Volume 35, Number 13 · August 18, 1988
From the Grassy Knoll
By Robert Towers
Libra
by Don DeLillo
Viking, 456 pp., $19.95
Though he is yet to write a work as prodigious as Gravity's Rainbow or as sensational as An American Dream, Don DeLillo has, with nine novels to his credit, supplanted both Pynchon and Mailer as chief shaman of the paranoid school of American fiction. Beginning as a fantasist, he has moved stealthily toward realism while retaining a dark and at times prophetic vision of occult conspiracies and correspondences and technology-gone-mad. As far back as 1977 he 'foretold,' in the cinematic novel Running Dog, the development of lawless outgrowths of the intelligence community—covert organizations that cancerously infiltrate the tissues of the body politic, breaking down the boundaries between governmental policy and private enterprise, amassing wealth or dealing out death with impunity. The weapons-obsessed leader of the organization called PAC-ORD in that novel will suggest the arms dealer Edwin Wilson to some readers, General Secord to others. Death becomes a cultish preoccupation in Running Dog, and in DeLillo's subsequent novels, The Names and White Noise, it is presented as the central object of worship in a shrine festooned with the trappings of Nazism, pornography, and international terrorism, and humming with a myriad electronic devices. The ultimate cataclysm, whether toxic or nuclear, is not far off.
Review, 2577 words
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