Where to Start Guide: Don DeLillo

White Noise 
One of my favorite aspects of DeLillo’s writing is the way he investigates completely different subcultures with each book, from football (1972’s End Zone), to rock music (1973’s Great Jones Street), to math prodigies (1976’s Ratner’s Star). With his 1985 National Book Award winner White Noise, DeLillo delivered his take on the campus novel, set at a Midwest institution called The-College-on-the-Hill, and starring Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler Studies who has been married five times to four different women. DeLillo’s riffs on consumerism, mortality, and the modern family are not to be missed. This is probably DeLillo’s funniest book, and it’s the title that won him both a wide audience and a position as the prime exemplar of “postmodern literature.”

Libra
One of the defining moments of the American experience in the 20th century was the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and DeLillo investigates this horrific event through his fictionalized account of the life of Lee Harvey Oswald in 1988’s Libra. DeLillo portrays Oswald not as a monster but as a deeply flawed man, driven to extreme actions by the pressures of his life and frailties of his mental health.

Mao II
DeLillo’s tenth novel, Mao II, concerns a reclusive novelist named Bill Gray. DeLillo himself is moderately reclusive. In his early years he shied away from interviews and accepted his National Book Award with the statement: “I’m sorry I couldn’t be here tonight, but I thank you all for coming,” instead of a speech. In Mao II, Bill Gray believes he’s living in a time when terrorism, instead of art, has become the dominant force in the culture, and DeLillo presciently writes, “Beckett is the last writer to shape the way we think and see. After him, the major work involves midair explosions and crumbled buildings. This is the new tragic narrative.” Mao II won the 1992 PEN/Faulkner Award.

Underworld
Now that you’ve warmed up on some of DeLillo’s early novels, it’s time to tackle his magnum opus, Underworld, a book I flat-out loved, despite the fact that it contains plenty of loose ends and wild goose chases as it covers a huge swath of American history, from the 1950s to the 1990s. The opening fifty or so pages was previously published as the novella Pafko at the Wall, and it’s the finest baseball writing I’ve ever read, harkening back to a time when America believed in its innocence, despite the dark threads that were already woven through its history.

Falling Man
As a reader smitten with DeLillo’s expansive style, his change in direction toward shorter minimalist works that began with The Body Artist in 2001 was a bit of a shock to me. But now that I’ve read several of DeLillo’s spare recent works, I appreciate that he was nimble enough to reinvent his style late in his career. When you consider DeLillo’s body of work, he’s long been concerned with acts of terrorism, which makes it only natural that he would weigh in on the 9-11 attacks, as he does in 2007’s Falling Man.
Will Zero K continue DeLillo’s minimalist mode or find him back in loose, baggy monster territory? DeLillo fans are on the edges of our seats as we wait to find out.