The Details Are Kept a Secret

UnderWords: Perspectives on Don DeLillo's Underworld. Joseph Dewey, Steven G. Kellman, and Irving Malin, eds. Newark and London: University of Delaware Press, 2002. Pp. 219. $39.50 (cloth).

Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. David Cowart. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2002. Pp. xi + 257. Revised edition, 2003. Pp. 288. $19.95 (paper).

The running dog has arrived. Don DeLillo's career as a novelist has already been the subject of book-length criticism, notably Tom LeClair's early appraisal of mastery and communications systems in In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel (1987), and Frank Lentricchia's two edited collections, one on DeLillo as exemplary postmodernist and the other devoted to White Noise as representative text of the postindustrial consumer economy (1991). One hears the gears of critical industry turning with greater speed as Mark Osteen brings forth a Viking Critical Library edition of White Noise in 1998 and his own evaluation of DeLillo at the crossroads of postmodern culture in American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo's Dialogue with Culture (2000). The past year has seen the publication of two additional books, one, UnderWords: Perspectives on Don DeLillo's Underworld, which provides a casebook of arguments for DeLillo's lengthiest and most complexly structured novel as a "masterwork," and the other, David Cowart's Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language, recently revised in paperback to include a chapter on the latest published novel, Cosmopolis (2003), which provides extended readings of each of DeLillo's now thirteen novels.

Although the Don DeLillo Society does not boast the membership—or the recognition by the Modern Language Association—enjoyed by the Toni Morrison Society, the obvious trend in the critical reception of DeLillo's fiction suggests that his oeuvrehas now been granted full membership in the canon of postmodern American literature. Thus we find in UnderWords that a good deal of the discussion relates DeLillo's Underworld (1997) and its characters to works by other canonical American authors, including E. A. Poe (the "third Edgar" in the novel), Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, John Updike, and Thomas Pynchon. In addition, the casebook's various essays track other impressive cultural sources in Dante's Divina Commedia, Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, and the sad, tortured comedy of Lenny Bruce. All of which says something about DeLillo's "dialogue with culture," as Osteen puts it, namely that DeLillo's cultural references are rather heterogeneous. The difficulty that I have with these canon-forming arguments is that DeLillo's "masterwork," his appeal to "readers of contemporary serious fiction" (9), has much less to do with literary allusion and the situating of his work within the lineage of masterly American writers—that's the unfortunate critic's job—than in attuning his ear to the demotic American voice. I miss Samuel Clemens in this list of precursors, and Stephen Crane in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, all of Steinbeck, John Dos Passos's U.S.A. Trilogy, Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust, Kerouac's On the Road, and Hubert Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn; at least there's Lenny Bruce's manic stylings.

Canon-forming arguments are frequently complicit with the persistence of the high style in American literature. Our literary masterworks—like those of other English-speaking countries—should sound, well, literary. If I could be permitted one example, Henry James, in his Preface to the New York Edition of The Golden Bowl (1909), remarks, "It's not that the muffled majesty of authorship doesn't here ostensibly reign; but I catch myself again shaking it off and disavowing the pretence of it while I get down into the arena and do my best to live and breathe and rub shoulders and converse with the persons engaged in the struggle that provides for the others in the circling tiers the entertainment of the great game." But James has no real intention of rubbing...