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“... mode: as they are for Rick Moody in The Ice Storm, and even, in a modified form, for Don DeLillo in White Noise. But it was Richard Yates who followed the nightmare of Remsen Park to its logical conclusion: Revolutionary Road is the tragedy of Organisation Man. In Yates’s novel, the man is Frank Wheeler, first glimpsed back in the ...”

“... leaving a trail of stitches – maximalists like Moody follow the lead of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo by wiring themselves into consumer culture, conspiracy theory, pop iconography and spy-craft technology, trying to chart an underlying pattern in the chaos, a treasure map of paranoia. Purple America, Moody’s major-statement novel about the ...”

“... propeller in the A&M wind tunnel came from the Enola Gay. It sounds like a Marvel comic written by Don DeLillo: the American hero, blasted bald by radiation, re-creates his body with the help of the B-29 that wiped out Hiroshima. No wonder the competition seems uneven. The four-lane N91 leads up from Grenoble to the Col du Lautaret and the Meije ...”

“... escape: mass murder at the movies.’ Someone, perhaps not a million miles from you, whose name we don’t yet know but whose face is camera-ready, whose conscience is clearing before the fact, is preparing a biography of his mentality in advance of a shooting massacre. He is almost certainly a he, and he is unhappy, and he is already fully armed. He is ...”

“... The Manchurian Candidate began as a novel by Richard Condon, who with Don DeLillo has done more to anatomise and dramatise the world of covert action than any ‘authorised’ chronicler. Before discussing Norman Mailer’s magisterial bid for dominance in this field, I want to use Richard Condon to anticipate a common liberal ...”

“... on an auto da fé among the intellectualoids. As he did so brilliantly with Libra a decade ago, Don DeLillo has caught the tone of unwholesome adoration in his aptly-titled Underworld, and put it into the caustic mouth of Lenny Bruce, found here delivering a monologue during the Cuban missile crisis: ‘Kennedy makes an appearance in public and you ...”

“... to explain how Romantic and post-Romantic poets relate to their predecessors. Authors for Bloom don’t in a simple way learn from earlier writers. What he termed ‘strong poets’ have ‘the persistence to wrestle with their strong precursors, even to the death’. By doing so they manifest and struggle to overcome the anxiety of influence: ‘each ...”

“... Frank Lloyd Wright designed house previously owned by the shah of Iran), he said to Geller: ‘I don’t want to perform any more. I want to leave the world. Find me a monastery. I want to become a monk.’ But his ascetic mood soon passed (as every Elvis mood passed, each brief and delicious horripilation), and the marker of this grand spiritual event ...”

“... until 1984). Translators can quiz writers about what they mean, by email, or even in person: Don DeLillo had a London conference for his European translators of Underworld, who not surprisingly faced a few problems in a novel which opens with a 60-page baseball game. But translation is not always, or necessarily, about managing loss. When my novel ...”

“... merely market-driven, out of conscious control and promising imminent sensory overload. As one of Don DeLillo’s eloquent paranoids observes of tomorrow, ‘it’s collapsed right in on us. It’s ahead of schedule.’ This is the bad news that Gibson has broadcast for over a decade. In Gibson’s near-future, first sketched in the novel Neuromancer ...”

“... She found her interactions with Lyttle challenging. ‘How come you have a small nose?’ ‘Jews don’t have blue eyes.’ On and on he went, trying to interrogate her on her sexual preferences. Russo recalled legends of lovers who descended into the depths to reclaim partners enraptured by the goddess of death. Now she was involved with a Celtic minotaur ...”

“... necessary edge of who we are … a riverrun writer, bringing us back and propelling us forward’. Don DeLillo’s Point Omega is ‘the one that takes the skin away, that sings at the deep raw edge’. I had read dozens of McCann’s blurbs before I’d read any of his novels: I doubted his ability to compose a meaningful sentence. He seems now and then ...”

“... epigraph from Emerson – ‘Every actual state is corrupt’ – and inspired by a thought from Don DeLillo’s Mao II: ‘Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken over that territory.’ A writer, Ben Sachs, gives up words for action, and travels the US ...”

“... made up of two people, the challenge is to discover how, like Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, Don Gately and Hal Incandenza, they might ever be brought together at all.) In 2000, DeWitt published a first novel called The Last Samurai; it sold a hundred thousand copies in English, was translated into ten languages and turns up on various best-cult-classics ...”

“... proliferating in all their chaotic digital, social, financial and emotional variety. In many ways, Don DeLillo’s novel Cosmopolis (2003) seems the complement to O’Neill’s Netherland, and is unsuccessful in a complementary way. DeLillo’s main character, too, lives in Manhattan, has a young wife, and works in ...”