BOOKS
DeLillo's World
AMERICANA.
Random House. $7.95.
END ZONE.
Penguin .
S8.95.
GREAT JONES STREET.
Random House. $7.95.
LIDRA.
Viking.
S19.95.
MAO II.
Viking.
519 .95 .
THE NAMES.
Random House. Sll.00.
PLAYERS.
Alfred A. Knopf. S7.95.
RATNER'S STAR.
Random House. S8.95 .
RUNNING DOG.
Alfred A. Knopf. S7.95.
WHITE NOISE.
Viking.
S16.95.
By
Don DeLillo.
The
novels of Don DeLillo can make your skin crawl. On a day when a
gunman in Texas has randomly killed twenty-two people in a cafeteria,
and a water-main break in mid-Manhattan has plunged the city into
chaos, the world, lacerated by disaster and mayhem, bullets and blood,
crazies everywhere, seems to be turning into a novel by Don DeLillo.
DeLillo is a voluptuary of paranoia, a connoisseur of dread who draws
his themes, characters, and incidents from what he calls "the daily jostle,"
where the banality of the commonplace is convulsed by terror and catas–
trophe .
DeLillo, born in 1936, is the son of Italian immigrants, grew up in
the Bronx, and was educa ted in parochial schools and at Fordham. Yet
his ethnic background and Catholi c upbringing are entirely absent from
his work. He is that very rare American writer who has no use for the
resources of personal memory and is most at home in the here and now.
Some brief parts of
Libra
(1988), DeLillo's fictional account of Lee Har–
vey Oswald and the Kennedy assassination, take place in the Bronx, but
only because Oswald and his mother lived there for a while. There are
no Italian families in
Libra.
The deliberately willed deracination that
DeLillo imposed on his fiction from the beginning is the strong under–
current running through all his work.
In the ten novels he has published since 1971, DeLillo has ranged
over an astonishingly diverse assemblage of American types: football play–
ers
(End Zone,
1972), rock stars
(Great Jones Street,
1973), .mad scientists
(Rat/ler's Star,
1976, his one work of science fiction), television executives
(Americana,
1971), expatriate businessmen and visionary archaeologists
(The Names,
1982), college professors
(White Noise,
1985) , and a drifter
named Lee Harvey Oswald
(Libra,
1988). Yet all these figures, different
