As is often the case with DeLillo, there are foreshadowings of 9/11 (the female protagonist works for the Grief Management Council in the bowels of the World Trade Center) and a similar set of questions about the troubling aesthetics of terrorism, set against a backdrop of glossy, empty Manhattan yuppie life. It’s ridiculous, but also audacious and breathtaking. But it’s also over 800 pages long, with its most brilliant section indisputably right at the beginning (see Pafko at the Wall).ĭeLillo’s opening here is every bit as memorable as Pafko: a terrorist attack on a golf course being viewed without sound in the piano bar of a jetliner, while the pianist accompanies. This is DeLillo’s meganovel-brilliant and only a little maddening-a great saga of connectedness, from the Cold War to cyberspace, with drop-in visits to a Texas serial killer and the New York seventies art scene. Beneath the scrim of ironies, The Names is bursting with human passion. It’s not as distanced as almost any of his other books. Mixing DeLillo’s brilliant gloss on America’s place in the world in the seventies with a comic portrait of a failing marriage and Pynchonesque story of a mysterious, murderous cult, The Names is a summa of everything he’d learned up to that point, his last and greatest seventies novel, and one of his greatest novels, full stop. Edgar Hoover visualizing nuclear Armageddon, and Jackie Gleason puking on Frank Sinatra’s oxfords. It was a good move here is all that’s wonderful about DeLillo: the sweep of history mingled with the telling detail, blinding eloquence and vivid vernacular, J. On the 50th anniversary of the famous homer DeLillo narrates at the start of Underworld (which gave the Giants the pennant over the Dodgers), this first chapter was separately re-released. If you’re going to like DeLillo, this is the book that will make it happen. Jack Gladney, professor of Hitler Studies, struggles with information overload, simulated disasters, an “airborne toxic event,” the most photographed barn in America, and a drug that neutralizes the fear of death. But that’s not why this is his masterpiece: The cipherlike figure of Lee Harvey Oswald, who sits squarely at the heart of Libra, is DeLillo’s greatest character.ĭeLillo’s breakthrough success, arguably still his quintessential masterpiece, and the funniest and most sustained example of his talent.
It allowed him to tackle the same themes as the more encyclopedic Underworld on a smaller, more focused scale. The Kennedy assassination, with its conspiracy theories, paranoia, Cold War overtones, and all-American mythology, was made for Don DeLillo.
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