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For years when I was younger, and still dreamed that I might be a novelist instead of an editor or a critic, I kept a quote from Don DeLillo’s 1993 Paris Review interview pinned to the bulletin board above my desk as a sort of talisman or goad prompting me to write: “Do you think it made a difference in your career,” Adam Begley asked him, “that you started writing novels late, when you were approaching 30?”
DeLillo’s mild answer (“Well, I wish I had started earlier, but evidently I wasn’t ready”) mattered less to me than the breathless audacity of the question itself, the blithe assumption that by your 20s — your 20s! — you were already too old, off the pace. And to ask that of DeLillo, who by the time of that interview had poured out almost a dozen novels in a torrent of productivity, probing his interests in everything from sports to mathematics to the inflection points of the American century … well, no wonder the man had a reputation for being paranoid.
In fact, despite all of DeLillo’s fascination with terrorism and death cults and the impotence of the individual swept up in unstoppable social forces, I’ve never considered him to be an especially paranoid writer. Anxious, sure — anxiety being one of his great themes, and one of the reasons he has so often seemed prophetic — but as a stylist he’s too cool and too alert to absurdity to be a true paranoid. I mean cool in every sense of the word: a little chilly, a little detached, and also ironic and knowing and hip, cool like the jazz he has cited as an influence on his sentences.
“He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.” That’s the opening to “Underworld” (1997), and it’s not just jazz, it’s poetry: the alliteration, the internal rhyme, the direct invocation to fellow citizens. DeLillo’s prose often summons this kind of music, whether he’s writing about nuclear annihilation or the Zapruder film or mass media or Hitler’s sex life. His syncopated riffs on culture’s weirder turns and mundane follies have influenced younger writers from Jennifer Egan to Jonathan Franzen, Dana Spiotta to David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith to Richard Powers to Colson Whitehead to Rachel Kushner and many more.
With some overlaps, his career is neatly divided into three distinct phases, and the very beginning is not necessarily the very best place to start. The early promise of his debut, “Americana” (1971), and the novels that followed is evident in certain characteristic touches: the sympathy for neurotic misfits — even wildly successful ones, like the rock star Bucky Wunderlick in “Great Jones Street” (1973); the ear for off-kilter dialogue; the anthropological instinct; the chiseled prose that announced the arrival of a dedicated stylist. (The opening sentence of “Americana,” “Then we came to the end of another dull and lurid year,” was catchy enough to provide the title for Joshua Ferris’s own debut novel 36 years later.)
But those early books are also marred by a shaggy, frenetic jokiness and a sense that DeLillo was still finding his way. His potential is more fully realized in the midcareer books that started with “The Names” (1982) and culminated in “Underworld,” after which he shifted to the starker, sparer — but still exhilarating — style that has marked most of his subsequent work. In other words, there’s something for everyone. Start here.
What’s his best-known work?
That’s probably “White Noise” (1985), which won the National Book Award that year and is still a mainstay on college campuses — possibly because it is itself set in part on the bucolic campus of the “College-on-the-Hill,” where the protagonist, Jack Gladney, teaches Hitler studies and worries about the state of the world. His immediate fears center on the so-called Airborne Toxic Event, a media-hyped but amorphous environmental threat involving a gas cloud that has drawn real-world comparisons to everything from the Bhopal chemical disaster (which happened a few months before the book was published) to climate change to the Covid pandemic: DeLillo’s genius in leaving it largely undefined is that there is always an Airborne Toxic Event.
More fundamentally, though, the characters are haunted by a free-floating angst that springs from the culture they inhabit: the breakdown of the family, the banality of tabloid celebrity and corporate language, the commodification of the individual. (“We are the sum total of our data,” Jack tells his wife at one point, in a sentence that feels especially clairvoyant today, “just as we are the sum total of our chemical impulses.”)
Above all, they are haunted by the crippling awareness of mortality that underlines so much of the book’s action, from the National Cancer Quiz on TV to the adult posture classes Jack’s wife teaches at the Congregational church (“We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming,” Jack remarks) to the running conversation they have about who will die first. This is DeLillo at his most anxious and his most absurd.
I want to read his masterpiece.
The bad news is that it’s also his longest, by far. Having written in his earlier books about death and sex and sports and history and political violence, DeLillo finally brought them all together in “Underworld” (1997), an 827-page behemoth that surveys the whole of the Cold War with cool aplomb.
The novel opens in October 1951 with one of the great crowd scenes in all of American fiction. The Brooklyn Dodgers are facing the New York Giants at the old Polo Grounds for a baseball game that will end with a dramatic home run, and the ball in the hands of a boy who skipped school and hopped the turnstile to attend. (He’s the one in the first sentence with the halfway hopeful shine in his eye.)
This ball will lead readers through the rest of the novel like the bouncing balls that used to lead TV audiences through song lyrics, with detours to subway graffiti and Truman Capote’s Black-and-White Ball and Lenny Bruce routines and a Texas highway shooter, on and on. Mostly, though, the book turns on the complicated relationship between Nick Shay, a waste management executive with a tragic past, and Klara Sax, an artist famous for the large-scale paintings she makes on the surface of decommissioned B-52 bombers in the California desert. It’s an astonishing feat of engineering — at one point I paused to think of what a particular scene was reminding me of before I realized it was reminding me of another scene, hundreds of pages earlier, that had set it up.
I know readers who would edit out parts of “Underworld” (in fact, the prologue is also available as a stand-alone novella called “Pafko at the Wall”), and I know readers who didn’t make it to the end — but if you want to read his best book, this is the one.
Sorry, but I can’t commit to 800-plus pages.
An intellectual is recruited to help shape America’s wars in the Middle East. Afterward, a documentary filmmaker wants to stand him against a wall to talk about guilt and regret and complicity, à la Robert McNamara in “The Fog of War.” That’s the basic premise of “Point Omega” (2010), which at 117 pages is like a shot of icy vodka compared with the 12-course meal of “Underworld.”
DeLillo’s late-career novels, beginning with “The Body Artist” in 2001 and continuing through to “The Silence” in 2020, are exfoliated to the point that only bone remains, and “Point Omega,” set largely in a nameless desert near a former blast zone, is the most parched of them all. There’s a gesture toward conventional plot when the war planner’s daughter shows up, and DeLillo frames the story with a bravura description of Douglas Gordon’s video artwork “24 Hour Psycho,” which (like the novel itself) aims to slow time to a single, distilled vanishing point. But for the most part “Point Omega” is a frigid exercise in pure existential terror. I mean that as the highest compliment.
I want to read a novel with history as its subject.
Is the Kennedy assassination historical enough for you? DeLillo had just turned 27 when the president was shot, and in “Libra” (1988) he revisits that turning point in American history through an in-depth character study of Lee Harvey Oswald, who was three years younger than DeLillo (and, as it happens, briefly his neighbor in the Bronx when they were adolescents). DeLillo did his homework: He has described reading not only the Warren Commission Report but thousands of pages of supplemental documents.
But as any moderately obsessed student of the assassination can tell you, there are enough gaps and provocative unanswered questions in the official narrative to give a novelist free imaginative rein while remaining faithful to what’s known. Oswald turns out to be a great DeLillo character: a malleable loser, a drifter, a self-important loose cannon who has a neurotic, endearing mother, a chip on his shoulder and a determination to do something big. In scrutinizing the inscrutable man at the center of the mystery, DeLillo spins a plausible web of conspiracy involving disgruntled C.I.A. officers and Castro’s Cuba and a plot that gathers its own momentum. A quote from “White Noise” is instructive here: “All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children’s games. We edge nearer death every time we plot.”
Tell me more about his interest in terrorism.
Terrorists, cults and conspiracies have been a recurring feature in DeLillo’s work: A stockbroker in “Players” (1977) is drawn into the orbit of a violent group targeting Wall Street financiers, a muddle of conspirators in “Running Dog” (1978) pursues a rumored home movie of Hitler having sex in the bunker where he died, a cult of killers in “The Names” selects its victims based on their initials and an arcane system of language. But nowhere does he focus more sustained attention on the theme, or on the link he perceives between terrorists and novelists, than in “Mao II” (1991), about a reclusive writer (and DeLillo stand-in) named Bill Gray who is enlisted to negotiate the release of a poet held hostage by terrorists in Beirut. Published a few years after the fatwa against Salman Rushdie had been issued, the book is explicit about DeLillo’s status anxiety. As Bill Gray puts it: “I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.”
This remains DeLillo’s most rigorous look at the power of mass movements — “The future belongs to crowds,” he writes at the end of the prologue, which details a group wedding at Yankee Stadium for members of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. (A bride in that wedding will go on to become the shared love interest for Bill Gray and his self-appointed assistant.) Thanks to the novelist protagonist, it’s also the closest he’s come in his fiction to offering an overt artist’s statement. “Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there,” Bill says. “I’ve always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence. The language of my books has shaped me as a man. There’s a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer’s will to live.”
Give me a deep cut.
It’s hard to claim that the mock hockey memoir “Amazons” (1980), about the first woman to play in the N.H.L., is essential as in “indispensable,” since DeLillo himself has dispensed with it. He wrote it under a pseudonym, Cleo Birdwell (which is also the name of the narrator), and omits it from his list of published books; it has long since fallen out of print. But if by “essential” you mean that a work contains the essence of a writer’s voice and vision, then “Amazons” deserves a spot in the lineup.
For one thing, it’s as prescient in its way as his more serious books: “They play ice hockey in Dallas-Fort Worth?” one character asks, 13 years before the Minnesota North Stars in fact relocated to Texas and became the Dallas Stars. For another, DeLillo’s interest in sports as an element of American culture has been a constant, from college football in “End Zone” (1972) to baseball in “Underworld” to the Super Bowl in “The Silence.”
But in “Amazons” the sport he’s most concerned with isn’t really hockey at all; it’s sex. By featuring a woman in a hypermasculine environment, the novel revels in opportunities to explore gender roles and lust as comic themes. (In this light, the glamorous “author photo” of a flaxen-haired model in a Rangers uniform is a nice touch.) The book is every bit as much a sex romp as movies of the era like “Porky’s” and “Night Shift,” only written with DeLillo’s customary verve. This leads to brilliant set pieces like the one in which Cleo’s father, hoping to desensitize her before she starts playing on boys’ teams, calmly instructs her in a litany of filthy slang; and another in which Cleo, during an unsatisfying tryst — “After a while it began to seem he was more or less performing a gall bladder operation for all the personal interest involved” — muses on the difference between expertise and prowess: “Expertise is specialized knowledge that you get from making yourself tremendously familiar with a thing. Prowess is the application of this knowledge in an erectile state.”
“Amazons” is the last book DeLillo wrote before “The Names,” and in disavowing it he may have been signaling a new gravity, making a clean break between phases of his career. But it’s also tremendous fun, written with a heedless headlong energy and studded with sharp observational asides, and DeLillo — a writer who loves to take history as a subject — does this book a disservice in erasing it from his own.
