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though they are, appear
to
inhabit the same obsessional landscape of fear
and cataclysm.
Equally, DeLillo has concentrated, with a sort of repelled fascination,
on a cluster of contemporary phenomena that turn up again and again in
various guises: the pop culture of movies, television, advertising, and rock
which he described in
The Nal1les
as an "enormous rot and glut and
glare"; supemurkets and shopping malls; desperately loveless sex in squalid
motels; the insidious tentacles of technology ("Someone is after you,"
warns a vicious ex-CIA agent in
RIINl1ilig Dog,
"the computers maybe,
the machine-police"); terrorism; violent death; the C IA ; natural and
man-made disasters; and, the thread on which he strings all his fixations,
conspiracy. ("This is the age of conspiracy," says the journalist Moll
Robbins in
RlIIlIIillg Dog.)
Conspiracy, in DeLillo's feverishly suspicious imagination, is the cen–
tral, serpentine fact of modern life, "the inside game, cold, sure, undis–
tracted ... All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find co–
herence in some criminal act." Thus it is criminals of many persuasions
who control the action in most of his novels. And, as he remarks in
White Noise,
since "all plots [in all senses of that word] tend to move
deathward," DeLillo's conspiracies inevitably end in blood. A particularly
nasty conspiracy rears its hydra-head in
RllIlIlillg Dog,
in which smut mer–
chants and buyers are involved in a plot to find the film of an orgy al–
legedly shot in Hitler's bunker during the last hours of the war. The
bestiary of conspirators hot on the trail of the film, and all too ready to
kill for it, includes some diabolical ex- spooks, a dealer in porn, and a
corrupt senator with a vast collection of dirty art.
DeLillo presses his point hard in
Rlmnillg Dog:
the world of degener–
ates and crooks is not an aberrant mutation in the underground of
American life but enmeshed in its essential being. Their machinations are
oiled by our "superabundance of technology," which, the novelist im–
plies, "makes us feel we're committing crimes." But the mood of
RUI1-
ning
Dog
is so unmitigatedly nasty, devoid of a single redeeming thought
or person, that although we do shudder, we do not believe. The vision
of contemporary America in this novel is such an unrelieved black hole
of plots and secrets that after a point it seems not so much inexorable as
demented. Even when DeLillo draws his material, as he does in
Libra,
from real persons and the historical record; even when, in
White Noise,
he
attempts a comic- romp of sorts about American suburbia, the atmosphere
is
sinister, thick with menace, drenched in intimations of death, and hur–
des
toward a bloody finale.
A
writer in the grip of premonitory obsessions can sometimes feel
