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PARTISAN REVIEW
paranoid style (to use Richard Hofstadter's phrase) grows DeLillo's re–
lentless stand that this country is "totally engulfed by all the so- called
worst elements of our national life and character." For him, government
is an irremediably sinister network of conspiracy and corruption, intrigue
and lies, secret codes and plots. As he put it in
Players
in 1977, and there's
no reason to think he's changed his mind, America is honeycombed with
"Mazes ... intricate techniques. Our big problem in the past, as a na–
tion, was that we didn't give our government credit for being the to–
tally entangling force that it was. They were even more evil than we'd
imagined." Though such pronouncements are usually uttered by weirdos
and monsters, DeLillo plainly shares their black suspicions and anxious
crotchets, their certainty that the real power in this country is controlled
by "banks, insurance companies, credit organizations, tax examiners,
passport offices, reporting services, police agents, intelligence gatherers."
(He is a master at condemnatory lists.) And the whole sick scene
invariably ends in violence and death, as though there is nothing more to
the totality of American experience than this bleak and terrible actuality.
Is this really all we have, all we are? Though DeLillo's novels are
unsettling, after a while we begin to feel that this enemy of excess is
guilty of his own kind of overkill. The intractable connections he draws
between consumerism and violence, kitsch and death, conspiracy and
power are too unyielding to acquire the moral weight of truth, or to
suggest, however cautiously, the possibility of redemption. Though he
unquestionably belongs to the long line of American literary nay-sayers,
though he is an extremely shrewd observer of present-day life and has
perfected a powerfully evocative style, DeLillo's brutally apocalyptic view
of American society finally seems reductive and self- satisfied. Paranoia,
after all, is a
distortion
of reality. And though DeLillo's bizarre inventions
can make our skin crawl, he is much less able to touch our minds and
hearts.
PEARL K. BELL
