Thinking of you, Sam, reading “The Underworld”…. I must read him myself. Embarrassing I haven’t so far in life….
Martin Amis on Don DeLillo in the New Yorker:
I love the work of Don DeLillo. That is to say, I love “End Zone” (1972), “Running Dog” (1978), “White Noise” (1985), “Libra” (1988), “Mao II” (1991), and the first and last sections of “Underworld” (1997). The arc of this luminous talent, as I see it, reached its apogee toward the close of the millennium, and then partly withdrew into enigma and opacity. What happens, then, when I read “Ratner’s Star” (1976) or “The Names” (1982) or “Cosmopolis” (2003)? Novelists can be likened to omnicompetent tour guides—as they gloss and vivify the wonders of unfamiliar terrains, the marketplaces, the museums, the tearooms and wine cellars, the gardens, the houses of worship. Then, without warning, the suave cicerone becomes a garrulous rogue cabdriver, bearing you off on a series of sinister detours (out by the airport, and in the dead of night). The great writers can take us anywhere; but half the time they’re taking us where we don’t want to go.
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DeLillo is the laureate of terror, of modern or postmodern terror, and the way it hovers and shimmers in our subliminal minds. As Eric Hobsbawm has said, terrorism is a new kind of urban pollution, and the pollutant is an insidious and chronic disquiet. Such is the air DeLillo breathes.
Read more at The New Yorker
