Don DeLillo (review)

The "Postmodern" label clings to Don DeLillo because he describes our society so tellingly, whether it be a chemical spill that endangers a town, an assassination plot, or the most famous home run in baseball history. Harold Bloom's collection of previously published essays incorporated in this installment of Bloom's Modern Critical Views, Don DeLillo (2003), evaluates DeLillo in the light of postmodernism, and finds DeLillo more complex than just a "postmodern author." These essays serve to remind us that although the world that DeLillo witnesses is postmodern, this does not mean that the author has to treat it in a postmodern way.

Harold Bloom sets the tone for this collection with the proclamations found in his short, concise Introduction. Bloom claims for DeLillo a spot in the list of great writers of our time, specifically citing Underworld as his masterpiece. Additionally, Bloom asserts that DeLillo, contrary to popular opinion, is not a postmodern author but a High Romantic, owing more to Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman than to that quintessential postmodern, Thomas Pynchon. This tension provides a theme observable in the essays.

Robert Nadeau's opens the collection with "Don DeLillo's Search for Walden Pond," focusing on the game quality evident in DeLillo's novel about football, End Zone. Despite the cleverness of game systems used as metaphors for life, DeLillo recognizes that they ultimately fail to enclose the complexity that is reality; someone is always stepping outside the game. Bruce Bawer, examining White Noise in "Don DeLillo's America," sees DeLillo as a jargon juggler not interested in the human. "His characters are little more than authorial mouthpieces, all but interchangeable with one another" (27). Bawer's will not be the only article critical of DeLillo. Gregory Salyer, conversely, finds White Noise "the best articulation of the American mythos in the late twentieth century" (34).

In "The Romantic Metaphysics of Don DeLillo," Paul Maltby defines DeLillo as a Romantic because of an acknowledgement of a spiritual tone to life. Concentrating on the "visionary moments" in The Names, White Noise, and Libra, Maltby celebrates the anti-postmodern wonder and mystery that DeLillo foregrounds. These moments act in DeLillo as an "affirmation that the near-global culture of late capitalism cannot exhaust the possibilities of human experience" (65). David Cowart helps the reader remember why DeLillo has been labeled "postmodern": he works with postmodern moments, much like Pynchon. "More than any other contemporary writer, DeLillo understands the extent to which images . . . determine what passes for reality in the American mind" (72). For all of the emphasis on language and communication as themes in DeLillo's fiction, Christian Moraru confirms that reading is also a "master motif" (90). Reading is linked to consumption, and Moraru examines several works to remind us that DeLillo's characters often lack the skill at interpreting required reading.

Lou Caton and Dana Phillips continue the theme of the Romantic in the postmodern world. Caton uses three episodes in White Noise to highlight the "romantic collisions" with our world, the elevation of the human above the role of "isolated, socially constructed, economic units" (112). Phillips reads White Noise as a postmodern pastoral, with the traditional pastoral conflicts replaced, re-interpreted. Processed food can represent nature, with the supermarket becoming the new site for Arcadia, ultimately changing our view of "the wilderness."

Tony Tanner's outlook on Underworld asserts DeLillo's achievement in helping to shape the way we think. DeLillo has said that "the news" is the new narrative of our world, replacing novels or interpersonal discourse, and news is what molds Underworld. Finally, Jeoffrey Bull uses Mao II to examine the postmodern idea of the political novel, finding DeLillo's rewriting an affirmation for this type of novel.

The essays in this text are grouped well and represent a wide range of scholarship. Scholars find in DeLillo a wealth of material with which to interpret his work while at the same time differing on how that work might be read. Faced with these evaluations of DeLillo, one finds it...