DeLillo Novels: Crowds and Terror

Post Modern Master Shines A Light on U.S. Culture and Cults

May 22, 2008 Grace Lichtenstein

Read Paperbacks Cosmopolis or White Noise, Listen to Audiobook Mao II, and Try Underworld on a Long Flight or Vacation to Discover a Great American Novelist

Don DeLillo offers great reading on the page, as well as in audio books. Here are ideas for catching up on this post modern author whose themes include garbage, crowds, terrorism and the environment.

White Noise

In White Noise, the protagonist Jack Gladney is a professor of Hitler Studies at an American university, but that is almost beside the point. This was the first real “hit” for DeLillo in 1985. It is amazingly prescient in talking about blended families, psychotropic drugs, toxic clouds of chemicals, the digitization of health records, and the American consumption of junk food. As later reviews on Amazon.com have noted, the book predates Bhopal and Prozac. It is as mordantly funny and futuristic as it was when it first appeared.

White Noise 1992 ISBN-10: 0140152741 ISBN-13: 978-0140152746 Penguin paperback 256 pp.

Mao II

Mao II as a book on tape is a gem read by Stockard Channing. First published in 1991, this book exemplifies DeLillo’s fascination with terrorism. It opens with a crowd of followers of a guru similar to the Rev. Sun Myung Moon being married in a mass wedding ceremony at Yankee Stadium and ends with a pomo writer who may be a stand-in for J.D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon. The novelist gets caught up in a hostage situation in the Middle East. A summary does not do justice to this brilliant exploration of what might be behind Andy Warhol’s famous paintings called Mao II.

Mao II Audiobook. Publisher: Highbridge Audio 1991 ISBN-10: 0453007538 ISBN-13: 978-0453007535

Underworld

Fast-forward to 1997 and DeLillo’s long but absorbing masterpiece, Underworld. Here his fascination with crowds shows itself in the opening piece set in 1951 in the stands of the Polo Grounds as Bobby Thomson hits his historic home run. A boy who has played hooky from school winds up with the ball and we follow those trying to get hold of it throughout the book’s 832 pages.But DeLillo expands his scope to include a great deal more that is part of the second half of the 20th century. As the book notes, on the same day in 1951 the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb. The book is a meditation on our nuclear era. Try the paperback, even though it’s heavy.

Underworld 1998 ISBN: 0-9656641-2-0 / 978-0-9656641-2-7 Paperback Scribner 832 pp

.Cosmopolis

The crowd is outside financial trader Eric Packer’s stretch limo in DeLillo’s next work, Cosmopolis. It is the opposite of Underworld – short, focused on a single day as a protagonist who might represent the new century’s hedge fund masters goes for a haircut. Inside the car, Packer’s employees visit and his physician conducts an examination. Outside the car, anti-globalization riots develop and a killer awaits Packer.

Cosmopolis 2004 ISBN-10: 0743244257 Picador paperback 224 pp.

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