Beyond Grief and Nothing: A Reading of Don DeLillo (review)

Joseph Dewey takes the title of his comprehensive study of the fiction of Don DeLillo not from the writing of his subject author but from a lesser work by William Faulkner, The Wild Palms (1939). In it the protagonist faces a lengthy prison sentence for performing a botched abortion, and, contemplating suicide, he must choose “between grief and nothing.” Abjuring self-annihilation he accepts a secular form of expiation for his sins, the heroic endurance of his own grief. A bleak choice, to be sure. Dewey suggests that DeLillo, in the fullness of a career that has given us such masterworks as The Names (1982), White Noise (1985), Libra (1988) and Underworld (1997), the latter ranked second (behind Toni Morrison’s Beloved) in The New York Times survey of the “best work of American fiction in the last 25 years,” has become the worthiest successor to Faulkner in postwar American literature.¹ DeLillo more than other contemporary writers has succeeded in negotiating the chasm between grief and nothingness, vaulting beyond the merely dignified endurance of loss or a retreat into existential cynicism.

Dewey revisits this theme throughout his readings of DeLillo’s novels, from his freshman effort, Americana (1971), which satirizes American televisual media and the corporate advertising industry, through Cosmopolis (2003), which excoriates the self-satisfied cultural and fiscal excesses of the end of the millennium. DeLillo’s most recent publication, Falling Man (2007), which presents the repercussions of the World Trade Center’s collapse on 9/11 on the life of a survivor, arrives too late for discussion in Dewey’s book, but surely that event places even further emphasis on a strategy for moving beyond the alternatives of grief and nihilism. However apt Dewey’s pursuit of this theme in DeLillo may be, I’m concerned that it does little to alleviate the criticism of DeLillo’s fiction as “inaccessible” to the general reader (1) or peopled with forbidding protagonists who “do not so much talk as think aloud” in his novels of ideas (3). To the extent that DeLillo’s novels “resist inviting intimacy” (2), they are not in accord with the criteria for adoption by Oprah’s Book Club, whose main selections stress personal empower-ment, spiritual (if non-denominational) transformation, and an empathetic narrative voice. Yet whatever mass appeal DeLillo lacks, he has won the 1985 National Book Award for White Noise, the 1991 PEN Faulkner Award for Mao II, and the 1999 Jerusalem Prize, awarded to a writer of international stature whose work celebrates the freedom and dignity of the individual. Such crises in the human condition as have been endured in the forty years of DeLillo’s literary career demand far more difficult and intellectually complex responses than assuaging the gentle reader’s frayed psyche.

For his part, Dewey eschews the theoretical apparatus that informs earlier single-author studies of DeLillo by Tom LeClair, Frank Lentricchia, David Cowart and Mark Osteen on the grounds that such academic criticism is even more forbidding to the reader who wishes to understand more about a prominent writer than his or her own reading of the novels has provided. If we consider readers not affiliated with universities or compelled to read print fiction by their professors, then one must ask how many “serious readers of fiction” (5) there are who actively seek interpretive guidance and yet remain averse to academic discourse. Yet it’s these educated but non-academic readers to whom Dewey’s study is addressed. Neither a literary celebrity such as the late Norman Mailer nor a Nobel Prize winner such as Morrison, DeLillo indeed lays claim to a readership of serious literary fiction, but it must be one of the most imperiled markets in publishing.

Beyond Grief and Nothing adopts several strategies for encouraging serious readership of an author, chiefly that of the chronological treatment of the author’s oeuvre without omission or the favoring of major over minor works. In order not...