Don DeLillo - New Editions of Three Novels

 Here is another example of a writer known but unread before going to prison: Don DeLillo. There, I read Underworld and Libra. The latter is shorter; the former might be a good beach read.

The Nation published Siddhartha Deb's review of three of DeLillo's novels, Secret Histories: Don DeLillo’s Cold War. Maybe this will help push you to reading him, if not I do suggest the whole review:

A Don DeLillo novel grasps both the assassin’s monomania and the contradictory, counterintuitive world of which it is a part. It is capable of displaying fidelity to both perspectives, brushing one against the other to edge its way toward a fictional truth that neither can uncover on its own. Six novels published in the 1970s established this principle, but the approach truly came into its own only with Libra (1988), DeLillo’s ninth novel. “Hashish. Interesting, interesting word,” a character says to Lee Harvey Oswald as the novel uncoils toward its climactic moment in Dallas with the Kennedy assassination. “Arabic. It’s the source of the word assassin.”

This knowingness, highlighted by the verbal certainty of the character, only throws into sharp relief all that is unknown, confusing, and contradictory in the novel. By its end, we are still uncertain whether either the shadow men who set the Kennedy assassination in motion (including the character riffing on the etymology of “assassin”) or the fastidious figures who attempt to piece the event together have any greater grasp of the whole than Oswald has. Nothing is knowable in full in the world as depicted by DeLillo, and this is why the Kennedy assassination is the prime exhibit in this hall of mirrors. “We are not agreed,” DeLillo wrote in an essay for Rolling Stone a few years before Libra’s publication, “on the number of gunmen, the number of shots, the origin of the shots, the time span between shots, the paths the bullets took, the number of wounds on the president’s body, the size and shape of the wounds, the amount of damage to the brain, the presence of metallic fragments in the chest, the number of caskets, the number of ambulances, the number of occipital bones….”

Libra is the last of three DeLillo novels from the 1980s that have now been reissued by the Library of America. With appendices, notes, new prefaces by the author as well as his Kennedy assassination essay and another on neo-Nazis in the United States, the volume runs to over 1,000 pages. Including The Names (1982), a novel about a cult set mostly in Greece, and White Noise (1985), a Midwestern campus drama that devolves into existential uncertainties, this is a compilation that grasps everything while also pointing out that an excess of material may, in terms of understanding, easily amount to nothing. We learn about fossil fuels and risk analysis, Hitler studies and toxic chemicals, millenarian cults and shadowy operatives of the deep state, but at these novels’ core are the mysteries of American power at home and abroad. Written in the fog of the Cold War, they take the story of America’s postwar years, usually seen as a triumphal rise to perpetual dominance and the end of history, and convert it into the story of a long, chaotic decline. Perhaps for this reason, these American novels written over the course of a decade feel like they are recording half a century, and if they speak powerfully of the past, they simultaneously manage to address the present.

sch 7/5