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.'"
Next page: The marriage of the intellectual and the novelist