Books, Arts & Manners

Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery, by Norman Mailer (Random House, 791 pp., $30)

AFTER living nearly three years in the USSR, Lee Harvey Oswald —accompanied by Marina, his Russian wife, and their infant child—returned by boat to America in early June of 1962. During that trip Oswald jotted down a kind of political testament, using the stationery of the Holland-America line, and Norman Mailer offers one passage from those notes as a proof-text for his thesis that President Kennedy’s (probably) lone assassin was a solipsistic anarchist cum nihilist, who was ultimately oblivious to the myriad conspiratorial sirens close about him who may have tried to lure him into their service. With stoic intensity and with an idealistic ruthlessness reminiscent of the great-souled heroes and antiheroes whom he had studied—Lenin, Mao, Hitler, Castro—Oswald tried to forge a new world single-handedly by murdering the most vibrant living symbol of the old. “I wonder what would happen,” he wrote, “if someone would stand up and say he was utterly opposed not only to the government, but to the people, to the entire land and complete foundation of his society.”

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Jacob Cohen

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Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery, by Norman Mailer (Random House, 791 pp., $30)

AFTER living nearly three years in the USSR, Lee Harvey Oswald —accompanied by Marina, his Russian wife, and their infant child—returned by boat to America in early June of 1962. During that trip Oswald jotted down a kind of political testament, using the stationery of the Holland-America line, and Norman Mailer offers one passage from those notes as a proof-text for his thesis that President Kennedy’s (probably) lone assassin was a solipsistic anarchist cum nihilist, who was ultimately oblivious to the myriad conspiratorial sirens close about him who may have tried to lure him into their service. With stoic intensity and with an idealistic ruthlessness reminiscent of the great-souled heroes and antiheroes whom he had studied—Lenin, Mao, Hitler, Castro—Oswald tried to forge a new world single-handedly by murdering the most vibrant living symbol of the old. “I wonder what would happen,” he wrote, “if someone would stand up and say he was utterly opposed not only to the government, but to the people, to the entire land and complete foundation of his society.”