowing moment of justification and repudiation, but a sad and dingy notoriety, known as an assassin and nothing more.The other end of the equation, the CIA men and their network of informers and partners and scapegoats, are also fascinating. Win Everett instigates the president's assassination, after he is horribly disappointed in how the whole Cuba affair fell out. Originally, he plans on creating a near-miss on Kennedy's life, and trailing the blame to a communist Cuba sympathizer, galvanizing the country into the war that should have been. As his plans unfold, however, and other people take their parts and develop their own details and pass plans on to still more people, Everett fears that the plan is taking on a life of its own, and shifting into a more menacing conspiracy than he intended. And he is right. Some people don't just want to the president scared, they want him dead. These two halves of the novel present some profound themes that take this book beyond mere conspiracy theory. Among the many themes, here are just a few: identity, and the juxtaposition between reality and facade, and just where the line between really lays, and how reality can become fantasy and fantasy can become reality, and the idea of unseen forces directing our lives. There are infinite webs of secret societies in this book; some are real and some are imagined, but it is impossible to discern between the two. Lee has delusions of people watching him, but the people he thinks are spying on him are not; however, there are a lot of people who actually are watching him and trying to control him. These ideas are presented with plenty of action, a great grasp of colloquial language, and a rising tension that erupts in the violence I knew was coming, but still somehow hoped wouldn't happen.I liked the book. It's definitely not a fast read - not because of the language of the book, which is powerful and concise, but because the subject matter is so dense. So many characters weave in and out of the narrative! If you don't mind books that require some mental organization, I think the story is worth the work. It's a fascinating study of the secret world that operates around us, and so carefully constructed that I had a hard time remembering it was just a fictional story. I will never look at the assassination of JFK in the same way again.
    • 3/5
      This chronicles the assassination of John F. Kennedy. For a DeLillo novel, I found it to be a decent on-- but nothing more. Surely, not one of his best.
    • 5/5
      Plausible account of the JKF assassination and surrounding circumstances. Memorable for a few sentences so well constructed you may have to stop reading, put the book down, and tell someone about it.
    • 4/5
      Tough to read, for several reasons. Ventures into the dark underbelly of American history. Lee Harvey Oswald is an unusual choice of protagonist, and a very thought-provoking one.
    • 3/5
      Although both idea and writing are appealing, the predictability of the story made this a somewhat tedious read. (And by 'predictability' I don't mean knowing what happens to JFK in the end.)
    • 2/5
      I'm convinced that no one who reads this damn thing remembers what it's about beyond the baseball story at the beginning -- and that was nothing special. DeLillo writes a flat, unemotional, uninvolving prose that I can only take in small doses. If Star Trek's Dr. Spock became a novelist, he'd sound like DeLillo.
    • 5/5
      I unintentionally finished this days before the 50th anniversary of JFK's death, which made the whole thing even more enjoyable, if that's the right word. Aside from a bit of the good ole American prose (and its general fear of syntax more complex than subject-verb-object), and brief moments of postmodern angst (can we know anything???), this is an excellent, excellent book. It's easy to read but doesn't ignore the possibility that writing may (I'd go as far as 'should') be noticeable. But most importantly, it's very, very smart.

      What is an historical novel* meant to do? One character in 'Libra' suggests that history just is the sum total of what we don't know--presumably what we do know being either 'present' or, perhaps, knowing history makes it less likely to have unpleasant effects: if I know x has a history of beating his girlfriends, I'd warn my friend against dating him. Another character suggests that Oswald, who thinks that he wants to enter history, really wants *out* of history: he doesn't want to be a concrete thing, he wants to be a symbol. And of course he has become just that.

      Most of us know nothing about LHO except the image of him being shot, and despite this ignorance, we also feel that he's the image of America's shift (massive generalization alert) from confidence to neurosis. What we know, in this case at least, is just the symbol. But the symbol is not 'in' history; symbols float free of history. So yes, LHO wanted to get out of history, and he did. He's known. But only as a symbol. What we don't know is the real history.

      And that's what the historical novel, and narrative art more generally, offers us: some way to understand the messiness of 'history', to burrow under the symbols and decontextualized factoids. Art suggests and plays with what we don't know--here, LHO's personality, wishes and dreams on the one hand, and a possible conspiracy on the other. In other words, the historical novel and conspiracy theories do much the same thing: they try to contextualize symbols, to ground them in history, in the things we don't know. Libra achieves the almost impossible: it confers dignity on LHO and his family by paying attention to history.

      Conspiracy theories, on the other hand, dignify nobody, except perhaps the theorist in her own eyes. That's not to say that the urge to produce conspiracy theories is blameworthy. They're attempts to understand and get behind the symbols, just like DeLillo's novel. And the novel itself makes it hard to see what difference there might be between art and theory (aside from intelligence and style). I'm sure there is one, but how can I describe it? Right now, I just don't know.


      *: McCarthy's 'Blood Meridian' was published in 1985, three years before 'Libra'... and both feature a villainous, pederastic man who suffers from Alopecia universalis. Conspiracy?
    • 4/5
      An incredibly interesting take on the JFK assassination. This is a good political drama, as well as a good detective story.
    • 4/5
      Libra by Don DeLillo is a 1988 book. Don Delillo is a post modernist author. This is his 9th book. Libra is a retelling of the assasination of JFK by Lee Harvey Oswald.. This book will make you believe the conspiracy theories. Not sure of my rating yet. The story is the life of Oswald from childhood as a bullied, disadvantaged youth with dyslexia. The assasination, dreamed up after the Bay of Pigs to promote anti Cuban opinion and push America back into conflict with Cuba was dreamed up by disgruntled CIA agents was meant to fail. This book has a lot of espionage in it. It also has a parrallel story of the man who has been assigned to review all the data that has been collected about the assasination and write the history of the assasination
    • 3/5
      A fictionalized biography of Lee Harvey Oswald and the Kennedy assassination. Interesting, but not amazing.
    • 3/5
      See the truth and know it, if you can.

      It's easy to see why David Foster Wallace - or, indeed, anybody - likes Don DeLillo: his dense, lingually contorted novels leave a stronghold on one's mind beyond the fact. In my case, I seldom remember the plots, but I can remember certain scenes or feelings invoked, mainly as few authors have managed both in the same way before.

      It's less about the contents and more about a general sentiment.

      Workmen carried lanterns along adjacent tracks. He kept a watch for sewer rats. A tenth of a second was all it took to see a thing complete. Then the express stations, the creaky brakes, people bunched like refugees. They came wagging through the doors, banged against the rubber edges, inched their way in, were quickly pinned, looking out past the nearest heads into that practiced oblivion.

      As the book states, this is about the Kennedy assassination. Oswald was a Libra. Does he buy into the whole Oswald-did-it-thing? Does anybody care?

      There is political intrigue here. Language snakes around as a man hits the person he's romantically entangled with, which turned me into near-vomit; one of the fores of DeLillo's strengths are how he can describe dramatic detail with few words and yet, together with the use of idiomatic expressions in dialogue, refrain from sounding tart or obtuse.

      She saw him from a distance even when he was hitting her. He was never fully there.

      Yes yes yes yes. God is alive and well in Texas.

      Paragraphs turn into short stories at times:

      “I’ll tell you a good sign,” Lee said. “I order the handgun in January, I order the rifle in March. Both guns arrive the same day. My wife would say it’s fate.” “What did you tell her about tonight?” “She thinks I’m at typing class. I dropped out of typing class two weeks ago. I got fired from my job last Saturday was my last day.”

      “I have the primitive fear,” Ferrie said. “All my fears are primitive. It’s the limbic system of the brain. I’ve got a million years of terror stored up in there.” He wore a crushed sun hat, the expressive brows like clown paint over his eyes. He handed Wayne the rifle. They watched him walk to the lopsided dock and climb into the skiff.

      All in all, I really got into this book around the 350-page mark. Was it worth it? Yes.
    • 5/5
      Delillo is always a difficult author to get a perfect handle on, but goddamn this was a rip-tide of a book. Reads like an incantation of an assassination, with an eerie fatalistic pulse pumping through the latter half. Frustrating and opaque, as always, at times, but still unnervingly convincing. And shi-it, what a first-rate nightmare.
    • 4/5
      This story pads out and adds to facts that are known of the assassination of JFK on 22 Nov 1963. It is written from the perspectives of a number of people- Lee Harvey Oswald, his wife Marina, and mother Marguerite. As well as various government officials and Intelligence agents who were implicated in the conspiracy theory that is told so well in this book. Apart from being superbly written, it is a very clever, and a very real feeling portrayal. The parts of the story are drip fed to the reader in pieces here and there, from different sources. We are left to add it all up, but always with doubt about what is really happening and who is really behind this sad event, and most importantly: why. I think this style reflects the true happenings of operations within an Intelligence agency. There are a select few making plans and information is deliberately withheld from participants in events to protect the plans, as well as the planners. There are multiple back stories, aliases and false leads. I like to think that it was intended that the reader have trouble following it all, but it was probably my less than analytical brain that had the problems. Regardless of the intensity of the prose, I felt it easy to read and always looked forward to getting my fix of the next few chapters.
    • 2/5
      I see that this book took serious thought, real research, and a dedication to history and imagination that comes through on each page......but, while I'm normally a fan of Delillo, I had a rough time getting through this book. I'd recommend it to those interested in dense creative nonfiction and conspiracy theory, and of course to those interested in the stories built up around the JFK assassination, but otherwise, this isn't one I'd pass on. For this reader, it was just too dense and focused a text. I can appreciate the goal, the writing, and the experiment.....but this read like a wandering conspiracy theory, and I was ready for it to be done fairly early on.
    • 5/5
      Pure delight - brought back fond childhood memories and captures perfectly the sensory impact of baseball, both game and stadium.

    Book preview

    Pafko at the Wall - Don DeLillo

    PAFKO AT THE WALL

    He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.

    It’s a school day, sure, but he’s nowhere near the classroom. He wants to be here instead, standing in the shadow of this old rust-hulk of a structure, and it’s hard to blame him—this metropolis of steel and concrete and flaky paint and cropped grass and enormous Chesterfield packs aslant on the scoreboards, a couple of cigarettes jutting from each.

    Longing on a large scale is what makes history. This is just a kid with a local yearning but he is part of an assembling crowd, anonymous thousands off the buses and trains, people in narrow columns tramping over the swing bridge above the river, and even if they are not a migration or a revolution, some vast shaking of the soul, they bring with them the body heat of a great city and their own small reveries and desperations, the unseen something that haunts the day—men in fedoras and sailors on shore leave, the stray tumble of their thoughts, going to a game.

    The sky is low and gray, the roily gray of sliding surf.

    He stands at the curbstone with the others. He is the youngest, at fourteen, and you know he’s flat broke by the edgy leaning look he hangs on his body. He has never done this before and he doesn’t know any of the others and only two or three of them seem to know each other but they can’t do this thing singly or in pairs so they have found one another by means of slidy looks that detect the fellow foolhard and here they stand, black kids and white kids up from the subways or off the local Harlem streets, lean shadows, bandidos, fifteen in all, and according to topical legend maybe four will get through for every one that’s caught.

    They are waiting nervously for the ticket holders to clear the turnstiles, the last loose cluster of fans, the stragglers and loiterers. They watch the late-arriving taxis from downtown and the brilliantined men stepping dapper to the windows, policy bankers and supper club swells and Broadway hotshots, high aura’d, picking lint off their mohair sleeves. They stand at the curb and watch without seeming to look, wearing the sourish air of corner hangabouts. All the hubbub has died down, the pregame babble and swirl, vendors working the jammed sidewalks waving scorecards and pennants and calling out in ancient singsong, scraggy men hustling buttons and caps, all dispersed now, gone to their roomlets in the beaten streets.

    They are at the curbstone, waiting. Their eyes are going grim, sending out less light. Somebody takes his hands out of his pockets. They are waiting and then they go, one of them goes, a mick who shouts Geronimo.

    There are four turnstiles just beyond the pair of ticket booths. The youngest boy is also the scrawniest, Cotter Martin by name, scrawny tall in a polo shirt and dungarees and trying not to feel doom-struck—he’s located near the tail of the rush, running and shouting with the others. You shout because it makes you brave or you want to announce your recklessness. They have made their faces into scream masks, tight-eyed, with stretchable mouths, and they are running hard, trying to funnel themselves through the lanes between the booths, and they bump hips and elbows and keep the shout going. The faces of the ticket sellers hang behind the windows like onions on strings.

    Cotter sees the first jumpers go over the bars. Two of them jostle in the air and come down twisted and asprawl. A ticket taker puts a headlock on one of them and his cap comes loose and skims down his back and he reaches for it with a blind swipe and at the same time—everything’s at the same time—he eyes the other hurdlers to keep from getting stepped on. They are running and hurdling. It’s a witless form of flight with bodies packed in close and the gate-crashing becoming real. They are jumping too soon or too late and hitting the posts and radial bars, doing cartoon climbs up each other’s back, and what kind of stupes must they look like to people at the hot dog stand on the other side of the turnstiles, what kind of awful screwups—a line of mostly men beginning to glance this way, jaws working at the sweaty meat and grease bubbles flurrying on their tongues, the gent at the far end going dead-still except for a hand that produces automatic movement, swabbing on mustard with a brush.

    The shout of the motley boys comes banging off the deep concrete.

    Cotter thinks he sees a path to the turnstile on the right. He drains himself of everything he does not need to make the jump. Some are still jumping, some are thinking about it, some need a haircut, some have girlfriends in woolly sweaters and the rest have landed in the ruck and are trying to get up and scatter. A couple of stadium cops are rumbling down the ramp. Cotter sheds these elements as they appear, sheds a thousand waves of information hitting on his skin. His gaze is trained on the iron bars projected from the post. He picks up speed and seems to lose his gangliness, the slouchy funk of hormones and unbelonging and all the stammering things that seal his adolescence. He is just a running boy, a half-seen figure from the streets, but the way running reveals some clue to being, the way a runner bares himself to consciousness, this is how the dark-skinned kid seems to open to the world, how the bloodrush of a dozen strides brings him into eloquence.

    Then he leaves his feet and is in the air, feeling sleek and unmussed and sort of businesslike, flying in from Kansas City with a briefcase full of bank

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