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PARTISAN REVIEW
whom he intersects. There are those whose lives never or hardly touch his.
Linked only by the drifting baseball after its first rebound from Bobby
Thomson's bat are Manx Martin, the Harlem grifter whose son grabbed
hold of the ball that historic day and whose daughter grows up to take part
in the antisegregation struggle in the South. There is Marvin Lundy, the
dealer in baseball memorabilia who traces the ball, and Charles Wainwright,
an advertising account supervisor who buys it from Manx and gives it to his
son. That son becomes a Vietnam pilot; his plane's fuselage, decorated by a
female figure called Long Tall Sally, eventually goes into one of Klara's con–
structions. And quite unattached even by this whimsical relation is Ismael
Munoz, the graffiti artist who spraypaints blue and pink angels as memorials
of destroyed children, onto a Bronx wall.Just when the Russians put a satel–
lite in orbit in 1957, a housewife makes Jell-O Chicken Mousse in her
middle-America kitchen while her husband simonizes his car and her son
masturbates peacefully in his room in front of a picture ofJayne Mansfield.
And the Texas Highway Killer, a supermarket clerk, commits a random mur–
der captured on video by a camera pointed idly by a child through a car rear
window. Touching none of these directly but significant for all is the historic
Hoover, the obsessed and repressed master figure whose never-released sex–
ual energy is like the menace of the cold war itself. He seems the spokesman
for the era's paranoia and, at the same time, for the artist's search for an elu–
sive coherence. An equally striking reincarnation is Lenny Bruce with his
manic monologues, subversive and corrosive. He screams out what America
hears behind the headlines of the Cuban missile crisis: "We're all gonna die!"
Continuous plot, in the ordinary sense, does not exist for DeLillo in this
book. As though making fun of the literary idea of a puzzle to be unraveled
on the last page, he teases us by letting us know early that Nick committed
a murder when he was seventeen, a murder for which he was imprisoned as
a juvenile before being released to a Jesuit school where a teacher instruct–
ed him in the importance not of wholes but of particulars-that one must
know the names for all the parts of anything, as one might know technical
names for all the parts of a shoe. Almost to the end, the novelist lets the read–
er wonder whom Nick killed, and how, and why. But when this primal
scene is called up at last it turns out to be non-significant-a kid's game with
a gun he was told was unloaded. As unmeaningful, probably, is his boyhood
seduction by-or of-Klara. We understand from the beginning that they
once were lovers, but only at the last is the affair given on-the-page life, and
by then it is clear that it failed to provide the conventional motif of long–
enduring love. For DeLillo is really not interested in such story-telling. The
only history he tells is that which governs all lives.
Yet calendar time itself is deliberately flouted by a ferocious shredding
of the narrative or narratives. The novel is divided into several hundred
