NP - More on DeLillo's new book

[David Morris]

http://www.observer.com/pages/book1.asp

We badly want there to be a novelist who can pronounce on the Big Themes of our
mediated world, and Mr. DeLillo has always been up for the job. For all his
weaknesses (plot, character, dialogue), he writes terrific set pieces—critics
and fellow novelists will forgive you anything if you deck it out in a
glittering style—and he can work himself up into quite a state about the
significance of it all. He’s not afraid to be grandiose; that, and his
eloquence combines potently with our desire for an oracular voice to obscure
the fact that for years almost everything Big he has had to say has been either
1) banal or 2) wrong.

Mr. DeLillo is a great writer going grievously off the rails as a result of not
attending to his strengths. His last novel, The Body Artist, began with 20
pages of perfection, a description of a married couple having breakfast. It was
followed by many more unexceptional pages of solemn, gnomic maunderings about
grief and loss. Reading those first 20 pages, it’s possible to believe in
miracles, or at least in the power of genius to transform something utterly
ordinary into an intimation of the divine, to fill us with wonder at the
texture of our lives. With the rest of the book, it’s what happened?

His newest novel, Cosmopolis, alas, is all what happened?


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