![]() ![]() ![]() These are the kind of crowds in which characters like Karen Janney lose their identities and become subsumed into the mind of the master. From a series of linked couples they become one continuous wave,” an “undifferentiated mass.” A key word in this novel, as it is in White Noise, “mass” refers both to crowds and to the mass-produced images that they consume and that consume them. Mao II opens with a procession tracked by the narrator’s roving camera at a mass wedding: “he effect is one of transformation. Osteen: But which crowds? There is more than one kind of crowd. What is behind this fascination with crowds and their role in understanding twentieth-century America? LOA: “The future belongs to crowds,” DeLillo famously writes in Mao II, and the theme of crowds and mass spectacle recurs throughout his work-perhaps most memorably in the opening of Underworld, which recounts the “Shot Heard ’Round the World” at the 1951 pennant game between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers. That novel’s brilliant structure and sweep also forecast Underworld’s enormous scope. Further, Underworld’s mixing of fictional characters and real people is presaged in Libra. Likewise, the “airborne toxic event” scene in White Noise prefigures Underworld’s attention to the dire consequences of consumerism: our products return to us as deadly poisons. Underworld’s Fresh Kills Landfill is the Gladney garbage writ large: multiply their waste by millions and you build a veritable mountain of rubbish. For example, the novel’s analysis of the apocalyptic menace of the atomic age appeared first in End Zone, where the protagonist becomes fascinated with nuclear war strategy, and of course the theme of waste shows up dramatically in White Noise, where Jack Gladney reflects upon his household’s trash. Underworld provides a broader canvas for concerns that DeLillo has engaged with throughout his career. In fact, The Names itself marks a departure-embodying what DeLillo has called a “new seriousness”-that sets it apart from his early novels, even while it displays renewed attention to themes that he had introduced in those books, such as terrorism ( Players, 1977) and ascetic rituals ( End Zone, 1972 Running Dog, 1978). This synthesis is novel, yet the thematic threads woven into this magnum opus are apparent not only in his 1980s work but in his earlier fiction as well. Mark Osteen: Underworld is the novel where the manifold strains in DeLillo’s previous work interlock and expand. How did DeLillo’s work evolve through these decades? Can we see traces of the ambition and thematic range of Underworld in earlier works like The Names ? LOA: LOA put out an edition of DeLillo’s novels of the 1980s last year and will publish an edition of his ’90s novels this coming fall. Don DeLillo in 1988 (Bernard Gotfryd, Library of Congress) Over email, Osteen spoke with LOA about the evolution of DeLillo’s novels, the recent White Noise film adaptation, and why so many contemporary authors try to follow in his footsteps. In Three Novels of the 1980s, published by Library of America in 2022, and a forthcoming volume collecting Mao II and Underworld, editor Mark Osteen guides us through DeLillo’s crowning literary achievements, making a convincing case for him as one of America’s greatest living writers. Though perhaps best known for the apocalyptic satire of White Noise and the kaleidoscopic, decades-spanning Underworld, his work has consistently linked the idiosyncratic and the personal with the universal and spectacular, conjuring fictional events, real-life characters, and razor-sharp dialogue in an inimitable yet widely influential style. Mark Osteen on the apocalyptic satire and historical panorama of Don DeLillo Don DeLillo: Three Novels of the 1980sĪ peerless and prolific chronicler of modern America’s obsessions, fears, and fantasies, Don DeLillo has, for more than fifty years, enthralled readers with his masterful prose and searching treatments of themes-art, terrorism, consumerism, garbage-that cut to the heart of our contemporary moment. ![]()
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