On Wednesday we brought up the fact that the women in Libra seem to be kind of on the sidelines. One of the female characters who doesn't get a lot of time but who I think is really interesting is Beryl, Larry Parmenter's wife.
From her introduction I liked DeLillo's description of her on page 124, especially: "She had a dry way of delivering friendly insults directly into people's chests. She walked softly swaying into a room and you could sense anticipation in the group. They began preparing their laughter before she said a word."
My favorite part, though, was the description of her pastime: "She said the news clippings she sent to friends were a perfectly reasonable way to correspond. There were a thousand things to clip and they all said something about the way she felt. He watched her read and cut. She wore half-glasses and worked the scissors grimly. She believed these were personal forms of expression. She believed no message she could send a friend was more intimate and telling than a story in the paper about a violent act, a crazed man, a bombed Negro home, a Buddhist monk who sets himself on fire. Because they were the things that tell us how to live."
At first I thought this was kind of sad, that this is what she spends her time doing, but after this paragraph I realized this is kind of like what people do on social media now -- sharing news stories and links (like clippings) as communication, and it made me like Beryl even more.
I totally think of Facebook when I read that description of Beryl, basically "posting" (through the mail--the same term applies!) news items to "share" with her friends. Of course, DeLillo is imagining this as a practice long before Facebook or anything like it, but it's one more way that the novel seems to tap into something fundamental about people and how we interact via mediated stories--we "are" the stories we "post." (And of course there's the added irony that she's concerned with spreading all these unconnected, random news items, while her husband is secretly advancing the biggest news story of the century, unbeknownst to her--and, ultimately, to history.)
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