Over the course of time, the dismissive accusations have lost their bite. DeLillo’s clearly focused vision of the contemporary landscape — once so despairing and unlikely — has become, startlingly, more and more our own. He worried about a world in which spectacle and terror would achieve totemic significance in the everyday lives of Americans. From attacks on American money markets to bioterror in the heartland, DeLillo’s work has long anticipated a world in which acts of terror would achieve unprecedented historic consequences. He has also probed deeply the role of Americans and their reputation in the modern world, and worried about the invasiveness of its popular culture. “We’re all one beat away from becoming elevator music,” he once said.

Sympathetic critics have increasingly suggested that Don DeLillo is probably the best living American writer that living Americans do not read. Today, the growing relevance of his work has him poised to become more than a critics’ darling. His literary peer Thomas Pynchon has applauded DeLillo for “a voice as eloquent and morally focused as any in American writing.” In light of the events of Sept. 11, Don DeLillo’s America may assist many readers in making sense of a newly uncertain world.

Modern American history has proven itself reliably frustrating in the hands of its most capable chroniclers. As Philip Roth, speaking for historians and artists alike, famously observed of the reality of American life, “It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meagre imagination.” The pressing need for a broad historical understanding — while deriving some meaning from the daunting, terrific violence of recent weeks — is more pronounced than ever.

DeLillo’s rejoinder to Roth’s shrug can be seen throughout his oeuvre. As he wrote in a 1997 essay, “The sweeping range of American landscape and experience can be a goad, a challenge, an affliction and an inspiration, pretty much in one package.” His literary career has taken up this express challenge with remarkable aplomb.

Born in 1936 to Italian immigrants, DeLillo grew up in New York in the Bronx. There he actively played sports among fellow Italian-Americans, harboring no interest in the writing life. A teenage job as parking attendant one summer proved to be a pivotal experience. According to DeLillo, the vast hours spent waiting and watching over vehicles encouraged a reading habit that became, over time, the beginnings of a writer’s education. He discovered Faulkner, Joyce, Melville and Hemingway. He attended Fordham University as a self-described listless youth, and over the early ’60s toiled discontentedly in advertising. The writing of his first novel, “Americana,” would occupy the second half of the ’60s, with DeLillo alternating between novel writing and freelance copywriting. In 1975 he married Barbara Bennett, a banker and, later, landscape designer, and they traveled for several years across Greece, the Middle East and India. He has repeatedly remarked on the influence of these travels, as well as his many years in New York. “I think more than writers,” he has added, “the major influences on me have been European movies, and jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.”

DeLillo’s understanding of the world at large stems from his observations of contemporary Western life. His first three novels are a tour de force of the panorama of American pop culture: They examine advertising and film (“Americana”), football and nuclear war (“End Zone”) and rock ‘n’ roll (“Great Jones Street”). The last of those opens with a visionary rant on the rock star that may be the last word on the subject.

Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the somber renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings. I mean long journeys across grey space. I mean danger, the edge of every void, the circumstance of one man imparting an erotic terror to the dreams of the republic. Understand the man who must inhabit these extreme regions, monstrous and vulval, damp with memories of violation. Even if half-mad he is absorbed into the public’s total madness; even if fully rational, a bureaucrat in hell, a secret genius of survival, he is sure to be destroyed by the public’s contempt for survivors. Fame, this special kind, feeds itself on outrage, on what the counsellors of lesser men would consider bad publicity — hysteria in limousines, knife fights in the audience, bizarre litigation, treachery, pandemonium and drugs. Perhaps the only natural law attaching to true fame is that the famous man is compelled, eventually, to commit suicide.

Could there be a more evocative apotheosis of Kurt Cobain and his antecedents? Later books contain far-reaching ruminations on pornography and conspiracy (“Running Dog”), the many shades of consumerism and self-medication (“White Noise”), baseball and trash (“Underworld”), as well as the JFK assassination, those “seven seconds that broke the back of the American century” (“Libra”). Appropriately enough, DeLillo’s take on the assassination comes from the first-person perspective of Lee Harvey Oswald.

His insights beam throughout. As a former professor of mine once remarked, DeLillo may be the foremost aphorist of our day. Reading him could qualify as a lightning tour of media studies. “‘The TV set is a package and it’s full of products,’” claims a character in Americana. “‘To consume in America is not to buy; it is to dream,’” he adds elsewhere. DeLillo mused about a future of voyeur cams and reality-based entertainment as far back as 1982′s “The Names.” “‘You have to ask yourself if there’s anything about us more important than the fact that we’re constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves.’” This is an America that “‘still lead[s] the world in stimuli,’” one character proudly enthuses in “White Noise.” Banality lives large in DeLillo’s fiction, whether in the dissolution of the atomic family or the disappearance of old cultural certainties: “‘Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there’s kitsch, schlock, camp and porn.’”

Long before the World Trade Center attacks, DeLillo understood the profound disconnect between reality and spectacle made possible by modern media. “‘For most people there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set,’” one character notes. Of jaded viewers’ appetites, he writes, “Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, need them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else.” Indeed.

Several of his novels (“Players,” “The Names” and “Mao II” in particular) feature terrorism as a prominent theme. In “Players,” terrorists explain their plotting of an attack at the New York Stock Exchange with a symbolic rationale that is chillingly familiar: “‘They have money. We have destruction.’” DeLillo sees a direct correlation between ideologically keyed acts of terrorism and an increasingly global economy. The price of oil serves as “an index to the Western world’s anxiety,” and it also underscores how terrorism can “infiltrate and alter consciousness” in a psychologically deep, globally unprecedented manner. “The Names” features discussions of anti-Americanism, and the antipathies between the fundamentalist Islamist and the American capitalist. “White Noise” examines the hysteria surrounding what DeLillo then referred to, with smirking undertones, as an “airborne toxic event”; today the world knows it simply as bioterror. At his most dystopian, in “Mao II,” DeLillo considers forebodingly that, “in a society that’s filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act.” From the point of view of the fundamentalist terrorist, “‘Terror makes the new future possible.’” DeLillo’s vision of terrorism implicates both agents of terrorism and the West in a larger web of mutually antagonistic ideologies.

Topicality aside, the broader importance of DeLillo’s literary accomplishments can be seen as the continuing evolution of two distinct talents.

He is a passionately cerebral writer, a cultural critic with an insistence on the importance of big ideas. “For me,” he once told an interviewer, “writing is a concentrated form of thinking.” The literary critic Frank Lentricchia was an early admirer of DeLillo’s “perfect weave of novelistic imagination and cultural criticism.” From his 1971 debut with “Americana,” DeLillo’s characters echoed the author’s project: “a literary venture, an attempt to find pattern and motive, to make of something wild a squeamish thesis on the essence of the nation’s soul.”

DeLillo is also quite simply a stunning stylist, a writer whose sentences have been accorded the adoration once reserved for Ernest Hemingway’s. The mark of Hemingway, or his writing ethic, can appear strikingly:

“‘Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there. On one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it’s the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language. I’ve always seen myself in sentences … There’s a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer’s will to live.’”

DeLillo has an unreserved affection for language. It is one of his cornerstone obsessions. A writer figure in “Mao II” conveys this attachment to language in smirking understatement: “‘I’m a sentence maker. Like a donut maker, only slower.’”

The marriage of the intellectual and the novelist in Don DeLillo has led to a handful of landmark novels, from “White Noise,” “Libra” and “Mao II,” to his inspired opus “Underworld.” His books have received the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner and various other distinctions internationally, but it may be his influence on future literary generations that produces the surest proof of his achievements. In interview he expresses little concern for his posterity, and he zealously fights his cult fame: public appearances are kept to a bare minimum, he will likely never appear on TV or film and he speaks admiringly of the example set by his enigmatic forbear, Thomas Pynchon. Nonetheless, he remains active today, having released on the heels of 1997′s “Underworld” both the play “Valparaiso” and a slim novel, “The Body Artist.”

DeLillo is ultimately exceptional for his strident convictions, his unflagging defense of the promise of art in times of conflict or malaise. In the face of all that cheapens human experience, or renders it disempowering, there are availing things that still matter. As a character in “Underworld” ponders, “What’s the point of waking up in the morning if you don’t try to match the enormousness of the known forces in the world with something powerful in your own life?” Over time his fiction has imbued Pynchon’s distraught and fearful proclamation in “Gravity’s Rainbow,” that “everything is connected” with an unforeseen hopefulness in the connections of language itself. DeLillo’s writing produces rare sparks of rapture, such as this passage from “Underworld,” in which a character ponders a word that appears on her computer screen — a word to resonate with the war footing of today.

A single seraphic word. You can examine the word with a click, tracing its origins, development, earliest known use, its passage between languages, and you can summon the word in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and Arabic, in a thousand languages and dialects living and dead, and locate literary citations, and follow the word through the tunnelled underworld of its ancestral roots …

And you can glance out the window for a moment, distracted by the sound of small kids playing a made-up game in a neighbor’s yard, some kind of kickball maybe, and they speak in your voice, or piggy-back races on the weedy lawn, and it’s your voice you hear, essentially, under the Glimmerglass sky, and you look at the things in your room, offscreen, unwebbed, the tissued grain of the deskwood alive in light, the thick lived tenor of things, the argument of things to be seen and eaten, the apple core going sepia in the lunch tray, and the dense measure of experience in a random glance, the monk’s candle reflected in the slope of the phone, hours marked in Roman numerals, and the glaze of the wax, and the curl of the braided wick, and the chipped rim of the mug that holds your yellow pencils, skewed all crazy, and the plied lives of the simplest surface, the slabbed butter melting on the crumbled bun, and the yellow of the yellow of the pencils, and you try to imagine the word on the screen becoming a thing in the world, taking all its meanings, its sense of serenities and contentments out into the streets somehow, its whisper of reconciliation, a word extending itself ever outward, the tone of agreement or treaty, the tone of repose, the sense of mollifying silence, the tone of hail and farewell, a word that carries the sunlit ardour of an object deep in drenching noon, the argument of binding touch, but it’s only a sequence of pulses on a dullish screen and all it can do is make you pensive — a word that spreads a longing through the raw sprawl of the city and out across the dreaming bourns and orchards to the solitary hills.

Peace.

Any age, let alone our own turbulent, bewildering times, would count itself fortunate with as prescient, unnerving and sharply attuned a chronicler as Don DeLillo. Although his legacy and influence are increasingly guaranteed in literary circles, his work still eludes the popular following of Roth, or of younger writers with either half DeLillo’s stylistic mastery or his enduring grasp of pop culture. His body of work remains unread at our own negligence. We could do worse than begin recognizing that America’s premier novelist of ideas deserves, for whatever attention he draws, closer inspection still.

Roth, when pressed by his interlocutor, didn’t offer much of a reason for the change in his tastes: “I don’t know. I wised up …” he said rather enigmatically. It may be that he’s determined that reading other people’s novels impairs his ability to write his own. Most writers know what it’s like to fall under the sway of a master’s voice and to wind up unwillingly imitating it. Self told an interviewer that he couldn’t enjoy other authors’ fiction because “It uses the same muscles that I use to write with.” Still, it’s improbable that a writer with a voice as established as Roth would have this problem.

Perhaps, like McCarthy, Roth has simply lost interest. (McCarthy once said that he found reading fiction “a rather odd thing to do.”) Non-writers who have bailed on novels and short stories often say they’ve exhausted their patience for flagrantly “untrue” narratives. One blogger explained it thus: “I put it down to having experienced enough real life narrative and drama such that made-up stories no longer appeal.”

There’s a school of evolutionary anthropology that might agree with him. It speculates that fictional storytelling — a universal cultural practice — helps people imagine what others are thinking and feeling, and consequently how they might behave in the future. The value of such skills when it comes to navigating complex social groups is obvious, but perhaps people do reach a saturation point with age. No other artistic form can surpass the novel’s ability to immerse us in the inner life of another human being, yet there may come a stage when that prospect promises nothing new.

The literary journalist Sarah Weinman rose to Roth’s defense on Twitter, writing, “Actually, I am more surprised when 70-something writers read fiction. V. Rare.” Intrigued, I asked her to expand on this remark, and she told me, “To read fiction in particular is to engage with so many different creative senses, from being knocked out by a great writer’s examination of the human condition to marveling over linguistic style and voice to escapism and entertainment, or even all of the above. And as one gets older, and the ability to free up space in one’s head to properly engage with reading and not be distracted by physical and/or mental ailments, it seems to me that reading fiction would naturally become more difficult.”

Or maybe what some readers get sick of is introspection itself. The celebrated memoirist Diana Athill spent her working life reading as well as editing fiction, but wrote that in her 90s she had “gone off novels.” She blames this on the loss of a certain narcissistic taste that once dominated her reading. “Because a great many of today’s novels still focus on the love lives of the kind of women I see around me all the time, that means I am bored by a large proportion of available fiction,” she wrote in “Somewhere Towards the End.” I can sympathize. Once, the struggles of 25-year-olds to satisfactorily arrange their romantic lives was a fascinating topic to me. Now, not so much.

Of course, that’s only one kind of novel, in a world that offers many, many choices. It’s hard to muster the energy to explore new genres, however, when you’ve lost your faith. As champions of nonfiction often point out, whatever the literary shortcomings of any given work of nonfiction, at the very least you come away from it having learned something about the world. Fiction, however, doesn’t offer instruction or information; it offers an experience. And for that experience to occur, the reader has to deliver him- or herself up to the book.

This takes faith — belief that it can be done and trust that the author can do it. As Weinman suggests, you have to clear space in your head, like a party host pushing back the furniture, stocking up on drinks and hoping that everyone invited will come. If the gamble pays off, if the guests show up in a festive mood and hit it off with one another, you have a fabulous time. If the party never gels, all you have to show for your efforts are disappointment and embarrassment.

I don’t think fiction is harder to read than nonfiction — if anything, good fiction (make that the right fiction) is easier. But, as every reader can attest, opening a novel is a crap shoot. Depending on how new and untried the books you read are, the washouts are likely to outnumber the successes. For some older readers, summoning the optimistic energy required to give it yet another go despite these discouraging odds just doesn’t seem worth it. As Dr. Johnson said of second marriages, such efforts represent the triumph of hope over experience.

Yet others are still willing to try, like the late John Updike. “It frankly amazes me,” Weinman noted, “that he still reviewed younger writers for as long as he did.” I expect he threw some great parties, too.

Further reading

The original Financial Times interview with Philip Roth

Will Self tells the BBC that he doesn’t read fiction

The text of a 2007 Rolling Stone profile of Cormac McCarthy in which he describes reading fiction as “an odd thing to do.”

Readers of Mike Johnstone’s blog discuss their diminishing interest in fiction

It took Callil a few days to present a fuller explanation. In the meantime, it was fascinating to watch various commenters respond to the kerfuffle. “I’m discouraged by what I assume is her ideologically inspired illiteracy,” Wendy Kaminer assumed for the Atlantic Online. “Is there a terrible scar of monotonous male sexuality in these inventions that limits their power or makes Roth deserve Callil’s dismissal?” fulminated Jonathan Jones in the Guardian. “To claim that,” he went on, “is to misunderstand what a novel is.” Eileen Battersby, in the Irish Times, sniffed, “The sexism and ego of Roth can certainly offend, and obviously bothers the irate Booker judge Carmen Callil.”

Not so obviously, in fact. Nothing in Callil’s initial statements about the affair indicated that her opposition to Roth’s work had anything to do with sexism or raunch. When she published a full account of her objections in the Guardian on Saturday, she expanded on a complaint that she’d mentioned from the start: Roth is the second North American (after Alice Munro) to receive the prize in its four-year history. Given that this variation on the Booker Prize is labeled “International,” and that it provides an additional grant that the winner may use to fund further English-language translations of his or her work, Callil had hoped that it would go to a less usual suspect.

She also doesn’t like Roth’s work very much, as she made abundantly clear. For the record, while I’m more or less in Callil’s camp when it comes to Roth’s fiction (particularly the face-sitting bit), her first remarks were thoughtless and high-handed. Perhaps Callil believed she was acting in the hallowed tradition of British literary prize judges who have aired their dirty laundry in the press, but insulting an author (any author) by name in such a context is uncalled for. There are enough readers who love Roth’s work to make him a reasonable choice for an important award, even if Callil can’t personally endorse that choice.

However, the really interesting aspect of the story is the straw woman erected by pro-Roth commenters like Kaminer, Jones and Battersby (among others) before Callil explained herself at length: the dour feminist scold who’s incapable of separating art from “ideology.” Instead, it turned out that Callil finds Roth’s fiction “narrow. Not in the Austen, Bellow or Updike sense, because they use a narrow canvas to convey the widest concepts and ideas. Roth digs brilliantly into himself, but little else is there. His self-involvement and self-regard restrict him as a novelist.”

These are legitimate aesthetic reservations, even if not everyone agrees with them. Yet if you do agree with them, and you happen to be a woman, chances are excellent that — no matter what you say — Roth proponents will assume your aversion is based in politics. This is as frustrating as telling the chef you don’t care for lamb chops and getting a self-righteous lecture on his supplier’s humane farming practices.

As recently as 30 years ago, subjecting a work of art to a political litmus test — is it racist, sexist, classist, homophobic? — was considered the supreme critical method, but fortunately times have changed. Unfortunately, they have changed with a vengeance. Now, in many circles, critiques that can be labeled as “politically correct” can also be summarily dismissed as “not literary arguments but emotional or ideological ones,” to quote Kaminer.

Presumably, literary arguments can also sometimes be emotional and ideological (this one certainly is!), but the point seems to be that if you’re a female reader who hates Roth novels, you must be motivated by (irrational) passion and doctrinaire political animus, whether you realize it or not. Your taste could not possibly arise from anything but “illiteracy” and an inability to understand “what a novel is.” Patronizing? You bet. Why, it’s enough to turn a girl into a feminist.

Further reading

Judge withdraws over Philip Roth’s Booker win: The initial story in the Guardian

Wendy Kaminer’s appreciation of Philip Roth in the Atlantic Online

Jonathan Jones on why Philip Roth deserves the Man Booker International Prize

Eileen Battersby defends Philip Roth in the Irish Times

Carmen Callil on why she resigned from the Man Booker International panel

Marcus Messner has his own reason for assimilating: He’s still living at home, and his worrywart father is driving him crazy. “I had to get away,” Marcus says, “before I killed him.” So he transfers from the local university to Winesburg, a small liberal arts and engineering college in Ohio that bears little resemblance to Sherwood Anderson’s story collection and no resemblance at all to Newark. Boys toss footballs on expansive green lawns, and the frat houses have “massive black studded doors,” the better for excluding non-Christians. When Marcus takes a job pouring beer at the local inn, the local frat boys bellow: “Hey, Jew! Over here!”

On a campus that so prides itself on its sacred traditions, Jews have little hope of fighting their second-class status. But fight it Marcus does, in his stubborn and pugnacious way. He engages in a protracted battle with the dean over the university’s chapel requirement, and he refuses to do what the faculty or his peers expect of him, whether it’s getting drunk or joining a Jewish fraternity or trying out for the baseball team.

Marcus isn’t the only outsider at Winesburg, but, being a solitary cuss, he can’t make common cause with misfits like Bertram Flusser, a troubled young gay man whose oppositional stance is distilled in Malvolio’s exit line from “Twelfth Night”: “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you!” And speaking of “Twelfth Night,” there’s a sad girl named Olivia, “an ex-teenage drunk and inmate of a psychiatric sanatorium who’d failed at suicide with a razor blade, a daughter of divorced parents, and a Gentile to boot.” Which makes her, by direct consequence, irresistible to someone like Marcus, especially when she proves to be more sexually experienced than he is. Soon, though, even this thread of happiness is jeopardized by the prevailing Midwest mores, and Marcus comes to realize he has exchanged his father’s stranglehold for Winesburg’s equally constricting rectitude, which is now “tyrannizing my life.”

“Indignation” is almost comically well-titled: It’s an angry little morality play about the harm men can do. Marcus comes to Winesburg trailing memories of his father’s kosher butcher store, where he used to watch the local shochet slit chickens’ throats and let the animals hang until the blood flowed out. (“It’s as if he took a bucket of blood, as if he took several buckets, and poured them out all at once, because that’s how fast blood gushes from the arteries onto the floor, a concrete floor with a drain in it. He stands there in boots, in blood up to his ankles despite the drain…”) But even within the pastoral confines of Winesburg, blood is never too far from the surface. In the hands of sexually repressed young men, a simple snowball fight can quickly segue into mayhem. “Within an hour, they were hurling at one another not just snowballs but beer cans whose contents they’d guzzled down while they fought. There were flecks of red blood in the clean snow from where some of them had been cut by flying debris … But their bleeding did nothing to dilute their ardor. The sight of their own blood in the white snow may even have been what provided the jolt to transform them from playful children recklessly delighting in the surprise of an unseasonable snowfall into a whooping army of mutineers…”

This violence echoes and prefigures the carnage happening overseas in Korea, where thousands of American soldiers are perishing in the name of anti-communism. It’s a dangerous world for a young Jewish man with no money and no connections. “Mark my words,” warns one of the Messners’ neighbors. “The world is waiting, it’s licking its chops, to take your boy away.” That terror infects even Marcus, whose obsessive devotion to academics is fueled by the knowledge that, if he’s expelled, he could likewise become bayonet fodder. Studying is nothing less than survival.

By design, “Indignation” is a slim and foreshortened volume, and critics are already assigning it to the shelf of “minor Roth,” maybe because its narrative freight is small in relation to its themes. But its emotional effect is by no means small. Early on, Roth springs a stunning twist on the reader — reminiscent of the switcheroo he pulled in “The Human Stain” — and the entire book is transformed into a meditation on loss and entropy, culminating in a superb set piece that gives full play to Winesburg’s pent-up demons.

Best of all, Roth has (for now, at least) abandoned the libido-in-winter theme that made some of his recent volumes a priapic chore. His ferocity, however, is undimmed as he takes up once more the conflict that has enlivened his work from the start: the unbridgeable divide between being a credit to one’s race and “an enemy of the Jews.” That last epithet was flung at both Roth and Roth’s alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, whose own brother joined the attack in “Zuckerman Unbound”: “To you everything is disposable! Everything is exposable! Jewish morality, Jewish endurance, Jewish wisdom, Jewish families — everything is grist for your fun-machine.”

Well, Roth’s fun-machine has largely closed down, and on the evidence of both “Indignation” and “The Plot Against America,” he has begun to savor both the mixed and unmixed blessings of his upbringing. He can even allow the self-banished Marcus to reflect back on “those unimperiled, unchanging days when everybody felt safe and settled in his place.” It would be absurd to say Philip Roth has found religion; it would be equally absurd to say he’s immune to Marcus’ nostalgia for religion’s comforts.

In the end, Roth leaves it to Marcus’ mother to set him — and us — straight. “That old world is far, far away and everything in it is long gone. All that is left is the kosher meat. That’s enough. That suffices. It has to.”