DeLillo,Don

Don DeLillo is one of the most significant contemporary American novelists. Depicting an age of media and advertising saturation in which politics have been reduced to sound bites and images, his fiction has often felt eerily prescient about contemporary crises. Published in 1985 just after the environmental disaster in Bhopal, India,White Noiseseemed to many like an uncanny commentary on the event. SincePlayers(1977), which imagines a plot to blow up the New York Stock Exchange, DeLillo's fiction repeatedly has explored the possibilities of terrorism on American soil, so much so that his fiction almost seems to have foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks on the United States. But to see DeLillo merely as a kind of contemporary Nostradamus is to miss what is central to his work. His most important fiction invites the reader to think historically. DeLillo may write about American postmodernity, but in his belief that the novel may help the engaged reader to think historically there remains a decidedly high modernist belief in the power of art to create a critical purchase on the present. This modernist undercurrent to DeLillo's postmodernism is not surprising given his admiration for William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and especially James Joyce.