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he knows that the man who finds connections everywhere is a para–
noid.) Words, in the end, make up the fabric of our beings (and so
the assurance that Gladney is not dying "in so many words" knells
with particular plangency) .
Above all , language, for DeLillo , is like fear: it is all we have of
certainty, and of humanity. In this novelist's (largely verbal) uni–
verse, words are treated as archaeological fragments that can help
us recover something of a more primitive and so more human past .
Words are runes, atavistic relics, talismans with something of the
sacred about them. Language is ritual; language is liturgy. It is no
coincidence that the scenes from DeLillo's fiction that hum in the
memory are virtuoso set pieces fashioned out of nothing but syllables:
the conquest in
The Names
in which the protagonist makes love to an
unwilling woman just by mouthing words to her in a crowded Athens
restaurant ; the episode in
White Noise
in which two professors deliver,
simultaneously and in the same room, lectures on Elvis and Hitler,
their words and ideas chiming and separating as in some verbal stereo
system . At his most reverberant DeLillo at once explores and em–
bodies the power, the fear of sound : recitation, repetition , incanta–
tion , words as rough magic, a way of making spells .
At times, perhaps inevitably, DeLillo's rhythms overpower
him, acquire a life of their own, race so fast that they overthrow the
meaning they are meant to carry . The minute Gladney is given a
gun, he thinks of it as "a secret, a second life , a secret self, a dream, a
spell, a plot, a delirium." Also concealed in the runaway rhetoric is
the deeper liability of seeing eternity in a grain of sand : DeLillo and
his characters are so eager to read the world, to invest it with signifi–
cance, that they come on occasion to seem overanxious. Hardly has
Gladney begun to rummage through the trash than he is off again: "Is
garbage so private? Does it glow at the core with personal heat, with
signs of one's deepest nature, clues to secret yearnings, humiliating
flaws? What habits, fetishes, addictions, inclinations? What solitary
acts , behavioral ruts?" His atmospherics -stronger than his aphorisms,
DeLillo occasionally builds up menace without meaning, is about
profundity rather than full of it, becomes - in a word - portentous.
The price he pays for his hubristic ambition is an intermittent bout of
pretension; manuals for Zen and the art of emotional maintenance ,
his books mass-produce fortune cookies along with their koans.
Perhaps the oddest and most enduring mystery of DeLillo's re–
markable novels is that, though preoccupied with plotting, they are
themselves ill-plotted; portraits of a mind as searching, driven and
