Across the entire range of DeLillo’s work – which has earned him one if the highest honours in American letters – there is a tone of ever-present panic
Robert Pattinson in Cosmopolis, based on DeLillo’s novel. Photograph: Supplied
The National Book Foundation recently announced that Don DeLillo would be the next recipient of their medal for distinguished contribution to American letters. This hardly comes as a surprise, given DeLillo’s 40-year writing career and the esteem in which many of his books have been held for decades. His reputation rests on a handful of extremely well-regarded novels – White Noise, Underworld and Libra chief among them – but, as a stylist, it is often difficult to know where to situate him; or what to say about his body of work as a whole.
Terrorism (in Falling Man and Players), assassinations (in Libra), conspiracies (in Running Dog), and violent fits of anarchy and anticapitalist mayhem (in Cosmopolis) pervade his work and drive his plots. But it is fair to say that his work may ultimately strike us as much less plot-centered than panic-centered. In DeLillo’s work, whatever its time and circumstance, it is almost as if everybody already knows that their acts of violence and destruction are doomed and meaningless in the face of globalised systems that devour them, but that they seem powerless to imagine any other kind of response, or any other way to feel invested or alive.
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Terrorism (in Falling Man and Players), assassinations (in Libra), conspiracies (in Running Dog), and violent fits of anarchy and anticapitalist mayhem (in Cosmopolis) pervade his work and drive his plots. But it is fair to say that his work may ultimately strike us as much less plot-centered than panic-centered. In DeLillo’s work, whatever its time and circumstance, it is almost as if everybody already knows that their acts of violence and destruction are doomed and meaningless in the face of globalised systems that devour them, but that they seem powerless to imagine any other kind of response, or any other way to feel invested or alive.
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