Don DeLillo, a novelist who has made American life his explicit subject for over 30 years, has faced similar charges. Like Stone, DeLillo's fascination with conspiratorial themes has drawn no shortage of heated rebukes. His reputation as an unabashedly private and cerebral literary figure, similarly, has not always endeared him to the literary establishment. He figured prominently in an anti-intellectual broadside of so-called serious contemporary fiction this summer in the Atlantic Monthly. Even tributes have tended to diminish DeLillo, as when Martin Amis trivialized him as "the poet of paranoia." Yet his dozen novels -- and handful of plays, stories and essays -- range widely and assuredly across the broad swath of the postwar American experience. They bristle with brainy asides and lyric rhapsodies rare to modern literature. From JFK to rock 'n' roll, from suburbia to the CIA, DeLillo has crafted defining portrayals of many touchstones in the American psyche.

Continue Reading...