Indeed, White Noise is a fine example of DeLillo's engagement with the world, not least in the lists that fills its pages, emphasising just how crammed our lives today are with stuff. "The American mystery deepens," he wrote in White Noise. In all these books, DeLillo is interested not just in these aspects of the world, but in what is hidden from us. And he would do it again: Underworld (1997) takes on more or less everything that happened in – or to – the US in the second half of the 20th Century, and Falling Man (2007) was inspired by the collapse of the Twin Towers. He had done it before, too: his debut novel Americana (1971) touched on the manipulations of what would later be called reality television. This engagement with the outside world renders DeLillo somewhat unfashionable in an age of autofiction and internal stories with no moving parts. I settled for that." He also noted that a "motivating element" in writing the novel might have been that "Oswald and I lived within six or seven blocks of each other in the Bronx.") But his birth sign turned out to be Libra, the scales. "I was hoping it was Scorpio, because I liked that word. This is perhaps best seen in his 1988 novel Libra, about Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination of President John F Kennedy, "the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century." (DeLillo decided early on to name the novel after Oswald's zodiac sign. They remained concepts, no less transient for all their bulk than some routine distortion of light." When, in September 2001, Al Qaeda treated them as such a symbol, DeLillo acknowledged that "today, again, the world narrative belongs to terrorists."Ĭonnected to this modernity is the next key quality of DeLillo's: his restless curiosity about the world. "People driven by the same powerful emotion." Even in his earlier novel, 1977's Players, DeLillo spotted what few of us had: that New York's World Trade Center Twin Towers were as much symbols as they were real objects: "The Towers didn't seem permanent. In 1982 of course there was no social media, but the groupthink it harnesses is summarised in The Names too: "Masses of people scare me," says one man. In The Names DeLillo also noted the rise of terrorism as a focus of the Western world's attention: the plot features a sect that kills people based on their names – and, in a horribly prescient take on the extremes of human appetites, one character wants to film the murders taking place. It told us how bad we felt at a given time." "Generally I do reviews, I examine figures, make decisions." It's a world where the US is the country that it's always okay to hate: "There's no sense of wrong when you kill an American or blame America for some local disaster." A world where, then as now, "the price of oil was an index to the Western world's anxiety. Everything about it is so thoroughly up-to-date that you can see why Geoff Dyer called it " a 21st-Century novel, published in 1982." Its characters have modern, hard-to-describe jobs: the narrator James Axton struggles to say what he does for a living. The Names is about Americans abroad, mostly in Greece and the Middle East. These books are still about things, yes, but they also are the things themselves: highly self-aware literary works, recreations of modern society so intense that they make us see it afresh – intensely DeLillo-esque books about an intensely DeLillo-esque world. It is on the five-book run of the 1980s and 90s – The Names (1982), White Noise (1985), Libra (1988), Mao II (1991) and Underworld (1997) – that DeLillo's colossal reputation stands. And they started to win him a reputation: " There's Norman Mailer, there's Thomas Pynchon, now there's Don DeLillo," gasped the Los Angeles Times on the paperback cover of Running Dog.īut it is widely agreed by his admirers that the next stage of DeLillo's career rang in what we might call his imperial phase. Later in the 1970s he began to grow and experiment more: novels like Ratner's Star (1976), Players (1977) and Running Dog (1978) were playful, intricate and increasingly uninterested in forcing DeLillo's talents into standard literary forms: they mashed up elements of science fiction, thrillers and satire with big-brain subjects (astronomy, economics, social history). DeLillo's early novels were about things – advertising (Americana, 1971), sport (End Zone, 1972), rock music (Great Jones Street, 1973).
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