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How to Be Good

Elaine Showalter: Carol Shields, 11 July 2002

Unless 
by Carol Shields.
Fourth Estate, 213 pp., £16.99, May 2002, 0 00 713770 2
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... verities in small individual lives’ rather than ‘taking a broad canvas of society’ like Don DeLillo or Philip Roth. Well, Winters retorts: way back in high school we learned that the major themes of literature were birth, love, understanding, work, loneliness, connection and death. We believed that the readers of novels were themselves ...

The Dollar Tree

Tobias Jones, 11 December 1997

Hand To Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure 
by Paul Auster.
Faber, 436 pp., £15.99, November 1997, 0 571 17149 4
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... the smartest lines in the story, being allowed, for example, to expand on his pet theories about Don Quixote and the difficulties, significantly enough, of representation. ‘Remember: throughout the book Don Quixote is preoccupied by the question of posterity. Again and again he wonders how accurately his chronicler will ...

Modernity’s Undoing

Pankaj Mishra: ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’, 31 March 2011

A Visit from the Goon Squad 
by Jennifer Egan.
Corsair, 336 pp., £14.99, March 2011, 978 1 78033 028 0
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... and war. The masters of this quintessentially American literature have been Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, prophets of Cold War paranoia, rather than Philip Roth and Jonathan Franzen, or all the chroniclers of the immigrant experience from Henry Roth to Jhumpa Lahiri. Pynchon and DeLillo have had oddly few ...

There’s Daddy

Michael Wood, 13 February 1992

Flying in to Love 
by D.M. Thomas.
Bloomsbury, 262 pp., £14.99, February 1992, 0 7475 1129 2
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JFK 
directed by Oliver Stone.
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... of pain. Another answer would involve exploring paranoia itself as a symptom, which is what Don DeLillo does in his marvellous novel Libra. For DeLillo Kennedy’s death is not so much a mystery as a catalyst: it provokes a show of the intricate weirdness of American (and no doubt other) life, of the infestation ...

Flame-Broiled Whopper

Theo Tait: Salman Rushdie, 6 October 2005

Shalimar the Clown 
by Salman Rushdie.
Cape, 398 pp., £17.99, September 2005, 0 224 06161 5
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... on here. My guess is that Rush-die is partly labouring under the strong and difficult influence of Don DeLillo. He exhibits a DeLillo-ish concern with the limousine-borne power-brokers who shape our world, and the secret networks that underlie it. Like many of DeLillo’s ...

It’s just a book

Philip Horne, 17 December 1992

Leviathan 
by Paul Auster.
Faber, 245 pp., £14.99, October 1992, 0 571 16786 1
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... on a doomed attempt to fix the chaos with a meaning. This is true again in Leviathan, dedicated to Don DeLillo, where again Walden and Thoreau feature, this time as inspiration for a novelist called Benjamin Sachs, whose dissatisfaction with writing fiction as a way of engaging with the world leads him, via Austerian chains of coincidence, to a campaign ...

Feast of Darks

Christine Stansell: Whistler, 23 October 2003

Whistler, Women and Fashion 
by Margaret MacDonald and Susan Grace Galassi et al.
Yale, 243 pp., £35, May 2003, 0 300 09906 1
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Whistler and His Mother: An Unexpected Relationship 
by Sarah Walden.
Gibson Square, 242 pp., £15.99, July 2003, 1 903933 28 5
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... to account for the picture’s appeal, and here and there tosses in contemporary references – Don DeLillo, Marilyn Monroe – to gesture toward some quintessential Americanness in Whistler. It’s when Walden turns to the paintings themselves that her book comes alive. The restorer turns sleuth, ferreting out secrets: thus the misty indeterminateness ...

Well, duh

Dale Peck, 18 July 1996

Infinite Jest 
by David Foster Wallace.
Little, Brown, 1079 pp., £17.99, July 1996, 0 316 92004 5
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... John Kennedy Toole, whose A Confederacy of Dunces is a book nearly as bloated as its protagonist; Don DeLillo’s social, um, satires owe more than a little to Pynchon’s work; and in a recent essay in Harper’s magazine the young novelist Jonathan Franzen declares Pynchon a personal hero. David Foster Wallace moves beyond admiration to adulation ...

Postcolonial Enchantment

Pankaj Mishra: Nadeem Aslam, 7 February 2013

The Blind Man’s Garden 
by Nadeem Aslam.
Faber, 409 pp., £18.99, February 2013, 978 0 571 28791 8
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... attacks of 9/11 provoked some disquieting epiphanies: ‘Our world, parts of our world’, Don DeLillo warned, had ‘crumbled into theirs’, condemning us to live ‘in a place of danger and rage’. Nevertheless the dominant assumption until the 2008 financial crisis was that ‘the dramatic climb of the Dow and the speed of the internet ...

God wielded the buzzer

Christian Lorentzen: The Sorrows of DFW, 11 October 2012

Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace 
by D.T. Max.
Granta, 352 pp., £20, September 2012, 978 1 84708 494 1
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... watched over six hours a day in the average American household,’ he wrote in a 1992 essay. ‘I don’t know any fiction writers who live in average American households … Actually I have never seen an average American household. Except on TV.’ He conceptualised the problem in Infinite Jest, the title of which refers to a videotape that’s so hard to ...

Lancelot v. Galahad

Benjamin Markovits: Basketball Narratives, 21 July 2022

Blood in the Garden: The Flagrant History of the 1990s New York Knicks 
by Chris Herring.
Atria, 368 pp., £23.95, January, 978 1 9821 3211 8
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... musicians and movie stars, we continue to consume the work that made them famous. But people don’t usually watch old ball games.) It was connected to a generational shift in the way basketball is played. For the past six or seven seasons the NBA had been reshaping itself according to ideas about playing ‘efficiency’ driven by increased access to ...

Unaccommodated Man

Christopher Tayler: Adventures with Robert Stone, 18 March 2004

Bay of Souls 
by Robert Stone.
Picador, 250 pp., £16.99, February 2004, 0 330 41894 7
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... Robert Stone was born in August 1937, nine months after Don DeLillo and three – we’re told – after Thomas Pynchon. Dog Soldiers, his second novel, made his name in the mid-1970s, and since then he has stubbornly held his ground on the upper slopes of American literary life. Fellowships, prizes, grants and commissions have rarely been in short supply, and his later books – from A Flag for Sunrise to Damascus Gate – have been much admired ...

Call It Capitalism

Thomas Jones: Pynchon, 10 September 2009

Inherent Vice 
by Thomas Pynchon.
Cape, 369 pp., £18.99, August 2009, 978 0 224 08948 7
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... by all readers and writers of stories. More fully perhaps than any other novelist, including Don DeLillo, with whom he is so often (and so oddly) paired, Pynchon has explored and exposed the overlap between paranoia and fiction, between the plots imagined or unearthed by conspiracy theorists and the plots of novels, not least because both are ...

You are the we of me

Joyce Carol Oates: The Autobiography of Carson McCullers, 2 September 1999

Illumination and Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers 
edited by Carlos Dews.
Wisconsin, 256 pp., £19.95, September 1999, 0 299 16440 3
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... for more complex and ambitious non-fiction novels by Norman Mailer (The Executioner’s Song) and Don DeLillo (Libra). In the massive, magisterial The Best American Short Stories of the Century edited by John Updike, Flannery O’Connor is included with one of her much anthologised stories, ‘Greenleaf’, while McCullers and Capote are not only ...

Man-Eating Philosophers

Will Self: David Cronenberg, 18 June 2015

Consumed 
by David Cronenberg.
Fourth Estate, 288 pp., £18.99, October 2014, 978 0 00 729915 7
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... cut – and probably the better for it. Has Cronenberg, with a recent film adaptation of a Don DeLillo novel to his credit as well, become that most paradoxical of things in relation to literary endeavour: a groupie turned performer? With Consumed he enters that select company of cinéastes who have also written creditable literary works: this ...

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