DeLillo News & Notes: Why you shouldn't pay attention to New York Magazine's "Guide to the Don DeLillo Oeuvre"

In 2007, New York Magazine published this "Guide to the Don DeLillo Oeuvre" on their website. While I think that this is a great idea, especially for a writer like DeLillo, I think that it could have been executed much better.

For example, I cannot understand why Mao II -- a short, accessible book with big ideas about images, terrorism, and novelists, a book that won the Pen/Faulkner Prize and was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist -- is listed as "Recommended" instead of "Classic." Nor can I fathom why End Zone -- an early, eerie, and deeply funny book about the relationship between war and football -- is "For Fans Only"; certainly it should be "Recommended."

This guide, following in the footsteps of many critics, asks us to disregard DeLillo's post-Underworld writings, including Valparaiso, The Body Artist, Cosmopolis, and Love-Lies-Bleeding. Though I understand why someone might criticize these works, I just cannot get on-board with it. I would recommended Valparaiso and especially Cosmopolis (which, we can say with hindsight, proved part of its worth when the American economy recessed.) The only exception, perhaps, is the Body Artist: I am still searching for a way to redeem this book.

Finally, Libra, one of my favorite DeLillo novels, is, I must say, something of a departure from his usual writing style. So, even though it is an enjoyable read, it does not give someone a good introduction into DeLillo's sensibilities as a writer. For this reason, it may not be the best place to begin. At the same time, the highlight of Libra -- i.e. the assassination of President Kennedy -- does provide the basis on which all of DeLillo's work is built, and this may be sufficient justification for reading it first.

As I wrote in a previous review that I expect to publish on this blog tomorrow, I believe that DeLillo's recently published short-story collection, The Angel Esmeralda, provides the best introduction to his work because it is accessible, easy to read, features classic DeLillo themes, and spans the better part of his writing career (1979-2011). (Of course, this short-story collection was not in print when the New York Magazine created its guide.)

Or, if it must be a novel, then I would recommend that one begin with White Noise. It's difficult to find a better representative text of DeLillo than this.

DeLillo Book Reviews: a review of Falling Man

"Racing Against Reality"

In June of 2007, Andrew O'Hagan reviewed DeLillo's novel Falling Man for the New York Review of Books. The first half of O'Hagan's review contextualizes Falling Man better than any other that I've read. In short, he takes us through Players, White Noise, Libra, Mao II, Underworld, and The Body Artist in order to show us that DeLillo -- with his discussions of plots, death, terrorism, and the World Trade Center -- had been leading us up to that "day of days" for a long time. As O'Hagan writes, 

To have something exist as your subject before it happens is not unprecedented in the world of literature [...] but the meeting of September 11 and Don DeLillo is not so very much a conjunction as a point of arrival [...]

The second half of his review, however, takes a turn. O'Hagan writes that this connection between DeLillo and 9/11 is too strong, so that when the day actually comes, it "instantly blows DeLillo's lamp out." O'Hagan then builds on this point:

DeLillo the novelist prepared us for September 11, but he did not prepare himself for how such an episode might, in the way of denouements, instantly fly beyond the reach of his own powers. In a moment, the reality of the occasion seems to have burst the ripeness of his style, and he truly struggles in this book to say anything that doesn’t sound in a small way like a warning that comes too late. Reading Falling Man, one feels that September 11 is an event that is suddenly far ahead of him, far beyond what he knows, and so an air of tentative rehearsal resounds in an empty hall.

Although I respect O'Hagan's review, particularly the first half, I am not inclined to side with him and his dismissal of Falling Man. (In fact, I would like to spend a future blog post showing how DeLillo does succeed in this novel.) O'Hagan's review, like many that I've read, appears to argue for DeLillo's post-9/11 irrelevance. With the power of hindsight, one can reliably say that Point Omega has disproved this flimsy generalization about DeLillo.