Michael Wood on Late DeLillo and Point Omega

[rich]

this is just the 1st paragraph. don't have a subscription but I think
this small bit explains what happened to DeLillo's writing (and in
Pynchon post-GR I'd argue) fairly well

The Paranoid Elite

Michael Wood

Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) was in many ways a farewell to
paranoia. Not the paranoid style in American politics, to quote the
title of a famous essay by Richard Hofstadter (how could anyone say
farewell to a mode so lavishly on the rise?), but to the paranoid
fictions that animated DeLillo’s own novels The Names (1982) and Libra
(1988), and went all the way back to Pynchon’s V (1963) and The Crying
of Lot 49 (1966). Those were the days when we knew the score: it was
whatever the authorities were not telling us. Conspiracy theory wasn’t
even a theory, it was a basic interpretative procedure, a way of
getting through the week. There was ‘a world inside the world’, as Lee
Harvey Oswald kept saying in Libra. And then one day there wasn’t. The
world was just the world, a vast clutter of causes and coincidences.
The underworld emptied itself onto the streets, and mere suspicion
began to seem naive, a form of reverse faith. Things were what they
were, and quite bad enough at that.