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Title: Typical Delillo, self-important without having anything to be really important about
Review: I found this insufferable for the same reason I find most Delillo insufferable, his language is just too incantatory and too bloatedly self-important to really take seriously. He wants to attach profundity and portentousness to everything in sight. Baseball, Nuclear War, J Edgar Hoover, Peter Bruegel, Frank Sinatra... everything becomes a part of this giant, humorously ritualized mythos, which would be fine, but unfortunately fiction needs to have more to it than the atmosphere of a catholic mass in old latin to really function (or at least is does for me). Delillo wants so desperately to be taken seriously, but his vague invocations make it obvious that he doesn't really even know what exactly he wants to be serious about. It seems like he wants to be a prophet of dread, anxiety, paranoia, really of modernity itself. Maybe instead of trying to be an important writer he should just try to be a good fiction writer.
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