Don DeLillo

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.

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