Don Delillo: Balance at the Edge of Belief

by Jesse Kavadlo

Don DeLillo - winner of the National Book Award, the William Dean Howells Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize - is one of the most important novelist of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. While his work can be understood and taught as prescient and postmodern examples of millennial culture, this book argues that DeLillo's recent novels - White Noise, Libra, Mao II, Underworld, and The Body Artist - are more concerned with spiritual crisis. Although DeLillo's world's are rife with rejection of belief and littered with faithfulness, estrangement, and desperation, his novels provide a balancing moral corrective against the conditions they describe. Speaking the vernacular of contemporary America, DeLillo explores the mysteries of what it means to be human.

Genres: Literary Criticism

170 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Alistair Montague]

Introduction.
Don DeLillo after 9/11: Prescience, Presentism, Postmodernism

1. White Noise, Mortality, Morality
2. Injustice for All: Balancing Libra with "American Blood"
3. Beyond Novelists and Terrorists: Mao II
4. "The Fall of 1951": Celebration and Annihilation in Underworld
5. Recycling Authority: Don DeLillo's Waste Management

Conclusion.
The Body Artist; or, How to Re-read DeLillo