Word: delillo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Since Americana (1971), Don DeLillo has converted our national confusions into witty, imaginative fiction. End Zone, a resourceful handling of football and nuclear war, brought him wide and serious attention. But without bestseller sales figures or a dependable cult following, he has become something of a reviewer's writer, a provider of topical allegories ripe for explanation and interpretation. Great Jones Street confronted the void of celebrity, and Ratner's Star measured the gap between science and humanity. There were terrorists in Players, spies and pornography in Running Dog and cult killers in The Names...
White Noise features a cloud of toxic industrial waste, although the author's larger concern is with death as metaphor. As usual, DeLillo mixes black comedy with a ceremonious tone: "The enormous dark mass moved like some death ship in a Norse legend, escorted across the night by armored creatures with spiral wings." The whirly appendages belong to helicopters tracking the monster smudge over Iron City, a small industrial town and home of the College-on-the-Hill...
...DeLillo has a knack for faculty follies. The school is well known for its department of Hitler studies, headed by Jack ("J.A.K.") Gladney, the novel's narrator. Students are also offered courses in popular culture, seminars in car crashes and cereal-box texts, a professor named Alfonse ("Fast Food") Stompanato and a teaching staff of New York emigres, "smart, thuggish, movie- mad, trivia-crazed . . . here to decipher the natural language of the culture, to make a formal method of the shiny pleasures they'd known in their Europe- shadowed childhoods...
...Names, Don DeLillo ∙On the Black Hill, Bruce Chatwin...
...DeLillo's salesmen carry more than lethal baggage, however, and they are more than walking editorials against fanaticism on one border and imperialism on the other. The author's main weapon, and his most formidable defense, is the word in description and dialogue. As Axton finally ascends the Acropolis, a pilgrimage he formerly dismissed as touristy, he speaks the author's mind as well as his own: "I move past the scaffolding and walk down the steps, hearing one language after another, rich, harsh, mysterious, strong. This is what we bring to the temple, not prayer...