Running Dog

by Don DeLillo

DeLillo's Running Dog, originally published in 1978, follows Moll Robbins, a New York city journalist trailing the activities of an influential senator. In the process she is dragged into the black market world of erotica and shady, infatuated men, where a cat-and-mouse chase for an erotic film rumored to 'star' Adolf Hitler leads to trickery, maneuvering, and bloodshed. With streamlined prose and a thriller's narrative pace, Running Dog is a bright star in the modern master's early career.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, American, Literature, Thriller, 20th Century, Literary Fiction

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Donald Richard DeLillo is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, the complexities of language, art, the advent of the Digital Age, mathematics, politics, economics, and sports.
DeLillo was already a well-regarded cult writer in 1985, when the publication of White Noise brought him widespread recognition and the National Book Award for fiction. He followed this in 1988 with Libra, a novel about the Kennedy assassination. DeLillo won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II, about terrorism and the media's scrutiny of writers' private lives, and the William Dean Howells Medal for Underworld, a historical novel that ranges in time from the dawn of the Cold War to the birth of the Internet. He was awarded the 1999 Jerusalem Prize, the 2010 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2010, and the 2013 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
DeLillo has described his themes as "living in dangerous times" and "the inner life of the culture." In a 2005 interview, he said that writers "must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments... I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us."

Reviews

[Darwin8u · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Imperialist lackeys and running dogs."
- Don Delillo, Running dog



"The camera's everywhere."
"It's true." (pg 159)
"Landscape is truth." (pg 229)
"It's a fact. A truth. It's history." (pg 236)

This is one of DeLillo's earlier novels. Early, I guess. It came after:

1. Americana - 1971
2. End Zone - 1972
3. Great Jones Street - 1973
4. Ratner's Star - 1976
5. Players - 1977
6. Running Dog - 1978

So, it was his 6th novel. 40 years old I guess. I liked it. Basically, a bunch of people (reporters, senators, the mob, and secret government organizations) are all searching for an erotic film made in the Führerbunker in April of 1945. Is it a black and white pre-suicidal orgy? Is he in it? These groups are all connected in a paranoid and weary way to each other. Each is searching for something, but also a bit indifferent. It's a philosophical, moody novel. It is weird in a way only DeLillo can be. Playing tennis on a volleyball court. Dogs. Sex and pornography discussed obliquely. Fingers tapping on walls. Lots of discussion of motion pictures, art, technology. Always, the push West, into the desert. Dying.

There is also a pressence of Vietnam that hangs on this novel. It WAS written in 1978. The echos of Vietnam are still vibrating through America. Things are being sorted. Ideas are coalesing into themes. Things collected, recorded, taped. Flash. Things given names, polished. Polished ambiguities. And always money, power, corruption.

When the reviewer stops reviewing, what does it mean? Cut.

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Edging closer to completing all DeLillo's novels, and I'd put Running Dog just below Great Jones Street - which is just below my four or five faves. Written ten years before Libra, I can't help but wonder whether this novel - which is politically heavy - gave him the idea for that. Anyway, this is no Libra, but I did like it more than I thought I would. Running Dog kind of reads like a conspiracy thriller, and although it does feature a few scenes where guns are drawn and shots are fired and people are under threat, I wouldn't simply lump this into thriller territory. In a way - DeLilllo being DeLillo, and not opting for the smooth flowing storyline - that it doesn't really read like a novel in the traditional sense. There is just something about his writing that I truly admire. And that's why I like him probably more than any other American writer. His characters throughout is what really made this book tick for me, rather than any story. We have the seedy New York dealer in erotic sundries, Lightborne, who hears of a reel of film made in the Fuhrer's bunker in Berlin towards the end of World War II. Could be pornographic? And even starring a deteriorating Hitler himself. Yet no one seems to have seen the film, but there are all sorts who want it in their possession, including a U.S. Senator, The Mafia, and a 22-year-old king of the smut business who just so happens to to be barricaded within his Dallas warehouse. Aside from this there is the ex-fighter bomber commander and C.I.A. employee in Saigon, Earl Mudger, who is now in charge of a secret operations organization called Radial Matrix, which specializes in failing to see the difference between efficiency and terrorism. Anyway, it's all dodgy stuff. And this leads to Moll Robbins, a reporter for running dog magazine who is working on a series of articles on sex as big business. If there is a centre to the piece, and the character that features most, then it's probably Glen Selvy, who is an agent for Radial Matrix and on the run after his superiors order his killing. He is hunted down. Now, how does all this tie in with the Hitler film? Simply answer is some of it does and some of it doesn't. I was hoping, at the very least, for there to be a viewing of the film at some point towards the end of the book, but I wouldn't have been surprised if there wasn't. There was. And when it came along - not to give anything away about the actual content - it truly gave me the creeps. Real eerie as what is shown on the projector screen is described in acute detail. Not close to his best, but an intriguing and innovative work nonetheless. 3.7/5

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Looking down at Krok's comment (comment number 1 and the only comment as I write these words), I have to agree. Maybe not with the ultimate ranking of DeLillo novels, but this is a remarkably under-appreciated work.

I doubt anyone has been paying attention, but I've been on a very slow and only periodically remembered task to read all of the DeLillo novels leading up to Underworld with the rough theory that Infinite Jest is a response or homage or a something to the pre-Underworld DeLillo. I meant to read them in order, but I realized I don't own Players yet, and the most recent troll on Karen's review of Underworld, made me want to dive back in to my mini-mission and I guess it's ok to skip a book, as long as I go back to it before I read Underworld.

DFW updates from this book? Some similar themes, but nothing really new. The film that everyone is after feels like The Entertainment in the way people are reacting. Besides some characters feeling sort of similar to ones that DFW populates Infinite Jest with there wasn't anything as overt here as in Great Jones Street or End Zone (you can find my reviews for these in my shelves, I'm too lazy to link to them even though this is probably costing me a few votes). I've been a lazy and distracted reader lately so I might have missed things.

The book? It's quite good. After Ratner's Star, which made me want to stab my eyes out with a rusty screwdriver rather than continue reading the book, this was great. I have some complaints, it feels a little underdeveloped. I think it's good as it is, but I feel like he could have done more with the characters, he has so many really good characters here but they are given a really limited amount of space to live in. This should have been his first BIG book, he had the story and the characters were more than just a series of quirky shadows spouting stylized dialogue like too many of the ones that populated RS. Maybe that is IJ's debt to this book, DFW gave the story line of the 'film' room to develop, I'm sort of grasping for straws here and I just thought of that, so I'm not sure if I stand behind it.

Ignoring RS and not having read Players, I'm still going to say that DeLillo's early / 1970's work is great. Jimmy Cline, etc. made a comment on Karen's above mentioned review (he's not the troll), he said, "I'm just conjecturing here, but it seems that his work does not age well at all, and that when his pomo navel-gazing gets at all over the top, the critics just pounce on him like rabid dogs. This is about Underworld, so I can't weigh in on that book, but I would say that DeLillo's early work is going to age quite well, he plays with some post-modern tricks in these early books, but he is more interested, it seems, in creating his own overly stylized version of America and the author, DeLillo, never appears to be making any appearances. Compared to the work of say John Barth, which mostly has aged as well as some hideous Park Avenue woman with too many face lifts and botox injections, there is still a freshness to the early (non RS(why is this one DeLillo's favorite early novel? Why?!?!) work. These early novels are quite good, maybe not developed as fully as they could be, maybe they could be longer and the themes delved into a bit deeper, the characters given some more room to stretch their legs and all of that, but they are still (in my not-so-humble opinion) some of the highlights of that dreary decade known as the 70's when authors appeared in book jackets wearing awful turtlenecks and people had key-parties and swinger orgies in between group readings of Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

Now on to the 1980's with DeLillo.

Moll was suspicious of quests. At the bottom of most long and obsessive searches, in her view, was some vital deficiency on the part of the individual in pursuit, a meagerness of spirit.

She sat in the dark, listening to Odell fiddle with the projector.

Even more depressing than the nature of a given quest was the likely result. Whether people searched for an object of some kind, or inner occasion, or answer, or state of being, it was almost always disappointing. Nothing but themselves. Of course there were those who believed the search itself was all that mattered. The search itself is the reward.

[Lee Klein · Rating 3 out of 5]

A confounded thriller that seems conceived by the same writer as the other novels but not quite carried out by the guy who usually delivers page after page of perfectly attuned phrases. Seems rushed, simply. Could be rewritten and rock: an old porn film shot in Hitler's bunker right before his end might be available; a Senator's proxy, a former Vietnam POW it turns out, is after it; a journalist for a middling radical magazine is on the case; shadowy forces not so well characterized are giving chase. In the end the film shows a human form who may be Hitler impersonating Charlie Chaplin, who famously impersonated Hitler, to entertain children. There's something to work with there, but in this version, it's too muddled for me, things throughout suffering from disbelief because the art -- as it is in everything else DeLillo's written for the most part -- isn't irrefutable.

DeLillo is always a hyper-reliable author, presenting a more real version of reality rendered in his absolutely particular, superhumanly attentive prose, even if his characters, scenarios, stories might be a little implausible. In this, the prose rarely achieves that level; the dialogue is difficult to follow but not as stylized, honed, musical, funny, and therefore not just forgiven but savored; the characters don't often animate beyond their name, usually just a surname here; and there are few thematic balls in the air, as usual elsewhere.

Some phrases on page 208 (of 246 total) -- "Vietnam, in more ways than once, was a war based on hybrid gibberish . . . where technical idiom was often the only element of precision, the only true beauty, he could take with him into realms of ambiguity" -- almost make all this seem intentional (hybrid gibberish evoking realms of ambiguity) but not enough to make this one seem like more than connective tissue among the major muscle groups of Libra (shadowy conspiracy) and White Noise (Hitler Studies) to come? Might try to read it more slowly, carefully, patiently at some point once I've read everything else and re-read a few others too.

[W.D. Clarke · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's 1978 (4 full years even before "Joust"!), mom won't spring for Atari (but fobs us off with a cloned "Pong" from K-Mart), and...and Double-D can somehow hear the Seven Seals a-opening and knows how it's all gonna play itself out (the shadowy horses, their long manes a-shake, riding four strong winds toward us, etc., etc.):

As I say, I’ve unlinked myself. Too much software, hardware, so on. Technology. The whole thing’s geared to electronics. There’s a neat correlation between the complexity of the hardware and the lack of genuine attachments. Devices make everyone pliant. There’s a general sponginess, a lack of conviction.”[...] “When technology reaches a certain level, people begin to feel like criminals,” he said. “Someone is after you, the computers maybe, the machine-police. You can’t escape investigation. The facts about you and your whole existence have been collected or are being collected. Banks, insurance companies, credit organizations, tax examiners, passport offices, reporting services, police agencies, intelligence gatherers. It’s a little like what I was saying before. Devices make us pliant. If they issue a print-out saying we’re guilty, then we’re guilty. But it goes even deeper, doesn’t it? It’s the presence alone, the very fact, the superabundance of technology, that makes us feel we’re committing crimes. Just the fact that these things exist at this widespread level. The processing machines, the scanners, the sorters. That’s enough to make us feel like criminals. What enormous weight. What complex programs. And there’s no one to explain it to us.”

(78) Though one of the endings still baffles me, I'm awarding this the five full stars , since I was never less than fully entranced by this novel, its numerous threads being woven into a paranoid tapestry that never feels like patchwork, and which imparts that long-lived, haunting quality of Delillo's best work—for me, its up there nipping at the heels of, or pre-figuring his very best (Libra, Underworld (ofc), The Names, White Noise, and Mao II)

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Graye Report

An investigation has been conducted pursuant to your request and authorisation concerning "Running Dog", a novel written by the American author Don DeLillo, in order to ascertain the literary and other merits of the novel. The results of my investigation are set forth below under headings designed to facilitate your perusal and analysis.

This report is made available to you at your express request, as you have employed me for that purpose. It is a privileged and confidential communication, and the information contained herein is not to be disclosed to others, verbally or otherwise.

The Entrance

I was driving an unmarked car north of Hudson.

I hadn't expected to see a woman. Not after dark, on these streets. Coming this way, striding nicely. She had long hair, darkish blond, and from twenty yards, and closing, I could see how attractive she was. Her black coat was open, revealing a bright red dress. She was eye-catching all right. If she was in the business at all, she wasn't working streets. Easing up on the accelerator, I thought she was a discrepancy in the landscape. A welcome sight, sure, but also slightly disquieting - she didn't fit the picture.

After she passed my car, I watched in the rearview mirror as she approached the demolition site, moving in that nice brisk sexy stride. A perennial all-pro, I thought. I figured I'd swing around the block and catch her again at the end of the same long street. With nothing better to do, I wanted a second look.

I drove around the block and stopped. The street was empty. I let the car inch forward. No one in sight. It had taken me very little time to circle the block. At the rate she was walking she would have reached this part of the street right about now.

The headlights picked up dust, a fairly heavy accumulation. It seemed to be coming from the second-story level of a construction scaffold in midblock. A possible discrepancy. No dust a couple of minutes ago. Dust now. Building should be unoccupied. Crew's gone home.

I got out of the car. I went to the front of the building and took a look at the scaffolding. I felt the dust in my eyes and mouth.

I hoisted myself up a series of interlocking rods and beams until I reached the second-story platform, about eighteen feet above street level. There was an unblocked window here, the one they used to empty the building of its contents.

I directed the flashlight inside. It picked her out through clouds of plaster dust. She was on her back, vivid in the grey haze, head twisted to one side. There was blood still coming out of her, midbody, beneath the rib cage.

I stepped through the window, and realised I had just entered a Don DeLillo novel.

The Settings

DeLillo positioned his novel in six different settings:

1. the art world;

2. the networks of manufacture and distribution of pornography;

3. the covert intelligence community;

4. the American federal political environment;

5. the family (the Mafia);

6. the world of investigative journalism.

You could call each of these worlds a "System" (if you were so inclined).

As in Systems Theory, there is a boundary at which one system stops and another starts.

You could say that this novel works at the boundaries where one system meets another.

The Systems

Whether or not you agree with Tom LeClair that this is a “Systems Novel”, DeLillo gives us enough Systems clues to contemplate.

The woman in the red dress in The Entrance (above) is actually a German transvestite male systems engineer called Christoph Ludecke.

He has acquired the original and only copy of an allegedly pornographic home-movie featuring the occupants in Hitler’s Berlin bunker shot in the last days of the Third Reich.

Earl Mudger, a veteran with experience in special paramilitary programs run by Air Force Intelligence, commander of a fighter-bomber squadron in Korea and former Vice-President of Distribution at Process Management Systems in Oklahoma City (which specialised in production flow systems and automation), is now the head of a covert intelligence organisation code-named “Radial Matrix”, which has spun off from PAC/ORD (the Personnel Advisory Committee, Office of Records and Disbursements, which is now being investigated by a high level Senate Committee led by Senator Lloyd Percival):

“What you have in Mudger is the combination of business drives and lusts and impulses with police techniques, with ultrasophisticated skills of detection, surveillance, extortion, terror and the rest of it.”

It turns out that Ludecke had done contract work for Radial Matrix.

Mudger’s wife is Vietnamese. He employs an assassination team of two former ARVN rangers (one, his wife’s brother, Van, and the other, Cao) who are skilled with knives. It's possible that one of them might have killed Ludecke. Either way, it doesn't sound like a very effective systems management strategy to kill the only person who knows where the home-movie is.

There are many more interesting characters, but you’ll need to read this combination police procedural/espionage thriller to find out the details. Needless to say, most of them want to get their hands on the home-movie.

The Sexual Conquests and Spiritual Quests

“Moll [Robbins] was suspicious of quests. At the bottom of most long and obsessive searches, in her view, was some vital deficiency on the part of the individual in pursuit, a meagerness of spirit.”

The novel is broken into two narratives: one in which various characters are in pursuit of the movie, and the other where Glen Selvy (a former trainee of one of Mudger’s operations and member of Senator Percival’s staff responsible for advising on his art acquisitions) turns his back on the quest and seeks spiritual fulfilment in death (preceded by sex with the two main female characters, Moll Robbins [an investigative journalist with the alternative “Running Dog” magazine] and Nadine Rademacher [a nude storyteller in a Manhattan sex shop]).

The Nomenclaturist Novel: Don DeLillo as Nomenclatourist

The thriller aspect of this novel is accomplished in its own right. However, as you would expect from DeLillo, there is a metaphysical aspect that is both challenging and equally rewarding.

This sixth novel provides an opportunity to reflect on DeLillo’s style and subject matter at a macro level. Here are some thoughts:

Like DeLillo, at the beginning of a novel or perhaps even the beginning of a life, we start with a blank page, all is secret, all is mystery. We are curious about what lies in the world beyond the blank page. So we invent, add or find words. We name things, until we have created a world, a world formed and shaped by nomenclature. When we have only partly finished, there are still secrets, there is still mystery, but we often identify it as conspiracy. We know something, but not everything, of the relationships between people, or between people and things. There are still things for which we do not have words. The more information we acquire, the more we expect to possess knowledge and understanding, the more we expect mystery to recede. However, mystery has a way of persisting. It tends to outlast or survive history and science, for there will always be things beyond our understanding, things that still mystify us, things about which we remain curious, things which lure us into the mystic.


SOUNDTRACK:

Zabriskie Point - Final scene

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=guOmJM8...

Roy Orbison - "So Young" (Love Theme From "Zabriskie Point") (1970)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NZwdTkB...

Beatles - "Within you! Without you!"

https://vimeo.com/42590181

George Harrison- "The Inner Light"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ttqE...

Elvis Costello & The Attractions - "Everyday I Write The Book"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekrzL...

Van Morrison - "Into The Mystic"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEvsD...

Joe Cocker - "Into The Mystic" (Live in Baden)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdgxx...



April 16, 2017

[Mattia Ravasi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Video review

A thriller about the world of erotica where the secret agents keep doing it and the porn dealers keep shooting each other.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

This 1978 postmodernist novel emulates a spy thriller. It has a breezy delivery with a great set of mysterious and colorful characters. I liked its stylish and ironic presentation, but all the suspense and action boils down to a shaggy dog story, which I personally don’t favor. Others may appreciate better the little absurdities in the nefarious machinations of the secret power brokers behind the U.S. government and corporations, but in the light of the Iran-Contra scandal of the 80’s the plot here is a bit tame. I was looking for something more over-the-top as part of a recent reading tour I took in search of exemplars of radical fiction.

The tale begins with an Austrian trying to sell a film from the last days in Hitler’s bunker to a dealer in erotic art, Lightborne. When the former gets murdered, interest in the film by various factions grows exponentially from the imagination of what its pornographic contents might be. Minions of a prominent U.S. senator and of a pornography empire run by the Mafia are two such factions with intense interest. Our erstwhile heroes on the case include a journalist, Moll Robbins, who does exposes and conspiracy stories for a DC magazine called “Running Dog”, and Glen Selvy, who scouts out and buys erotic art for a senator’s secret collection. A hot sexual relationship soon binds them together, a bond sealed when they escape a machine gun attack on a bar where they are chatting. His expert responses and handy work with a pistol reveals to her that he must be no ordinary staffer.

Here is a delightful snatch of dialog between them in the middle of the night after relieving their tension:
“Who are you, Selvy?”
He sat back in his chair, an intentional countermotion, a withdrawal, and smiled in deep fatigue, self-deprecatingly. He speared to be dissociating himself from whatever significance the question by its nature ascribed to him.”
…”What is it like, secrecy? The secret life. I know it’s sexual. I want to know this. Is it homosexual?”
“You’re way ahead of me,” he said.
“Isn’t it why they seem so good at it, which comes to the same thing. Isn’t it almost rooted in national character?”
“I didn’t know the English controlled world rights.”
“To what?”
“Being queer, “ he said.
“No, I’m saying the link is there. That’s all. Tendency finds an outlet. I’m saying espionage is a language, an art, with sexual sources and coordinates. Although I don’t mean to say it so Freudianly.”
“I’, open to theorizing,” he said. “What else do you have?”
“I have links inside of links. This is the age of conspiracy.”
“People have wondered.”

It turns out that the senator is heading up a closed-door Congressional investigation of the abuses of PAC/ORD, an acronym for the equally obfuscating “Personnel Advisory Committee, Office of Records and Disbursements” (don’t you love DeLillo’s names?). Apparently its benign role in administering the budgetary operations of the entire intelligence enterprise is a front includes some funding of operations beyond the purview of legislative oversight. What we come to learn is that its spawn for funding covert operations, Radial Matrix, has gone rogue, a transformation made possible by its development of its own money-making schemes. Kudos for prescience on that. Recall how a decade later Maine Colonel Olliver North sold arms to Iran to facilitate release of American prisoners and used the money raised to support the Contras war against the leftist Sandanistas in Nicaragua and generate more funds for them through the drug operations run by Panamanian president Noriega.

The reader is at sea over the intersection of the quest for Nazi film and the brewing conflicts over exposure of secret intelligence operations. All we know for a long time is that someone powerful wants to shut Selvy or Moll down. Selvy in fact may or may not work for Radial Matrix or may or may not be a target for a hit. Moll has free reign either to uncover the story about the senator’s porn art obsession or the story about the PAC/ORD investigation, so she works toward both, using her feminine allure to draw upon the senator’s lust for her. She also tracks down the mastermind of Radial Matrix, Earl Mudge, who has a similar weakness for her charms. Brilliant cat and mouse between Moll and Mudge. DeLillo gives him wonderful quirks, such as an avid hobby of creating a zoo in Vietnam when he ran the CIA contracted operations of Air America and his current metallurgic engineering of lucrative munitions at his current mansion in Virginia. Moll’s boss at Running Dog is compromised in her direction under blackmail threats, but is still able to convey her overall outlook to her:

“Want to hear my theory? …All men are criminals. All women are Mafia wives. …
I was married to the same man for eleven years. I did his bidding. Not fully realizing. His silent bidding. Somehow, mysteriously, unspokenly. It’s built into the air between us. It’s carried on radio waves from galaxy to galaxy. …
The ultimate genius of men. Do you care to know what it is? Men want. Women just hang around. Women think they’re steaming along on a tremendous career, toot toot. Nothing. Nowhere. I’m telling you. Men want. Bam, crash, pow. The impact, good Christ. Men want so badly. It makes us feel a little spacey, a little dizzy. What are we next to this great want, this universal bloodsucking need of theirs?

DeLillo has some fun painting the post-Vietnam character of Washington, DC, and New York City as a backdrop to his tale. We end with a cinematic fade to the American West and the Mexican border with Selvy on the run toward some kind of showdown. Like James Bond, he doesn’t neglect picking up a new playmate for a travel companion on the way. What does it mean that his pursuers turn out to Vietnamese? What is the outcome of the quest for the Nazi smut movie? Enquiring minds want to know, but will you be satisfied with the answer?

This book reminds me a lot of William Gibson’s espionage books (the so-called Blue Ant series). For both I appreciated their flow, cool, crisp dialog, and odd characters. Yet both leave a lot of their implications to hand-waving. DeLillo admits in interviews covered in Wikipedia he regrets not spending more effort on this and others of his early period (supposedly Running Dog was written in a four-month period). I’ve only read two works from the apogee of his arc, “White Noise” (1985), which mystified me with its dissection of consumerism and obsession with death, and “Underworld” (1997), which felt like a masterful take on paranoia and the Cold War. I look forward to reading more of his work, which includes quite a variety of subjects.

[Sentimental Surrealist · Rating 3 out of 5]

This strikes me as an important and often-overlooked book in the chain of early DeLillo's events, and indeed a necessary stop for anyone curious as to how he got from Americana to White Noise. DeLillo's early novels, particularly the trio of End Zone, Great Jones Street and Ratner's Star, feature these long stretches where DeLillo wanders away from his plots (never the tightest in the world even at his peak, not like it's a big deal (I almost typed "beak deal." I'm a silly person) or anything) and decides instead to explore whichever ideas he's trying to get across, as well as some brand-shittin'-new ideas that don't seem to have much connection with what's at hand; think the underwear-sharing episode in Great Jones Street or a bulk of Ratner's Star (End Zone isn't as guilty, if guilty's even the word I'm looking for). This tendency of his can be charming as hell, and the discussions are pretty much always intelligent, but you sometimes have to wonder how much control the guy had over his early work; they're, objectively speaking, pretty self-indulgent books.

And it's not like DeLillo was ever the tightest novelist in the world, but unless Players beat this one to the punch, Running Dog strikes me as the book where DeLillo started to pay more attention to plot, to the chain of events itself. This style would hit its peak with Libra, which I think is the most streamlined of the man's novels, or maybe the underrated Cosmopolis. It's not like DeLillo's ever going to strip his books down to just the barest facts that make understanding his narrative possible, and I don't think he'd be the same if he ever did, but at the same point, I don't think he ever would've broken through to his current major novelist status if he hadn't worked a little heavier in the x, therefore y, therefore z mode. In White Noise, for example, the Airborne Toxic Event hits, toxic chemicals from it enter Jack Gladney's system, Jack Gladney finds and steals Barbara's Dylar, revelations about the Dylar come to light. If you think I'm banking on you having read a decent amount of DeLillo here, you're right; it's hard to imagine anyone who isn't already a DeLillo fan reading reviews of this book.

Anyway, to business. Running Dog is a thriller. If I'm not mistaken about Players, it's DeLillo's second. He likes this mode; the Names, Libra, and Mao II all also fit into it. I generally don't like thrillers, but DeLillo's no mere airport novelist, and while aficionados of the genre might argue that he's too chilly to get the requisite suspense across, he more than makes up for it with the profound sense of dread and paranoia in his novels. This one's notable for packing so much of it in that the novel feels like it's ready to explode; it's fascinating to see how convoluted things get as the characters circle closer to the Hitler sex tape at the center of all this. Don't be fooled for a minute into thinking this book is as puerile as it could've been given its subject matter, by the way; as usual, DeLillo has a lot to say. Here it's about eroticism and fascism. And he does it with more forward motion than he had with his previous novels. Plus there's the usual virtues of DeLillo's novels: the calculated prose, each word seemingly weighted for maximum impact; the deadpan humor; the remarkably original concepts. You might want a character sheet, what with all these organizations stepping on each other's toes, and there isn't a lot by way of resolution, but DeLillo's fans can't go wrong.

[Kansas · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Ya de entrada se trataba de un rumor poco factible. Casi nadie se lo tomó en serio. Asi pues, silencio durante más de treinta años. Hasta que hace unos meses el rumor resucita.
[…]
Existe una película, Una película sin montar. Una sola copia. El original de cámara, Rodada en Berlin, en el mes de abril de 1945."

Realmente no creo que esta novela se merezca las tres estrellas que le he dado, pero tampoco las cuatro, aunque ¿por qué tendemos a clasificarlo todo en una cifra para de alguna forma valorar algo? Es una tendencia para poder ubicarnos, pero ya digo que me parece un tanto injusto entre otras cosas porque es una novela que casi se lee sola, que me he leído prácticamente en dos días y por supuesto porque Don Delillo no es precisamente un mediocre; no me ha convencido del todo pero sí que tiene momentazos, eso sí, como retazos un tanto perdidos sin conexión con la trama general.

"Entras en un banco y te filman. Entras en unos grandes almacenes y te filman. Lo vemos cada vez más. Entras en un probador a cambiarte de ropa y hay alguien observándote a través de un espejo falso. También vigilan a los empleados: los espían con cámaras ocultas. Radares. Controles computerizados. Se internan en el útero y toman fotografías. En todas partes. ¿Y qué hacen? Tomar fotos. Filmar el mundo entero."

Fascinación es una especie de novela negra sobre conspiraciones, o un thriller, ¿o una comedia que no se toma en serio a sí misma?? Es muchas cosas y para ello Delillo usa una especie de mcguffin muy atrayente: existe una película inédita, sin montar, una única copia que se rodó en Berlin en abril de 1945, en el búnker de los nazis. El morbo está en que el rumor que corre es que es una película pornográfica sobre los excesos de los nazis en estos últimos días antes de que todo estallara y que en ella intervienen muchos personajes conocidos de la época.

"Hoy en día, esto es lo gordo. Las películas inéditas. La gente quiere alimentar sus fantasías."

Aunque hay un par de personajes a los que se podría considerar protagonistas que guían la historia, yo la considero más una historia muy coral porque intervienen tratantes de arte, coleccionistas pornográficos, dobles agentes, espías, periodistas, algún travestí, senadores, la CIA, asesinos a sueldos vietnamitas… y todos están de alguna involucrados para encontrar esta película perdida y deseada, cuyo morbo es como un halo que envuelve toda la historia. El morbo lo es todo, un morbo que de alguna forma fluirá hacia el objetivo de encontrar la película y visionarla… y en este aspecto Don Delillo es completamente justo y honesto, no nos engaña, al final nos compensará con la visualización de la película.

Es una novela que no he disfrutado del todo, porque se dispersa continuamente y algo irregular en muchos tramos pero sí que el talento de Delillo la envuelve en un halo de misterio, de prosa poética inesperada para un argumento tan rocambolesco y es esta belleza oscura y un tanto morbosa lo que le da a esta novela ese resplandor inesperado en muchos momentos.

"- Solo una vez te he visto fisicamente en acción. Aquella vez, caminando en dirección a mi casa. Saliendo de la limousina y acercándote lentamente al edificio. Lo recuerdo. Se me ha quedado grabado. Es la imagen más clara que conservo de tí. Fisicamente en movimiento. Te veo caminando. Te muestras indecisa, sin saber verdaderamente dónde estás."

El titulo original es Running dog, perro acosado, un término con la que concluida la guerra denominaban en Vietnam a los estadounidenses que abandonaban el pais, un término insultante para lo que ellos consideraban los sirvientes del capitalismo. Y aquí es donde Delillo brilla con luz propia porque aunque ésta es una de sus novelas de los inicios sí que encontramos la temática de fondo dónde es un claro maestro: el arte, las grandes corporaciones, la politica, el cuarto poder, auténticos estandartes de manipulación de la masa..., el problema es que Delillo lo narra de una forma un tanto fragmentada. Sin embargo, en mi caso es una novela que me ha merecido la pena y que he disfrutado. La traducción es de Gian Castelli Gair.

"Moll hallaba algo especial en aquellas imágenes. No era como un largometraje o un documental; no era como un noticiario de televisión. Resultaba tosco y primitivo, pero a la vez hipnótico, y no desprovisto de cierto elemento de misterio."

♫♫ ♫ Adore, Robert Levon Been

https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2022...

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Illicit desires, paranoia, secret murderous organisations, the sex industry. Running Dog takes place in a kind of shadow world. Essentially it focuses on Glen Selvy who works for a nefarious government intelligence unit that has secretly gone into profitable private business. A U.S. Senator who collects erotic objets d'art is investigating the unit, so Selvy is employed to get dirt on the Senator. However a relationship with a female investigative journalist causes him to have a change of heart and soon he is on the run from two hired killers. Constructed like a mosaic of broken fragments of glass in which the storyline is reflected, the novel never conforms to what one expects of a political thriller but the prose is often mesmerising and I found much that was edifying. 4+ stars.

[João Carlos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Don Delillo - fotografia de Isaac Hernández

“Cão em Fuga” (1978) é o sexto romance do escritor norte-americano Don Delillo (n. 1936) – no original “Running Dog” não é mais do que o nome de uma revista.
Don Delillo inicia “Cão em Fuga” com uma frase emblemática - “Aqui não vais encontrar gente comum.” – e com um assassinato.
Na primeira parte – “Arte Erótica Cósmica” - encontramos Lightborne, um decadente negociante de arte nova-iorquino, com uma galeria denominada “Arte Erótica Cósmica”, obcecado por um suposto filme pornográfico filmado em 1945 no bunker de Hitler, em Berlim, nos últimos dias da 2º Guerra Mundial, “eventualmente”, protagonizado pelo próprio Führer, com imagens duma orgia sexual entre nazis.
Ninguém parece ter visto o filme, mas é em torno desta especulação, num rumor que se acentua, que Lightborne investiga e que procura vender a “mercadoria” – “Uma única cópia. A película original.” - a vários compradores; entre os quais o senador Lloyd Percival, um coleccionador aficionado pelo erotismo, que tem em Gren Selvy, um empregado, um testa-de-ferro sempre presente nas exposições e nos leilões e a Richie Armbrister um jovem de vinte e dois anos, “rei” da indústria cinematográfica ligada à pornografia.
É num dos leilões efectuados por Lightborne na sua galeria que a jornalista Moll Robbins, da revista "Running Dog", que está a fazer uma investigação jornalística para escrever um artigo sobre o mercado da arte erótica que conhece Gren Selvy, um agente duplo (ou triplo?), um homem cheio de regras e de rituais, “(…) não era detective. Não construía modelos explicativos teóricos a respeito de um qualquer acto criminoso. Tal como não se ocupava de aspectos decisórios.” e para quem “as armas de fogo e respectivos componentes constituíam um inventário de valor pessoal.”, e que pretende “(...) envolver-se apenas com mulheres casadas (...)" o que "(...) permitia-lhe definir o estilo de uma determinada relação, os limites do seu próprio envolvimento (...). A vida reduzida a fragmentos intensos. Um idêntico prazer em chegar e partir. Algumas dessas mulheres sentiam o mesmo, sem dúvida; as suas idas e vindas eram regidas por factores externos. O que adicionava força e profundidade e gradação ao acto sexual.”; premissa que Selvy não cumpria.
Na segunda parte – “Matriz Radial” – a subtrama centra-se no senador Lloyd Percival e na CCP/DRD (Comissão Consultiva de Pessoal/Departamento de Registos e Despesas) um organismo oficial de fachada para fiscalização orçamentária de toda a rede de serviços secretos dos EUA, criando um braço operacional, a empresa “Matriz Radial”, cujo dono é um ex-militar no Vietname Earl Mudger, especialista no financiamento de operações clandestinas contra governos estrangeiros; mas que se vai autonomizando em acções de terrorismo e espionagem internas, num mundo de ligações empresariais complexas e ambíguas, onde as teorias da conspiração governamental – militar e industrial - se conjugam entre o passado, o presente e o futuro.
Por fim, a terceira parte – Marathon Mines – o nome de um antigo campo de treino militar do governo norte-americano, num último capítulo, onde Delillo une as pontas soltas de uma narrativa com várias subtramas, permitindo desvendar os enigmas do enredo e formular conclusões sobre as inúmeras temáticas, com destaque para as relações complexas entre a arte, a investigação jornalística e a política, e onde o crime e o sexo sem amor, mas com paixão desmesurada, se revelam de uma forma banal e pervertida.
Don Delillo descreve e caracteriza admiravelmente as personagens principais e secundárias de “Cão em Fuga”, com diálogos curtos e intensos, em que os diferentes protagonistas exprimem as suas convicções e as suas opiniões pessoais, revelando por vezes uma melancolia e uma nostalgia arrebatadora, mas simultaneamente uma enorme agressividade.
“Cão em Fuga” é um livro imprescindível para os fans incondicionais de Don Delillo.

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have an ongoing project where I am re-reading all of Don Delillo's books in publication order. There's no schedule attached to this project: I read the next book when the mood takes me. Running Dog, Delillo's sixth novel first published in 1978, is a slight exception to this because this was not actually a re-read: this is the only Delillo book that I have never read before (this true at the time of writing, August 2020, although I understand there is a new book coming soon).

As with many Delillo books, this is not a simple book to read. It centres around the rumour of a movie. If the rumours are true, the movie was made in 1945 in the Führerbunker and shows an orgy in progress with the Führer himself involved. Of course, in this review, I am not going to tell you whether the film actually exists or whether we get to find out what its contents are. You will have to read the book for yourself to find that out. There are several possible combinations of existing and contents and it's not clear until right towards the end which will be the one that forms part of this book.

Several people are interested in acquiring this movie. Or in acting as an agent on behalf of someone else who wants to acquire the movie. Instead of taking us on a journey in a standard linear plot, Delillo presents us with a whole series of episodes seen from the perspectives of different players in this "game". This becomes quite disorienting (deliberately, I think). At one point, a character is unsure whether the person he is looking at through a dirty window is the person he thinks it is and this could fairly well be said to describe the reader's experience through the book. Who is watching who? Who is working for who? Who is pursuing who?

It's confusing, yes, but it is also fun to read. There are moments when the penny drops and you realise what you are reading and what it is describing. I actually enjoyed trying to work out how the different characters related (it’s not that tricky in the cold light of day). In some ways, some of the writing foreshadows what Delillo did in his next novel, The Names (I am ignoring Amazons which was written under a pseudonym). I have read The Names a couple of times and will read it again soon. The second half of that novel is very difficult to make sense of and there are several passages here that tend in that direction. Running Dog has the clearest expression so far of the "Delillo dialogue" (no one writes dialogue like Delillo writes dialogue). At Kirkus Reviews, we read

If all this sounds confusing, you should know that DeLillo makes little effort to facilitate comprehension as he mixes and matches, in cinematic slow motion, imagined and realistic debasements of a society gone past all limits.

You also have to add Vietnam into the mix. The dark shadow of Vietnam lies across this novel which is not surprising given its original release date.

I have to confess that I don’t always understand Delillo. I understand him at the sentence level and, strangely, at the book level when I finish a book and look back on it. But there are some intermediate levels between sentences and books at which he can be quite hard to follow. I find it best to cling on for the ride and see where you end up.

A few of my favourite quotes:

A woman with a past. Isn't that what makes us interesting? For men, it's lack of a recorded past that proves so fascinating. Women, no. It's the shadows behind us that do the trick.

People had bumper stickers. AMERICA—LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT. So this friend, it's clear as day, this well-meaning friend gave me a sticker of my very own, which I thought was so devilishly clever I immediately proceeded to affix it to the bumper of my little Swedish car. VIETNAM—LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT.

"I'm glad to see you, Slim. Were you afraid I wouldn't think you'd show up?"
"We'll have to go through that question point by point some time."
"It's a tricky one."

[LW · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alla ricerca del film porno (del Führer ) perduto

Più che una ricerca è una vera e propria caccia , e parecchio movimentata anche ,
che ritmo !
Segreti ,giochi di potere , realtà inverosimili e apparenze plausibili , inseguimenti , spari ,
coltelli , corpo a corpo,
dialoghi vivaci e serrati , intriganti
e che personaggi !
Su tutti Glen , cane che corre ( il suo nome indiano )
con i suoi freddi occhi grigi, quella strana aura pallida, quel senso di implacabilità . Era quasi una forma di talento, quella capacità di rivelare la presenza di una forza oscura del proprio carattere.
Quell'aria di austerità, l'indole dominatrice e intransigente, quel genere di fermezza che non s'incontra tutti i giorni

Alla fine forse Moll non ha tutti i torti...
il probabile esito di una caccia ,anche lunga e ossessiva, può essere ancora più deprimente della ricerca in sé.
Qualunque sia l'obiettivo di una ricerca, un oggetto, una situazione interiore , una risposta ,uno stato dell'essere, il risultato è quasi sempre deludente.
Alla fine ci si trova di fronte a se stessi.
Soltanto a se stessi.
☆☆☆☆

[Read By RodKelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a much more rewarding read the second time around.

[cycads and ferns · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Something new in here.”
“What?” she said….
“It’s a gun. I didn’t see at first from this
angle. A six-shooter.”
“I saw it the day after. Couldn’t resist. Also the story of my life. Not being able to resist.”
“Resist what?”
“Whatever I don’t see clearly.”

[Robert Morgan Fisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterpiece in many ways. All the Delillo touches in full evidence: haunting ambiguity, provocative concept, gritty atmosphere and clipped, droll digressions. The kind of book that inspires other writers.

[Kevin Tole · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I hold you in my arms; And I feel my finger on your trigger; I know nobody can do me no harm; Because, Happiness is a warm gun, oh yes it is

"Saigon, shit. I'm still only in Saigon. Every time I think I'm going to wake up back in the jungle. When I was home after my first tour, it was worse. I'd wake up and there'd be nothing... I hardly said a word to my wife until I said yes to a divorce. When I was here I wanted to be there. When I was there, all I could think of was getting back into the jungle. I've been here a week now. Waiting for a mission, getting softer. Every minute I stay in this room I get weaker. And every minute Charlie squats in the bush he gets stronger. Each time I look around the walls move in a little tighter. Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission, and for my sins they gave me one."

Oh yeah...... The Beatles and the NRA; and Captain Willard in a hotel room. They just seemed connected after reading Don DeLillo's Running Dog.

Published in 1978 and written in 4 months according to the author and in a light manner (“I knew I wasn’t doing utterly serious work, let me put it that way.” Interview Mark Binelli https://www.guernicamag.com/intensity...). So what does Don give us. A mish-mash might say ‘a detective novel, an investigative journalist, the smut / porn / erotica industry, an espionage / deep cover double type shape-shifter, the Mafia, the CIA, murder and violence, and sex and sex substitutes... and lots of it. Sounds like a winner to get picked up. Do you ever get the feeling when you are reading a particular book that maybe you shoulda sort of read this one after that one or maybe this author before that author? After about 50 pages more or less, I strongly felt that way. This is film-noir for the novel or more rightly, the other way round. Those first few pages of the prologue and the opening sections just reek of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. And the more you read of Running Dog the more it seems that DeLillo was intending to write a screenplay perhaps looking for an immediate Hollywood pick-up ... or maybe this is just what he wanted to do.... to write a Holllywood-esque treatment of themes that interested him and get it out there.

Of course the other author that it smacks of is James Ellroy. Tight prose, similar themes – almost the same flavour as The Cold Six Thousand, hard-nosed characters and flawed gems that we can and cannot relate to and underneath it all some sort of running thread of morality.

Everyone is after the unseen-but-alleged-to-exist can of original film from the Hitler bunker. It’s got value, maybe intrinsic historical value but that’s not what DeLillo’s characters are after. It is the entrepreneurial value as a commodity and the hoped-for value as a pornographic item showing Hitler and entourage in the final Götterdämmerung of the Second World War and the fall of Berlin and demise of Hitler and the Nazis. Fascism, Power and Pornography. Grab it and Go, Don!!!

De Lillo puts a lot of characters into this short (for him) book. However only a few are fleshed out to any great extent. We get

Lightborn – the dealer in erotica, seemingly not too successful but well-connected
Moll Robbins – not in the top rack investigative journo for past-it mag Running Dog
Glen Selvy – not what he seems, ever, spy / deep undercover / hunk / senatorial aid
Grace Delaney – shabby editor of Running Dog with a past
PAC / CORD and Deep Radial – Intelligence operations funding covert actions more like systems themselves outside of any control
Lomax - a camp PAC/CORD guy and Selvy’s immediate boss but who wants to get out but cannot
Christopher Ludecke - the trannie German immigrant who had access originally to the film canister along with his wife
Senator Percival - investigating and investigated by PAC/CORD and an avid collector of erotica
Richie Annbrister - young pornographer and entrepreneur, deep covered and protected
Earl Mudger - Kurtz-like figure who was at least in charge of Radial Matrix and made his name for his various exploits in Vietnam but now wants also to get away from it and hand-make knives.
Talerico - a Mafia boss now based in Toronto and specialising in smut
Nadine Rademacher - Nude storyteller, ingénue and , what......, page filler?

And that’s not even all the characters. Others are thrown in lightly. Very few get given full parts like, some only having a sense of walk-on roles. Only Robbins and Selvy get more fully fleshed. Moll Robbins – hey .... whaddabout we play on Moll Flanders and that hack Harold Robbins and his association with pulp soft-porn celeb trash? OK.... why go there.

Selvy though, is quite an apparition. After an assassination attempt on him (and as a bystander, Robbins) he starts to run, but from or to what? And why? What appears to be written is that Selvy is running to his destiny, a kind of act of apotheosis. But that kind of makes little sense. He only seems to realise it when he is on the outskirts of his original training camp but he’s kind of headed that way anyway. His training in the art of dealing death was, or is supposed to be a preparation for his own death? It’s perverse and illogical other than in some transcendent sort of way (we’ll come onto that). It is as if Selvy is merely a commodity of a process and to prove the process he has to die to see its true value. But the whole process is meant to be secret so the whole thing becomes a nonsense. There is an underlying theme of commoditization throughout this book. So the Selvy character is kind of... well.... just plain weird. And this is fiction not fact.

Reeking through it all is the power of sex. What fires them all to go after the film is the possibility that it might contain an orgiastic scene in the Hitler bunker with the main man himself taking a leading role. DeLillo can write a sex scene. Just enough. Not too much. Keep it on the erotic side rather than the hard core. But it is the associations with sex that pervade the book. This is from later in the book, with Nadine – who, wanting to be an actress has headed to New York only to end up working as a nude storyteller-with-add-ons in a flophouse off Times Square

”She kept on smiling, her eyes closed. When they were in bed together, everything about her suggested appealing healthiness. It bothered him. She seemed to think sex was wholesome and sweet.”

In Running Dog sex is never wholesome and sweet. It is power; it is control; it is fascistic Nazi associated; it is abusive; it is manipulative. Here sex is smut and pornography and perversion. Sex is abusive. Sex is secrets and secrecy. There is an interesting scene earlier between Selvy and Robbins prior to them getting it on where she expounds on sex and secrecy and where DeLillo really gets up to speed as the writer you know he is – punchy, full of underlying meaning, great dialogue, masterful, indicative of greater sense than just what is written down on the page.

Commoditization.... sex... and VIETNAM. It’s never far from the surface. For Ellroy it was Cuba and later Vietnam. But this was written in 1978 and was in the conscious thought of all of America and Americans. Another tie-in with Ellroy might be the fugue of the JFK assassination. Percival’s wife is hooked on reading the Warren Commission Report and its spin-offs and Ellroy is full of it. DeLillo and Ellroy almost feel like siblings. And the more you read of DeLillo the more you soak up like osmosis that Vietnam is a keystone in understanding American psyche for him and why it underlies much of this book.

All the characters in Running Dog appear to want to get out, to escape the path they are set on; from the sketchily filled-in walk-on parts to the main characters. Mudger recognises himself as a spent force. Lomax wants the country and his dogs; Selvy seeks his transcendence; Percival ditches his wife and takes up with a young piece of fluff. They all seem disillusioned and dying to escape, some quite literally. Gradually they all give up what they are either doing or trying to do. Which indeed is what happens to the characters vying for control of the film. In the end it’s almost as if they can no longer be bothered.

DeLillo cannot resist throwing in these bit parts from time to time. Mudger’s Vietnamese wife gets thrown in for seemingly only to provide a recess between one murder and its discovery like the Porter scene in Macbeth. And the pace of the writing, the chopping from one scene to another, the narration point changing – well it’s just like a screenplay, with scenes written simply to go over what we have already seen / read (the two seem almost interchangeable given the heavy correspondence here between screenplay and novel) so that the message is hammered home and we don’t miss a dimension. To resonate Tyler’s death he gives us Levi Blackwater (Jeezo – what a name, if you thought Moll Robbins was extreme!). He appears to be some kind of ascetic remnant of the training camp ready to provide the final pinches to the transcendence theme which is the apotheosis of Tyler. It’s kind of over-egging the cake with the chanting and Zoroastrian Tower of Silence / air burial thang and made me think of the theft of Gram Parsons body and attempted cremation in Joshua Tree. It had that sense of farce.

In the end, well, I couldn’t put it down. I HAD to get to the end. There is a sense that the whole book is somewhat deflationary, anti-climactic. Yes it reads like noir. Yes it reads like a screenplay. Yes it might make a decent fillum. And there is better noir out there and DeLillo has written better. Given the sense even from his own mouth that he just sort of knocked it off, should we take it seriously? Well there is this whole thing about sex as power and this commoditisation stuff going on as well as the disillusionment skank. Given all this then perhaps we might say that it is a bit of a period piece for the late 70’s as say Updike’s Couples was for the late 60’s. I did enjoy it.... but would I bother reading it again? Not really. There are bigger and better fish out there.

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even by DeLillo standards, Running Dog is a strange beast. A radical journalist investigates rumors of a pornographic movie featuring Adolf Hitler, which leads her into a tangle of corrupt politicians and smut peddlers, government bureaucrats and Vietnamese death squads. Structurally it's much more conventional than your average DeLillo work, resembling the paranoid thrillers so popular in the mid-'70s, but at service of an utterly weird plot whose strands don't entirely coalesce. Ultimately it fades into familiar thematic threads of much ado about nothing: money is spent, ink is spilled blood is shed and reputation ruined, all for a weird relic of dubious authenticity. Such is life, DeLillo says.

[Luna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Running Dog is your typical contemporary thriller. It does not concentrate on postmodernism, stream of consciousness, or existentialism. It rather follows a journalist (what better to develop a thriller?) who seeks to uncover a mystery, and she did not expect to find what she found. I'm not sure I appreciate how Hitler was portrayed in this, but I liked the message behind it.
 
History is True

[John Pistelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Guernica: Do you have any favorite genre writers or books?

Don DeLillo: I don’t really read much of that. I don’t read detective work and I am afraid I don’t read graphic novels.

Guernica: That’s interesting, because your books often make little feints in that direction. I’m thinking about, for instance, the shooting at the end of White Noise.

Don DeLillo: That was intentional. If I can recall my design accurately, it was to reduce the idea of death to a tabloid level. Running Dog, I think, would also meet your definition. I wrote that book in four months. I hope it doesn’t look it. Maybe it does.

Guernica: Were you thinking of Running Dog as a sort of refraction of genre material or as an actual attempt at—

Don DeLillo: I knew I wasn’t doing utterly serious work, let me put it that way.

Guernica: But did you think it might be a hit?

Don DeLillo: I knew I wasn’t writing hits.

—"Intensity of Plot: Mark Binelli interviews Don DeLillo"

The first-edition hardcover I have out of the library was once shelved as "mystery" according to a stamp on the top edge. Running Dog is a stripped-down 1970s thriller of wry paranoia. It alternates between several characters' viewpoints as they compete to acquire a film, possibly pornographic, shot in Hitler's bunker at the end of World War II.

The novel's heroine is Moll Robbins, a journalist for the ironically-named radical magazine Running Dog. "Running dog" is a phrase from the Maoist lexicon, a term of abuse for capitalism's supposed servants, as in "running dogs of capital." "Capitalist lackeys and running dogs,'" says one of the characters to Moll, glossing the magazine's name. She answers, "'Someone remembers,'" a rueful reply as I read it, not only a cynical comment on the folly of youth but perhaps also an elegy for expired radical dreams. Moll is, to my mind, much the most interesting character in Running Dog, the most novelistically inward—as indicated by her name, which combines pioneering novelist Daniel Defoe's most famous protagonists, Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe, those exemplary modern individuals who had to make their own way through a newly interconnected and money-dominated world, alone within society and before God, no tradition to guide them. But DeLillo's Moll comes after, not before, inwardness; all that's left in DeLillo of the modernist dream of psychological depth is a droll self-consciousness, a weird writers' view of the world: "The shirt accentuated her height in ways she found interesting." DeLillo's later work will achieve greatness in exploring this sensibility. In Running Dog (his sixth novel and, I must confess, the earliest I've read), he is not quite there yet.

Other seekers of the Hitler film whom the novel uses as viewpoint characters include the endearing elderly gentleman Lightborne, who runs the gallery Cosmic Erotics; Earl Mudger, a vaguely comic take on a postmodern Mistah Kurtz type, a military contractor who brought back an entourage from Vietnam and who is now obsessed with making knives; Lomax, some kind of deep-state agent who meets his contacts in a black limousine; Lloyd Percival, a senator who collects rare erotica; Talerico, a mafia boss with facial paralysis who operates out of Toronto; and probably more I'm forgetting. These are the fauna of the thriller and the detective novel, colorful gargoyles to adorn the plot architecture. They are entertaining enough but eventually tiresome, at least if you are not a devotee of those genres.

The novel's main hero, perhaps even more than Moll, is Glen Selvy, a man so well-trained as a deep-cover espionage agent (he is the real "running dog") that there is almost nothing left of him but his nearly mystical absorption in a pared-down routine:

He was a reader. He read his man. There was nothing cynical in his view of the world. He didn't feel tainted by the dirt of his profession. It was a calculated existence, this. He preferred life narrowed down to unfinished rooms.

This, I suppose, is an attempt to lend some aesthetic dignity to the super-spy/super-detective/super-hero archetype, especially as Selvy moves toward his inevitable end, undergoing a kind of ritual purification. I don't find it an entirely successful gesture: DeLillo takes a figure that belongs in an exaggerated aesthetic environment and tries to fit him into a novel that, for all its thriller trappings, still works in the mode of Flaubert. Hemingway is perhaps DeLillo's model here, but Papa's heroes were common soldiers, fighters, etc., not super-spies. An air of camp, though, hangs over the whole novel, from its now-offensive beginning, where a man dressed as a woman falls to his death (we later learn that he is the source of the Hitler film). So perhaps I am the one taking Selvy too seriously. Still, when I want Batman, I want Batman, and when I want Flaubert, I want Flaubert. I respect Running Dog's attempt to create a synthesis but find it unpersuasive. When compared to the extraordinary Lee Harvey Oswald of DeLillo's Libra, Selvy in his cartoonish extremism vanishes.

While allowing for DeLillo's correct assessment that Running Dog is not "utterly serious," I think it does gather itself into an argument. That so many authority figures in the novel desire a Hitler porn movie suggests a secret yearning among the elite, government and criminal, to believe in fascism's self-advertisement as the politics of self-annihilating ecstasy. Without spoiling the conclusion, I can say that the novel shows fascism up as a far more conventional, even sentimental affair, not an aesthetic sublime in the least. And whatever nostalgia the novel may harbor for the '60s dream, DeLillo is also aware of how that dream was commodified into irrelevance, turned into traditional authority's loyal opposition:

"Who do you work for?" Selvy said.

"Running Dog," she said.

He paused briefly.

"One-time organ of discontent."

"We were fairly radical, yes."

"Now safely established in the mainstream."

"I wouldn't say safely."

"Part of the ever-expanding middle."

"We say 'fuck' all the time."

"My point exactly."

Fuck all the time: the connection of sex to power, the search for an escape from "the ever-expanding middle." And the novel occasionally suggests that sex itself is a kind of fascism, echoing Sontag's classic essay on Leni Riefenstahl from three years before the novel's publication. Such hints—as when the source of the Hitler film is revealed as a "transvestite" (in the parlance of the times) or when Moll suggests that homosexuality is natural to an imperial elite (as in English public schools)—will no doubt offend the contemporary reader schooled in queer hermeneutics. On the other hand, in the novel's most arresting passage, a passage of far more relevance now than when the novel was published in 1978, Mudger explains that technological developments create an appetite for transgression:

"When technology reaches a certain level, people begin to feel like criminals," he said. "Someone is after you, the computers maybe, the machine-police. You can't escape investigation. The facts about you and your whole existence have been collected or are being collected. Banks, insurance companies, credit organizations, tax examiners, passport officers, reporting services, police agencies, intelligence gatherers. It's a little like I was saying before. Devices make us pliant. If they issue a print-out saying we're guilty, then we're guilty. But it goes even deeper, doesn't it? It's the presence alone, the very fact, the superabundance of technology, that makes us feel we're committing crimes."

In my Inherent Vice review, I alluded to T. S. Eliot's treatment of the occult in The Waste Land: he seemed to see it as a rich source of imagery, even one to which some authentic spiritual yearning could be attached, but also a body of lore that it would be insane to take literally. I think this describes DeLillo's approach to conspiracy and other forms of apocalyptic thought, including the mystique of sexual transgression. These are images he returns to, again and again, to make his art; but the art itself is the real riposte to the omnipresence of technology, to the machine-police that estrange us from ourselves. Because this insight is not quite articulated in Running Dog, as it will be in Libra or Underworld—because in fact a somewhat bathetic super-heroic tragedy, only half meant in earnest, is substituted for it—I can't say that this is one of DeLillo's best novels. Then again, he mined it again and again for his later fiction: White Noise's Hitler motif, Libra's Dallas-tending conspiracies, Underworld's and The Body Artist's bold female intellectuals, Cosmopolis's pursuit of an exterior to capitalist technocracy—all are present in Running Dog. Not bad for four months' work.

Finally, the DeLillo dialogue is here in all its stylized dueling-monologue comedy. It has always reminded me of Wilde. You either love it or hate it, and I love it:

"Are you as sluggish as I am?"

"No," he said.

"It's my biorhythms. They're way out of whack today."

"I'm great, I'm tuned."

"Biorhythmically I feel awful."

"You need a swim," he said.

And the DeLillo prose-poetry is here (though sometimes held up by too much genre-fiction exposition), the voice of a bewildered aesthete entranced at the postmodern spectacle. I will end where the novel begins:

You won't find ordinary people here. Not after dark, on these streets, under the ancient warehouse canopies. Of course you know this. This is the point. It's why you're here, obviously. Wind comes gusting off the river, stirring the powdery air of demolition sites. Derelicts build fires in rusty oil drums near the piers. You see them clustered, wrapped in whatever variety of coat or throwaway sweater or combination of these they've been able to acquire. There are trucks parked near the warehouses, some of them occupied, men smoking in the dimness, waiting for the homosexuals to make their way down from the bars above Canal Street. You lengthen your stride, although not to hurry out of the cold. You like that stiffening wind. You turn a corner and move briefly into it, feeling your thighs take shape against the dress's pleasurably taut weave. Broken glass shines like white mica in the vacant lots. The river has a musky tang tonight.

[Marcello S · Rating 4 out of 5]

Il sesto romanzo di DeLillo, l’ultimo degli anni Settanta, emula un thriller di spionaggio. Ruota attorno a una vecchia pellicola girata nel bunker sotto la Cancelleria del Reich nell’aprile del 1945. Dovrebbe esserci Hitler, non più in gran forma, e qualcosa di pornografico. L’autenticità è dubbia, nessuno l’ha mai vista, ma molti vogliono possederla.
Ha salti di scena continui e non sempre fluidissimi. I personaggi sono solo abbozzati e i fili della trama non si uniscono mai del tutto. La scrittura è del tutto in linea con le aspettative, con dialoghi in buona parte ottimi. Temi ricorrenti: immagine, sguardo, potere. Finale con dissolvenza verso il West americano e il confine messicano, in una sorta di fuga e resa dei conti.
Copertina italiana tremenda. Fuori catalogo probabilmente da sempre.
Lo metterei tra i miei preferiti? No. Resta comunque sottovalutato.
Running Dog è il nome di una piccola rivista underground.

[74/100]

Frasario minimo/

Moll Robbins si aggirò un po’ incerta fra tutti quegli oggetti, sfiorando il coperchio di una teiera di porcellana (imperatore cinese con concubina, a prima vista), scrutando una moneta sotto vetro (greca, effusioni fra maschi).
– Hanno un’aria innocente, non trova?
– Non si muovono, – disse Lightborne.
– Non si muovono?
– Movimento, azione, fotogrammi al secondo. Questa è l’epoca in cui viviamo, nel bene e nel male. Qui dentro è tutto un po’ inespressivo. Statico. Nient’altro che massa e peso.
– Pura gravità.
– Certo, nulla è pienamente erotico a meno che non abbia la capacità di muoversi. Una donna che accavalla le gambe fa impazzire gli uomini. Si muove, mi spiego? Gesto, azione, spostamento. Oggi, perché l’erotismo sia totale, c’è bisogno di tutto questo.
– Qualcosa del genere, credo.

Chi non fa quel tragitto ogni giorno tende ad ammutolire, quando il treno passa per Harlem. Il silenzio non dipende tanto dallo shock o dalla tristezza, quanto dal puro fascino di quel luogo. Il piacere delle rovine. La gioia degli occhi che scoprono vedute istruttive. È così interessante da guardare, così torpidamente pittoresco, soprattutto se visto da questa distanza, e da un mezzo in movimento.

L’importante non era sapere se l’avesse colpito o meno. Questo non lo riguardava. Era un dettaglio tecnico.

Certe cose diventavano impossibili, quando si smetteva di sparare.

– Sta diventando un western, – disse.
– E prima cos’era?

Da lontano vide la forma d’onda, il profilo scarno delle Chisos Mountains, di un pallido color ardesia, distese su una superficie così piana che poteva essere solo una luce arbitraria, uno stato d’animo o un’invenzione.

– Cos’hai comprato?
– Un bolo da guerriglia filippino.
– E la giungla dov’è?
– L’ho comprato per il nome.
– Se non te l’hanno venduto insieme a una giungla, ti hanno truffato.
– Mi piace il nome, – disse Selvy al vecchio. – È romantico.

Forte sensazione di assistere allo svolgersi di un dramma. Un ricordo, un film. Flusso di fantasticherie adolescenziali. Aveva immaginato quella situazione centinaia di volte, anche se mai fino in fondo.

La terra era una tavolozza levigata. Il potere della tempesta di lucidare e rinnovare, pensò, non era mai stato così evidente. Il cielo era perfetto. Le cose esistevano. Il giorno era commisurato alle pure gradazioni dell’essere e del sentire.

[Mircalla · Rating 4 out of 5]

"qual è il tuo nome indiano? Cane che corre"

una pellicola che pare sia stata girata nel bunker più famoso della Seconda Guerra mondiale, un mercante d'arte erotica, un agente segreto, vietcong, mafiosi, giornaliste avvenenti e politici assatanati...un funerale tibetano...forse ;-)
la storia è serrata e il racconto avvincente, Delillo ci mette un pizzico di paranoia governativa, che all'epoca in cui scriveva era senza dubbio più motivata di oggi, e i personaggi sono talmente ben delineati che si riesce persino a immaginarne il volto...di tutti, pure del killer scemo che si fa sparare mentre cerca di ammazzare un agente segreto, per conto di un'altra agenzia dello stesso governo
e poi
che cattiveria il finale, una vera cattiveria, e dire che questo è uno dei rari libri di Delillo che un finale ce l'ha :-P

[Eric T. Voigt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've heard him acting like he made a stunning turn in his literary life after the 80s began, after The Names was released, but damn, DeLillo's good anytime he's writing. Everything he's written is my favorite. I was like "where do I stack this alongside or against his other work?" and then thought about it and put it right there, in the middle, with the rest.

[Massimiliano · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tra i vari romanzi di Don DeLillo che ho letto — uno dei miei scrittori preferiti in assoluto — Running Dog è forse quello che meno incarna il suo stile tipico.
Manca quella densità filosofica e quel senso di straniamento che rendono i suoi testi così riconoscibili.
Qui la trama prende il sopravvento, e per certi versi sembra quasi un libro di Pynchon, con cospirazioni, paranoia e personaggi eccentrici, ma senza la stessa profondità.

Il romanzo si muove su binari quasi da thriller politico, con un ritmo serrato e una narrazione più lineare del solito. Questo lo rende sicuramente più accessibile, ma anche meno affascinante per chi cerca la complessità e l’ambiguità che DeLillo sa offrire.
Va detto però che l’oggetto centrale della storia — un presunto film pornografico con Hitler — è incredibilmente suggestivo e disturbante, e aggiunge un tocco di inquietudine che resta impresso, anche se non del tutto sviluppato.

In definitiva, Running Dog è un libro non brutto, ma nemmeno memorabile.
Conoscendo il potenziale di DeLillo, questo romanzo mi è sembrato una parentesi minore, interessante per vedere un lato diverso del suo stile, ma non abbastanza incisivo da lasciare il segno.

[LaCitty · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lo ammetto, non l'ho capito. Non ho capito dove l'autore volesse arrivare, quale storia volesse raccontare o meglio, che significato attribuire a tutto quel garbuglio politico, spionistico, malavitoso, giornalistico e anche un pochino perverso che è la storia di questo romanzo.
Intendiamoci, è scritto bene. Niente da dire, ma che significato attribuire alle varie vicende per me è un mistero.
Se qualcuno ha delucidazioni da darmi è il benvenuto, perché io brancolo nel buio.

[BAM doesn’t answer to her real name · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first de L book I’ve been able to tolerate from beginning to end. I’m not really sure why. It’s not because it took about 7 hours to read because I’ve a shorter one.
AND I want to know what is it with this author and Hitler? I’m going to research this because I do not understand.

[Illiterate · Rating 3 out of 5]

More of the same but better. This thriller suggests sex and power are now commercial spectacle, not transgressive fulfillment.

[Behnam Riahi · Rating 5 out of 5]

The following review has been copied from http://behnamriahi.tumblr.com

Running Dog, written by Don DeLillo and published by Alfred A. Knopf, is a third-person novel following several points-of-view, most notably journalist Moll Robbins and secret agent Glen Selvy. When an art dealer comes upon an erotic film made in Hitler’s bunker, everyone wants to get their hands on it—senators, pornographers, transvestites, and even one crazed Vietnam vet. Only no one has seen the film and it exists in rumor alone. Working for a politician wishing to keep his collection secret, Selvy is sent out to get his hands on it when he finds himself in the throes of romance with a journalist for a magazine named Running Dog, Moll Robbins. Except Moll wants the scoop on whom Selvy represents, though Selvy isn’t really out to protect the politician’s interest at all—only setting him up for a bigger fall, despite he himself being set up to be hunted down. As the film emerges, Selvy is forced to make haste to the ends of the earth, like a running dog.

This is one of the books that my ex-roommate, Wyatt, gave me. It’s the third I’ve read by DeLillo, including Americana and End Zone. And it’s not the last DeLillo book I intend to read this year, though every novel I manage to pick up by him is extraordinarily different from each other. As far as modern novelists go, DeLillo is by far one of my favorites because of his careful use of spirituality tied to sentiment and the context of that in the absence of sentiment. DeLillo writes about departures: David Bell in Americana leaving the world of television to find his roots, Gary Harkness in End Zone abandoning football to understand nuclear holocaust, and now Glen Selvy, the pivotal character of Running Dog, truly running away from his governmental roles to complete all of his unfinished business. These departures not only resound with an audience familiar with deep-seeded feelings of disconnection, but they directly relate to some measure of honor and expectation for the end, like one man looking both at his past and his future. Of course, I can’t tell you everything that happens. That would spoil it for you.

Kicking off this review, I’d like to start by pointing out some of the more unusual things about this book: It isn’t all that long, but there are so many goddamn characters. There were moments while reading this where I’d catch a name and had to scroll back a few pages in order to remind myself just who that name belonged to. DeLillo is no stranger to unnecessary amounts of characters though and very rarely does he ever tie up the ends of their stories. Some people just continue to live on, as though unaffected by the events in the novel, and we just have to let them live on that way. While I did long to see what happened to some folks, I found myself engaged to exactly what this novel was about—the big movie introduced at the very opening of the novel.

Apart from that, there isn’t much that I disliked about the novel. The points-of-view, though all told in the same voice, are unique, in that DeLillo carefully conveys each person’s beliefs and frustrations as a reflection of those characters in following their pursuits. Points-of-view tend to shift with paragraph breaks, so it’s easy to see when you’re looking through someone else’s eyes as the story progresses forward and he makes no secret about who exactly you’re watching the world from. Only on very few occasions does he meander from one point-of-view to another, but it’s appropriate nonetheless in how seamless it works and what exactly that shift represents.

One of the more interesting things about this book is that, in a lot of ways, it is a parody of a conspiracy thriller, though parody might be a strong word. Laced in the criminal activities of the characters of this novel is a very primitive sense of spirituality and complex layer of philosophy that determine each character’s path and motivations from beginning to end. It isn’t so much the action but the integrity of the characters in their beliefs that push the story forward, although DeLillo seems no stranger to action either. Each fight scene is carefully choreographed, with the characters spaced out clearly on the map of the battlefield, no different than how he placed characters on the football field in End Zone. These fights not only convey action, but also intent and strategy while revealing the enormity of each individual character’s determination to survive these conflicts.

Much like in a military thriller, DeLillo shows familiarity with firearms, military vehicles, protocol. And in spite of the year this novel is set in, sometime in the 1970’s, the novel feels frighteningly modern. There’s no cell phone use and while that could, theoretically affect a story from that era, it doesn’t—the novel is completely acceptable at face value as a modern story. In fact, if not for the mention that it’s set in the 70’s, I would’ve simply assumed it was set in 2014, although, by that theory, he published it awfully quickly. Nonetheless, the use of technology like military-grade weaponry flawlessly edges the story forward without blunting the audience with unnecessary jargon or outdated images. Although, I guess the Vietnam vets are still young enough to kill people. I’m not sure that’s plausible in the 2010’s, but I wouldn’t doubt it.

What makes this novel brilliant is the item that ties it all together—the secret film from the Nazi bunker. DeLillo engages the audience by creating a curious mythos around a fictional item and perpetuates that by building the drama of others trying to get their hands on it. Even while Glen Selvy is off, running for his life, we’re still engaged to that item and exactly what it contains. Is Hitler in an orgy? You don’t know until you get to the end, but you want to know so badly. The big reveal of the film itself ties the whole story together, including Moll and Glen’s connection to each other, and creates a finale that’s both beautiful, meaningful, spiritual, and without the staggering sentiment so common in literature that comes to a “romantic” conclusion. The very fact that this film is the center of the conflict doesn’t deter us from the character’s individual conflicts either, as we find ourselves watching the world through two scopes: the first being that the film is the holy grail and the second being that the film’s existence is a reasonable excuse for other, darker intentions to be unleashed.

As noted in my other reviews, DeLillo is still a word-smith. Though his similes and eloquence aren’t nearly as loquacious as they were in his debut novel, he continues to write things in a way that only a skewed perspective on the military, wars, and their aftermath could. As though experiencing feelings and events in the story for the first time as an adult himself upon starting it, each phrase refines the prose to the point of perfection by capturing original concepts about so many cliched expectations of how a gun feels, how a man bleeds, what love is. The clever use of language is only an addition to the plot itself though—he never hammers an idea into our head. He states events as though they’re minutiae, though brilliantly, and leaves it on the audience’s pallet as other events occur as a result. Hints of a film-shaped cookie tin carried off in a paper bag mean more to the story than by stating directly what one character’s intent with the cookie tin was—it’s left up to the audience to find the truth in the beauty, the Hemingway mentality of omission. The very things that aren’t written are the things we have to pay attention to, thus making the story that much more engaging as the audience discovers what they already know when they peer past the great beauty of his writing.

Don’t buy this book if you’re easily bored or lost—it’s not a slow book but it’s one that requires a careful eye and a strong memory. I’ll be honest, I couldn’t wait to finish it and now that it’s over, I already miss it.

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bunch of spies, journalists, and politicians looking for Nazi porn shot in Hitler’s bunker, what’s not to love?