Don DeLillo makes some people’s brains ache. They hurry to consign his novels — from Americana and Ratner’s Star to the great Underworld — to curiously inappropriate categories, whether readymade (“postmodernism”) or jerry-rigged for the purpose (“hysterical realism”). Minds skid on the glacial beauty of his fictive thought. Perhaps a slower pace, encouraged by the short-story form, will facilitate a better grip. Continued →

You could say there have been foreshadowings. From Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), the great American novel of the second half of the 20th century: “My son used to believe that he could look at a plane in flight and make it explode in midair by simply thinking it . . . he’d sense an element of catastrophe tacit in the very fact of a flying object filled with people.” Elsewhere in that novel, in 1974, two characters watch the World Trade Center being constructed: “Very terrible thing but you have to look at it, I think.” DeLillo’s fifth novel, Players (1977), features a woman who works in a grief management firm high up in the newly finished World Trade Center: “the towers didn’t seem permanent”, she thinks, but then, “Where else would you stack all that grief?” The same novel also depicts a cabal of terrorists who want to blow up the Stock Exchange. Continued →