FICTION IN REVIEW

1 8 1 R F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W S T E P H E N J . B U R N Don DeLillo’s novels are entropic machines, designed to slice open tightly bound plot situations and watch as they gradually leak narrative energy and unravel into their component parts. In book after book we see carefully assembled research collectives fall apart, relationships dissolve, and abstract theories emptied of usevalue in the bruising practical world. His works are not without their deeper philosophical layers or the intrigue that comes from strategically delayed revelations, but a reader’s page-by-page movement through DeLillo’s work is properly based not around plot momentum but rather the crystalline quality of smaller narrative particles. This is an art whose hierarchy emphasizes sentence making over genre-specific plot mechanisms, and as such DeLillo is still worth reading regardless of the literary form he is currently exploring. The crisp formulations that characterize his fiction survive translation into his nonfiction, where his sentences render the looming dangers hidden in ordinary life with a kind of T h e A n g e l E s m e r a l d a : N i n e S t o r i e s , by Don DeLillo (Scribner, 224 pp., $24.00) 1 8 2 B U R N Y prophetic glow. Thus ‘‘Silhouette City’’ (1988) warns that ‘‘in the American air, with every thought permitted, the distance between thought and action becomes ever slighter.’’ Similarly, plays such as The Day Room (1986) exist in part as placeholders for adroit reflections that leave mundane matters – say, the name of a disease – charged with significance: ‘‘If the gravity of the disease is not reflected in the terminology, the patient feels cheated. . . . We have to stretch the language to its breaking point as people find new ways to die, abrupt and mysterious symptomatologies.’’ One of the lessons we learn by reading DeLillo’s total body of work is that he could probably write a shopping list that would be of considerable literary interest. The Angel Esmeralda tests the load-bearing weight of one of DeLillo’s forays away from the novel by gathering roughly half his career total of short fictions. More than five decades separates the bookfromDeLillo’sfirstpublication–ashortstorytitled‘‘TheRiver Jordan’’ that appeared in Epoch in 1960 – but this collection begins almost halfway through his career, with 1979’s ‘‘Creation.’’ The volume then unfolds in chronological order with three stories from the 1980s (‘‘Human Moments in World War III,’’ ‘‘The Runner,’’ and ‘‘The Ivory Acrobat’’) and one from the 1990s (‘‘The Angel Esmeralda ’’) before concluding with DeLillo’s post-millennial output (‘‘Baader-Meinhof,’’ ‘‘Midnight in Dostoevsky,’’ ‘‘Hammer and Sickle,’’ and ‘‘The Starveling’’). The plot situations in this selection range from the mundane to the exotic: two students argue over the real identity of a wanderer they meet; a woman thinks about a figurine; two men orbit the earth during World War III; a woman obsessively returns to an art exhibition. Yet regardless of any given story’s ostensible focus, there is nearly always a flicker of danger eating away at the edges of the narrative’s frame: an earthquake’s aftershocks, an abduction, or men ‘‘organizing [their] loneliness’’ (as DeLillo wrote in Libra) by ‘‘stalking a victim.’’ In each story DeLillo’s remarkable intelligence works across the surface of these lives, looking for gaps in the matrix of ordinary moments where his sentences can probe deeper. Thus we see a woman taking a fuguelike doze on a couch as real sleep eludes her (‘‘She lay in a . . . mindwork spiral, carried on half-formed thoughts’’) or a character coughing (‘‘microscopic life-forms teeming toward the tabletop and ricocheting into breathable space’’). With typical acuity, De- F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W 1 8 3 R Lillo captures these small incidents in unusually vivid ways that should reassure any reader that sentence by sentence, and paragraph by paragraph, DeLillo serves up insights in the short form as punctually as he does in any other genre...