And while David Cronenberg’s new film, Cosmopolis, based on the novel by Don DeLillo, does not feature a strong performance by Mr. Pattinson, he is good for the movie. A more naturally gifted actor would not have served the story, which needs at its center someone who can emphasize—or who inadvertently emphasizes against his best efforts—the very stiltedness of each line and the whole enterprise’s remove from reality.

Mr. Pattinson plays Eric Packer, a man who works with money in a not-fully-defined capacity; he’s worried about the yuan. Mr. Packer’s eventful day makes up the plot of Cosmopolis, as the young man only occasionally departs his giant limousine, wherein he meets with various advisers and acquaintances, including a doctor who administers a lengthy rectal exam.

The Cronenbergian body-horror impulse is in full effect here, with the capacious limousine growing ever more claustrophobic and Eric ever more vulnerable to violation and attack. The interior of the car is brilliantly shot in order to convey a sense of the car’s scope without ever showing the full space—throughout the film, new elements of the interior are being revealed, as when Mr. Pattinson’s character relieves himself in a tiny, hidden toilet. The world he inhabits is so unsafe that to leave the car to urinate is a great risk; so, too, is expressing any passion for the woman (played by Juliette Binoche) he brings into the car for sex. Mr. Pattinson, to the likely dismay of tweens who got their parents to drive them to the art-house, doesn’t even remove an article of clothing for the liaison. When he finally gets the haircut he’s been driving vaguely toward, it’s a half-shaved, half-long mess that looks like a Manhattanite’s idea of a Brooklynite and won’t win new female fans.

This is hardly approachable material—even for literary types. Cosmopolis is one of Mr. DeLillo’s less popular novels, combining as it does the author’s general themes of paranoia and infinite environmental threat with dialogue that’s inscrutable, even by the DeLillo standard. That problem, such as it is, is not solved here: characters still declaim at Mr. Pattinson, and his aphoristic replies grant no clarity. But it’s not actually a problem on film, because the aura of impending doom is so palpable. On the page, the fatalism of Eric Packer’s situation—trapped in a car by protests going on outside, with brief detours to indulge vices—was hard to fully comprehend. Mr. Cronenberg traps you with Eric both geographically and ideologically: just as the shots are brilliantly chosen, so is the dialogue an exceptional depiction of the narcissism of the wealthy. “The glow of cyber-capitalism,” says Samantha Morton’s character, assaying a screen with information flowing across it. “So radiant and seductive. I understand none of this.”

She said a mouthful. No one in Cosmopolis understands anything, least of all why the protesters outside are assailing the limousine—or, if they understand, they’re not telling. Maybe it goes without saying: Cosmopolis is, despite the fact that its source material was written in 2003, our Occupy Wall Street film, a depiction of broad themes of economic inequality yielding to civil unrest. The protesters rocking the limousine back and forth while Mr. Pattinson pours himself a glass of vodka sure chose the right car—but, like Eric, they don’t stand for anything. Nor does the certainly insane fellow (Paul Giamatti) in whose apartment Eric finds himself by the film’s end. In Cosmopolis, two sides face one another for a heated debate, and that they have nothing to say won’t stop them.

And it is precisely this that drives the movie, so to speak, forward. If the film cannot help but call to mind Occupy Wall Street, it falls victim to a common critique of that movement: it seems to have nothing to say. The glossy conversations about mortality and currency are about themselves and also about how the people involved are all mindless shams; Mr. Pattinson is glazed over. But underneath the emptiness of Eric’s life lies an existential dread that feels almost too current. He fills the chasm in his life, ultimately, with violence: Cosmopolis is, in part, about the daylong birth of a psychopath. In the wake of destruction left by an effective protest movement or by capitalism lies the same thing: further violence.

Actors of muted affect are to David Cronenberg what blondes were to Hitchcock: Viggo Mortensen has, in three of Mr. Cronenberg’s films (including last year’s A Dangerous Method), offered master classes in restraint. Mr. Pattinson is hardly restrained: he’s clearly trying. (And a brief, effective moment, as the actor grins while twirling a revolver, brings to mind a possibly brilliant career move: the heartthrob as Marvel supervillain.) But his iciness serves the film far better than does, say, Paul Giamatti’s hyper-verbalism. Don DeLillo’s words should not trip off anyone’s tongue. The speaker should sound slightly befuddled by his own speech. Ms. Morton nails this, as does Mr. Pattinson, though given his stardom, he’s unfortunately likely to make many more studio movies in which aridity and reserve are not assets.

A final extant note on Cosmopolis: it is rare to see a small film with such expert sound mixing. Scenes in which Eric speaks to associates are sepulchrally quiet, free of any ambient noise, then a brief exterior shot of the limousine will draw in the sounds and stresses of the outside world. It’s a world whose stresses no man can escape, no matter how thick his insulation. And when guns are fired, they’re unusually loud, by movie standards, at least—which is to say, they sound accurate. When a gun is shot in this movie, it’s a provocation, and one that keeps on shocking.

Mukherjee.

A report on Lauren Oliver, who wrote the young adult novels Delirium and Before I Fall, and her fiction factory, Paper Lantern Lit. [BusinessWeek]

Siddhartha Mukherjee wins the Guardian's First Book Award for his history of cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies. [Guardian]

Europeans appear less interested in e-books. The Times blames taxes. [NYT]

Abe Books sells a first edition of Karl Marx's Das Kapital for $51,739. [Abe Books]

The Millions has kicked off its Year in Reading series. [The Millions]

Don DeLillo and Paul Auster talk horror at a recent Granta reading (audio). [Granta]

"The Angel Esmeralda" by Don DeLillo. (Courtesy Scribner)

Don DeLillo’s novels have tended to be loose, crisscrossing sagas, covering large spans of space and time. They are explorations, many-angled and painstaking, of the primal scenes of postwar American life, with a democratic regard for the power of crowds and a sports fan’s relish for the spectacular. It is not surprising that the greatest sequences this reclusive New Yorker has written, the prologues to Mao II (1991) and Underworld (1997), take place in baseball stadiums.

In Underworld, Mr. DeLillo mapped the aftermath of two highly public events, one ecstatic and the other traumatic: the Bobby Thomson home run (“The shot heard ’round the world”) that won the New York Giants the 1951 National League pennant; and The New York Times report, on the same day, that the Soviets had tested a second nuclear bomb. The book contains decades, as the repercussions of the Shot and the Bomb echo across the culture; and the decades contain multitudes. J. Edgar Hoover is a character, and so is Lenny Bruce. It is 800 pages long.

The novel’s protagonist, Nick Shay, is a waste-disposal “broker” with a characteristic weakness for memorabilia. He has embraced “the comprehensive philosophy of the firm, the Weltanschauung. I use this grave and layered word because somewhere in its depths there is a whisper of mystical contemplation that seems totally appropriate to the subject of waste.” The novel diversely works at this idea of a world engulfed by its own debris field, its hazardous materials and souvenirs. “All waste defers to shit,” Nick thinks. Then (paraphrasing Walter Pater): “All waste aspires to the condition of shit.” Mr. DeLillo’s theme is the incontinence of history, how it stains the present with nostalgia and paranoia. Underworld ends with a nun named Edgar on the Internet, looking up bomb videos.

Underworld may be Mr. DeLillo’s biggest book, but it is not his only big book. He has written about terrorism, 9/11, the superwealthy, rock stardom and, in Libra (1988), the Kennedy assassination, a novel that prompted the conservative columnist George Will to call its author a “bad influence.” Mr. DeLillo is also a novelist unusual for his argumentativeness. He regularly inserts dicta into his fiction that feel clipped from his own conversation (from White Noise: “Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom”), and he creates characters with rarefied inner lives, who eloquently engage with the latest in critical theory, world events and art. It can strike a reader as contrived. Real life is seldom as explicit with its themes as Mr. DeLillo invariably is with his.

Yet the prose is far more artful than its earnest grappling with ideas might suggest. “Everything seeks its own heightened version,” says Bill Gray, the blocked novelist-hero of Mao II. Such a search for a heightened version is frequently enacted by Mr. DeLillo’s sentences, which are extensile and unpredictable, ticking through long lists of flat descriptions before turning caustic in their final clause. “Feliks [Zuber] was here every day now, front row center, carrying with him a sentence of seven hundred and twenty years. He liked to turn and nod at those nearby, making occasional applause gestures without bringing his trembling hands into contact, a small crumpled man, looking nearly old enough to be on the verge of outliving his sentence.” The cumulative effect of this technique is to touch even Mr. DeLillo’s darkest writing with a latent comedy. The reader learns to anticipate that the flow of information will funnel toward a punch line.

The passage quoted above comes from the short story “Hammer and Sickle,” which first appeared in Harper’s in 2010. Now it has been reprinted by Scribner in The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories (224 pages, Scribner, $24.00), the author’s first collection of short fiction. Mr. DeLillo has put his career in it. There is a story, “Creation,” from 1979; there is also one, “The Starveling,” from this year. The book thus bears a curiously dual aspect, as both a 30-year retrospective and an unprecedented technical challenge. We see the style mature, gaining confidence, losing a layer of descriptive fat, and then putting it back on. But we also see a great artist, for whom grandeur of scale has been a kind of signature, forced to go small. Reading the book is a little like seeing if Frank Gehry can build a bungalow.

The adventure into a new and narrower form provides a fine occasion to compliment an aging writer on abilities he has always possessed. Mr. DeLillo is a lyrical witness to the physical world. In “Creation,” he sees the “massive tumbling summits” in low-flying clouds, and the faces of standby passengers in a tropical airport, “bland in their traveler’s woe.” In the title story (which appeared, in different form, in Underworld), he catches the resemblance of a “deep-streaked” patina of dust on a car window to “starry nights in the mountains.” The dust is the stars.

But it is dialogue, not description, that provides the ideal medium for this drolly rhythmic American writer. Mr. DeLillo likes the sound of real speech, and the sound of it turning surreal. In “Esmeralda,” he has some fun with a slum dweller in the Bronx, who encourages kids to cut loose their parents, lest they start “dangering their safety.” This same character has already exposed the component parts of a familiar word: “She be a addict. They un, you know, predictable.” The line cleverly takes advantage of the little hiccup (“you know”) that manifests its lifelikeness, suggesting that the unpredictability of the junkie is actually a form of predictability.

More often, though, Mr. DeLillo’s characters interact in a mode of sprightly and morbid self-parody, as in this exchange between lovers in “Creation”:

“You’re the only man who’s ever understood that boredom and fear are one and the same to me.”

“I try not to exploit this knowledge.”

“You love to be boring. You seek out boring situations.”

“Airports.”

“Hour-long taxi rides,” she said.

Sometimes the dialogue becomes so stylized that it stops making sense. The reader is left with a kind of heightened gibberish, the hum of a mood as it courses through whatever words happen to be spoken. In “Hammer and Sickle,” two adolescent girls on television narrate the genesis of a market panic:

“But the pound is showing signs of cracking? Will the euro follow? Is the dollar far behind?

“There is talk about China.”

“Is there trouble in China?”

“Is there a bubble in China?”

”What is the Chinese currency called?”

“Latvia has the lat.”

“Tonga has the ponga.”

“China has the rebimbi.”

“The rebimbo.”

“China has the rebobo.”

“The rebubu.”

It is an hysterical and musical scene, nearer in tone to Lewis Carroll than Michael Lewis. Yet it is also, in spite of its outlandishness, an exemplary one: it shows the reader how Mr. DeLillo understands speech in its essence, as a singing conduit of dread.

And indeed, the fear of language is one of the great preoccupations of Mr. DeLillo’s short fiction. “What I object to in Vollmer,” says one character, “is that he often shares my deep-reaching and most reluctantly held convictions … these ideas unnerve and worry me as they never do when they remain unspoken.” The other preoccupation of the short work is youth. Its heroes tend to be unformed, faltering, college-age—people who, as one “prematurely bald” character puts it in “Baader-Meinhof” (2002), “have to find [themselves] on the verge of something happening before they can begin to prepare for it.” (This story, in which a woman rebuffs the man pursuing her, wittily features a painting by Gerhard Richter, titled Man Shot Down.) Mr. DeLillo’s young men and women share a tendency to misapprehend the role of illusion in adult life. Another way of putting this is that they are still liable to be surprised by the power of language to cause pain.

In perhaps the book’s best story, “The Runner” (1988), a young man is running in a park when he distractedly oversees the abduction of a child. In the disorder that follows, he is waylaid by an older woman, a witness also. She tries to persuade him that the abductor was the child’s estranged father. But this is a wishful hypothesis, and the runner knows it. He contradicts her briskly. “I don’t see a common-law husband, I don’t see a separation, and I don’t see a court order.” He will not back down; he cannot see that the woman also hopes to persuade herself. Finally, she asks him how old he is. When he says 23, she declares, “Then you don’t know.”

Piqued, the runner leaves. But soon he recognizes that he “never should have challenged her.” For “what would you rather believe, a father who comes to take his own child or someone lurching out of nowhere, out of dreaming space?” In his remorse he chases after the woman. Though he eventually catches up to her, he does not quite level with her. Instead, he claims that the police have confirmed her theory of the crime. (In fact, they have done the opposite.) “You had it just about totally right,” he says. But his lie comes too late. Terror has unnerved her patter. “The car, the man, the mother, the child,” she says. “Those are the parts. But how do the parts fit together? … A hole opened up in air.” It is Mr. DeLillo’s version of a coming-of-age story. Neither the truth, nor the lie—nor the crime—can be undone. As another character elsewhere says, “There’s probably a German word for it.”

editorial@observer.com

On Aging: "I can't quite imagine myself being 73. That's the age my father was! How can I be his age? It's weird."

On His Habits: "I used to go for a daily run, but now I exercise at home to avoid the weather. I stick to a routine. But when I'm between work, I don't panic. I suppose I have the Italian element of enjoying a certain amount of leisure."

On Brooklyn: "Everyone who does not live in Berlin lives in Brooklyn now."

On Becoming a Writer: "I was very slow to begin. I lacked the discipline for the enormous commitment one has to make. Even when I had all day to write, and sometimes all week, I took forever finally to enter my first novel.... It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess."

Also, DeLillo is a "slight, anonymous figure in a black cap and leather jacket." Big D: Just a regular guy, basically.

The century ended. Says Richard Elster, the protagonist of Don DeLillo’s 15th novel, Point Omega: “I’d try to imagine the end of the century and what a far-off wonder that was and I’d figure out how old I’d be when the century ended, years, months, days, and now look, incredible, we’re here … and I realize I’m the same.” Elster, a brilliant intellectual hired by the government to “conceptualize, his word in quotes, to apply overarching ideas and principles to such matters as troop deployment and counter insurgency,” has retreated, as he often does, to his secluded home in the desert to be alone with his thoughts and watch the atomic-colored sunset. The century may have ended for Elster in anticlimax, but DeLillo went out on a high note with his epic send-off of Cold War paranoia, the wonderful Underworld (1997) He followed that book with a string of disappointments—2001’s The Body Artist, 2003’s Cosmopolis and 2007’s Falling Man. The writing became directionless, and these minor novels felt like the work of a lame-duck author who wrote his masterpiece and was now just biding his time. But now we have Point Omega. This short novel is a feverishly understated return to form, an icy exploration of the past decade’s paranoia and melancholy, the “nausea of News and Traffic,” as Elster calls it. If Underworld was DeLillo’s extravagant funeral for the 20th century, Point Omega is the farewell party for the last decade.

Elster’s story opens with a nameless, faceless man in a crowded gallery watching 24 Hour Psycho—which is exactly what it sounds like: Hitchcock’s last great film slowed down to two frames per second, a video installation on view at MoMA in the summer of 2006. The anonymous viewer discovers the reality of Norman Bates’ knife going into Janet Leigh’s naked body. “Every action was broken into components so distinct from the entity that the watcher found himself isolated from every expectation.” Mr. DeLillo’s prose is as ambiguous here as the viewer’s face: a list of empty signifiers hitting the reader like a closed fist. Obscure, drug-addled and beautiful, it’s his best writing in years.

The opacity of the opening gives way to the cold reality of the story: “The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.” Surely, Mr. DeLillo has tried—even through his questioning. “Where was it, the world?” he writes. Elster has gone to find it in the desert. He’s followed by Jim Finley, a struggling filmmaker living in two solitary rooms in New York City. Finley is recently separated from his wife, with one film under his belt that no one has seen—a montage of promotional clips of Jerry Lewis on television in the ’50s. He wants to make a film about Elster—“just a man and a wall.” Just words. He’d even picked out the perfect wall, a dull gray surface in a Brooklyn loft. Ten days in the desert turn to 20, which turns to losing count as the men engage in typical DeLillo dialogue, cyclically discussing the “meaning” in everything, concluding there is none, watching the sun set.

When Elster’s daughter, Jessica, visits as a retreat from an obsessive boyfriend—he’d been, presumably, calling Jessica’s mother using an anonymous number, breathing into the phone and hanging up—the three reach a comfortable harmony. “No more strange than most families except that we had nothing to do, nowhere to go.” But the novel prepares us for a downfall from the outset: the Omega Point—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s theory that there is a maximum level of consciousness through which the universe is evolving. “Some worldly convulsion,” as Elster defines it. Equilibrium is always followed by chaos.

Point Omega is a novel about the end of the century—a moment that was supposed to be so meaningful. We stocked up on water and canned goods; we thought the world might end; and then it didn’t. As the decade changed, there was no flash of white light, no epiphany. It just happened. True life is not reducible to words or conspiracy theories, and yet, Mr. DeLillo urges, that’s all true life is: words and theories. It’s all the author has. With just over 100 pages, Mr. DeLillo has corrected his mistakes and written the first important novel of the year. “Why is it so hard to be serious, so easy to be too serious?” Mr. DeLillo writes, asking the question of his own work. In Point Omega, he has tapped into a reality as paranoid as ever, a world where, sometimes, the most frightening thing imaginable is a nondescript face in a crowded gallery, an anonymous number on your caller ID.

mmiller@observer.com

“I’m not a blog man,” said Irish author Frank McCourt, in his melodious brogue. “I’ve read two in my life. I really don’t like to be sequestered in a room with a screen. I’d rather sit in a bar and listen to some guy uttering platitudes. You need time to think for yourself; I can’t absorb it all anymore. A book is enough, and a bar.” He gulped some more red wine.

Then the writer Gay Talese and his wife, Nan, an editor at Doubleday, swept in. Mr. Talese professed some weariness with PEN. “It’s very quick to judge lack of candor in other countries,” he said, with a mischievous, contented look on his face. “Like this Don DeLillo thing about signing petitions against China... Oh man, don’t get me started.”

But the Transom had and there would be no stopping him.

“I so will not sign that little circular letter under the auspices of PEN and with the distinguished Don DeLillo showing us the way, uh-uh, leave me off. I want China to have a wonderful Olympics!”

And another thing: “Believe me, if tonight someone says, ‘Now in memory of Norman Mailer, our former president, I’m going to get a glass and throw it in the air!” He said that in neglecting Mr. Mailer for too long, the organization had lost the right to celebrate his legacy.

Writer Michael Cunningham scoffed at Mr. Talese’s criticism. “The PEN awards will be at Gay Talese’s funeral,” he said. “I can’t imagine an era when writers are so disregarded as to be coming out against any attempt to recognize any writer under any circumstances. And Norman Mailer could write rings around Gay Talese.” Oh, snap. “Don’t quote me on that.” Oops!

Playwright Tony Kushner was gabbing away merrily with a clutch of bookish-looking women. He said he is currently reading The Rest Is Noise, by New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, and lots of stuff on Abraham Lincoln, for the screenplay he’s writing.

“When you’ve got a play that’s getting in trouble with some right-wing asshole group in Illinois, you can call on PEN and they’ll write a letter,” he said.

Co-chair Tina Brown, looking glamorous in a black blouse with a plunging neckline (hello, boys!), began the ceremony with a tribute to Mr. Mailer, crediting him for, among other things, founding this party. Mr. Talese elected to pump his fist rather than hurl his glass.

The evening, which honored author Toni Morrison, was emceed by CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.

Plastic surgery expert Alex Kuczynski left early to see her newborn son, Maxime, named after her grandfather. The big blond bouncing boy had just been born 11 days earlier, via surrogate.

Don DeLillo already owned the Twin Towers—in 1997, he chose for the cover of Underworld a haunting Kertesz photograph of the World Trade Center looming in the murk, disappearing up into cloud, a soaring pigeon standing in for a hijacked airliner. And he owned terrorism, which he put at the heart of three novels, Players (1977), The Names (1982) and Mao II (1991). And he owned conspiracy, imagining in Libra (1988)—in encyclopedic detail—the plot that led to the assassination of J.F.K. Now, with his new novel, the extraordinary Falling Man, he has exercised his right of ownership and stamped his name on 9/11: He has written a powerful and direct account of the atrocity and its aftermath.

He owns it, of course, only in the sense that he’s taken an event that we thought we knew too well and made it his own with the lean, nervous, relentlessly ambitious writing that is unmistakably DeLillo. Reading the virtuoso first pages of his novel, we see the catastrophe anew—smell it, taste it, hear it, feel it—as if that September morning had dawned again, fresh and bright: “The roar was still in the air, the buckling rumble of the fall. This was the world now. Smoke and ash came rolling down the streets and turning corners, busting around corners, seismic tides of smoke, with office paper flashing past, standard sheets with cutting edge, skimming, whipping past, otherworldly things in the morning pall.”

Out of the smoke and ash comes a man in a suit, carrying a briefcase, “glass in his hair and face, marbled bolls of blood and light.” The man’s name is Keith Neudecker, and he was working in his office in the North Tower, far too close to the point of impact. Only dimly aware of his injuries, he accepts a lift uptown to the apartment where his estranged wife Lianne lives with their son, Justin, who’s 7. That’s the core of the novel: a survivor and his wife and child and what comes after (“Everything now is measured by after”).

Justin has little friends who now search the skies for planes; Lianne has a mother; the mother has a lover (who may have been complicit with the Red Brigades in the 1970’s); and all of them (and all of us) register in different ways the impact of what Keith has survived, the shock waves emanating from Ground Zero. There’s also another survivor—the owner of the briefcase Keith was carrying when he walked out of the smoke and ash—who says, “I feel like I’m still on the stairs …. If I live to be a hundred I’ll still be on the stairs.” This woman wants to tell Keith everything about her escape from the tower—“the timeless drift of the long spiral down”—a grim march they both endured. “He listened carefully, noting every detail, trying to find himself in the crowd.”

Mr. DeLillo doubles back in time to meet one of the hijackers, Hammad. Rapid, elliptical sketches give us a hazy outline: his recruitment in Hamburg, his training in Afghanistan, the waiting in Florida, the doubts and recommitment, the “electric” presence of Mohamed Atta. “They felt things together, he and his brothers. They felt the claim of danger and isolation. They felt the magnetic effect of plot. Plot drew them together more closely than ever. Plot closed the world to the slenderest line of sight, where everything converges to a point.”

The magnetic effect of plot is a subject Mr. DeLillo knows well. In Libra, he wrote: “There is a tendency of plots to move toward death.” In Falling Man, the terrorist plot accelerates the gravitational pull of death, an implacable force that snares us all willy-nilly. The new novel is about falling—falling through space, through time, through memory, being tugged down or forward or back—and about how some of us try to slow or speed the motion.

Twice in the weeks after 9/11, Lianne encounters a performance artist who goes by the name of Falling Man: Secured by safety harness, he jumps from high places (the Queensboro Bridge, the elevated roadway around Grand Central) and dangles in the pose of the man in the famous 9/11 photograph—“a man set forever in free fall against the looming background of the column panels in the tower.” Toward the end of the novel—several years have passed—Lianne happens to see Falling Man’s obituary. He died at 39 (Keith’s age on Sept. 11, 2001), of natural causes.

Other natural causes: Years ago, Lianne’s father killed himself when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s; now she volunteers with a writing group for patients in the early stages of the disease. “These people were the living breath of the thing that killed her father.” She notes the “slow waning” of one patient: “She was not lost so much as falling, growing fainter.” The group writes about the planes, about the towers, about the victims, but not about the terrorists. One patient explains that even wishing for revenge on the “nineteen men come here to kill us” is impossible—“Because they’re a million miles outside your life. Which, besides, they’re dead.”

This is the wonder of fiction: It raises the dead (defying gravity) and closes the gap between one life and another.

Consider the second encounter between Lianne and Falling Man, who suddenly appears on a maintenance platform on the elevated tracks north of 96th Street. As a train roars by, he jumps:

“Jumps or falls. He keels forward, body rigid, and falls full-length, headfirst ….

“She felt her body go limp. But the fall was not the worst of it. The jolting end of the fall left him upside-down, secured to the harness, twenty feet above the pavement …. There was something awful about the stylized pose, body and limbs, his signature stroke. But the worst of it was the stillness itself and her nearness to the man …. She could have spoken to him but that was another plane of being, beyond reach. He remained motionless, with the train still running in a blur in her mind and the echoing deluge of sound falling about him, blood rushing to his head, away from hers.”

The tail end of that last sentence forges a syntactic union, a blood bond, between the performance artist and a member of his audience—a closeness not achieved by the event itself, in which Falling Man remains on “another plane of being, beyond reach.”

At the end of the novel—looping back to just before the beginning—Mr. DeLillo performs the same trick again, though this time the effect is even more startling, almost unthinkable: He writes a sentence that yokes together terrorist and victim. It begins with Hammad seated in a jump seat aboard the hijacked Flight 11, screaming down the Hudson corridor toward the World Trade Center:

“A bottle fell off the counter in the galley, on the other side of the aisle, and he watched it roll this way and that, a water bottle, empty, making an arc one way and rolling back the other, and he watched it spin more quickly and then skitter across the floor an instant before the aircraft struck the tower, heat, then fuel, then fire, an
d a blast wave passed through the structure that sent Keith Neudecker out of his chair and into a wall. He found himself walking into a wall. He didn’t drop the telephone until he hit the wall. The floor began to slide beneath him and he lost his balance and eased along the wall to the floor.”

How does Keith fare, afterward? He was always a reticent man, we learn. As a survivor, he’s enigmatic, troubled, restless, maybe even dangerous—like the protagonist of almost any DeLillo novel, even the very first, Americana (1971). He moves in with Lianne and Justin, knowing that the only thing he’ll miss from his recent past is the weekly poker game, “the one uncomplicated interval.”

After the planes, “he felt strange to himself, or always had, but it was different now because he was watching.” Of course. Time passes, though, and it seems that it just might be true, what he tells Lianne: “We’re ready to sink into our little lives.”

But no, Keith is not yet ready to “sink”—and his strategic resistance takes him back to the poker table, as a professional now, flying out to Las Vegas to play in tournaments.

“The cards fell randomly, no assignable cause, but he remained the agent of free choice …. [T]he game had structure, guiding principles, sweet and easy interludes of dream logic when the player knows that the card he needs is the card that’s sure to fall. Then, always, in the crucial instant ever repeated hand after hand, the choice of yes or no. Call or raise, call or fold, the little binary pulse located behind the eyes, the choice that reminds you who you are.”

At the poker table, Keith is sustained by an illusion of control. And here (one final passage from this beautifully crafted, endlessly quotable novel) is an image that captures the essence of everything he’s hoping to shut out, an eerie image from the awful, surreal seconds after the fall of the first tower:

“There was something else then, outside all this, not belonging to this, aloft. He watched it coming down. A shirt came down out of the high smoke, a shirt lifted and drifting in the scant light and then falling again, down toward the river.”

Adam Begley is books editor of The Observer.

The June 5 battle of the literary heavyweights looks like an even match. Mr. DeLillo has more at stake: Falling Man (Scribner) is about 9/11, and if you get that wrong, you get pummeled; also, it’s been a long 10 years since Underworld—the last time he delivered a knockout punch. Mr. McEwan’s On Chesil Beach (Nan A. Talese/ Doubleday) is less ambitious—an intimate look at a fraught honeymoon—but he’s coming off back-to-back triumphs with Atonement (2002) and Saturday (2005).

Christopher Buckley has come up with the season’s best subject for a novel: His Boomsday (Twelve, April 2) is a political comedy about euthanasia. On a darker note, Jim Crace, author of Quarantine (1997) and Being Dead (1999), sets a post-apocalyptic fable, The Pesthouse (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, May 1), in a ruined America. And if you’re in the mood for a quick nocturnal tour of Tokyo, there’s Haruki Murakami’s After Dark (Knopf, May 8).

Closer to home, it’s a rich season for books about Gotham, including biographies of two titans whose careers spanned the 20th century, Brooke Astor (b. 1902) and the arts impresario Lincoln Kirstein (1906–1996): The Last Mrs. Astor: A New York Story (Norton, May 21), by Frances Kiernan, and The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein, by Martin Duberman (Knopf, April 17). Not so well known, but just as fabulous, writer and editor Leo Lerman (1914-1994) left behind a vast trove of letters and journals, now collected in The Grand Surprise (Knopf, April 10), edited by Stephen Pascal.

Manhattan money matters come under scrutiny in The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co. (Doubleday, 4/17), William D. Cohan’s account of a firm whose history stretches back 150 years and features such outsize players as André Meyer, Felix Rohatyn, Steve Rattner, Michel David-Weill and the current capo di tutti capi, Bruce Wasserstein.

And speaking of great men, our nation’s longest-serving President gets a massive one-volume biography with a succinct title: FDR (Random House, May 15), by Jean Edward Smith. Are you ready for a double dose of Albert Einstein? Walter Isaacson, the former chief executive of CNN and managing editor of Time magazine, whose last biography was of Ben Franklin, gives us Einstein: His Life and Universe (Simon & Schuster, April 10). Mr. Isaacson’s competition is Jürgen Neffe’s Einstein (F.S.G., May 1), which was a best-seller in Germany.

Two literary greats, Edith Wharton (1862–1937) and Ralph Ellison (1913–1994), get new biographies, too. Wharton has been studied extensively, and we already have three superior accounts of her life and work (by Louis Auchincloss, R.W.B. Lewis and Cynthia Griffin Wolff), but Hermione Lee’s Edith Wharton (Knopf, April 15) is a welcome addition to the canon. In comparison, Arnold Rampersad had a clean slate to work with: His Ralph Ellison (Knopf, April 20) is the authorized biography. Mr. Rampersad, who’s written about Langston Hughes and Richard Wright and W.E.B. DuBois, also dabbles in sport: He helped Arthur Ashe write his memoirs and produced a biography of Jackie Robinson.

—Adam Begley

When the current season ends, so will the legendary Café Carlyle. The furniture will move to the basement, and a golden era will vanish from the diminishing world of Manhattan after dark. No better time to catch Barbara Cook’s final appearance in the room that Bobby Short made famous. I don’t think she knows how lucky she is. While everything else goes to the dogs, Barbara always stays the same. Almost everyone from her age group and musical persuasion is gone. She carries the torch where Mabel Mercer and Sylvia Syms left off, and she lights it with her own gas and gusto. Celebrating the songs and highlights of her 25-year career as a headliner at the Café Carlyle, from a playful “I Got the Sun in the Morning” right through a stunning tribute to one of her favorite singers, Dick Hayes, with plenty of the obligatory Hammerstein and Sondheim, she is in wonderful shape, and there is something here for everyone.

It’s a thrill to see what so much talent and preparation can accomplish. “You Could Drive a Person Crazy,” usually performed by three women simultaneously, is an acting class. She crystallizes the notes, but she also acts the words. On a hilarious romp introduced a zillion years ago by Ukulele Ike called “My Dog Loves Your Dog,” she even barks like a terrier. (“I love you bow-wow-wow, and how-how-how!”) She can be dark and contemporary (John Bucchino’s sad lament for hustlers who meet in a bus station, “Sweet Dreams,” is musical film noir at its best), or flip and frivolous (“Hard Hearted Hannah” rocks). But songs are always playing in her head. Something is always dancing in her eyes. This sensitive and articulate interpreter of lyrics refuses to compromise her artistry for gimmickry or fads. She always chooses songs that have something to say and makes every phrase wonderfully clear and audible. As a result, she never fails to establish a rapport with her audience that is admirable and true.

I have never seen or heard Barbara Cook so radiant, relaxed and reckless. In one hour of reasons why she is the Queen of Cabaret, she rules from her own unique and exclusive cloud. For the entire month of March, become her willing vassal. She takes you to a brighter, sunnier, more graceful and superior world, and—take my word for it—you’ll feel richer in life for taking the trip.

Damn Sox

A lot of unlucky people who can’t roll two sevens in a row strike out again in the fatally confusing Game 6. Michael Keaton is a reliable actor who hasn’t made a good movie in years. Michael Hoffman proved to be a director of range, texture and discipline with The Emperor’s Club, a film I loved more than most of my colleagues. And novelist Don DeLillo is a writer admired by many. Game 6 is a disaster of such dimension I fear it will disappear before anyone can say, “Gee, fellas, we hardly knew ye.”

The day is Oct. 25, 1986. Mr. Keaton plays playwright Nicky Rogan, a writer who has devoted his career to turning out Neil Simon–like plays that have pleased the audiences but not the critics. Tonight is the opening night of his first serious work, the best play he’s ever written. But it is also the sixth game of the World Series, and his beloved Boston Red Sox are poised to win. Nicky starts off for the theater with nothing in mind but getting a haircut.

Then he gets the first crippling round of reports that will change his life: His wife (Catherine O’Hara) is divorcing him after 19 years. His mistress (Bebe Neuwirth) informs him his leading actor has a brain disease and can’t remember his lines. A cynical writer (Griffin Dunne) scares his socks off with horror stories about a new and powerful drama critic named Schwimmer (Robert Downey Jr.), a man so venomous he turns writers bitter and self-destructive. This monster is so hated he goes to the theater every night wearing disguises, carrying a loaded gun. He has no phone and no friends, and he has driven the entire population of Broadway into a state of paranoid schizophrenia. Will it be the opening night, or the Boston Red Sox? Miserable and stricken with terror, Nicky heads for the stadium and spends the whole day in New York traffic, trapped in the back seats of gridlocked taxis driven by foreigners who speak every language except English.

As the curtain rises, Nicky ends up in a trashy saloon pretending to be a gangster, with a lady cabdriver who is like Dr. Phil in drag and says things like “Life is good because faith is rewarded” and “Take a risk—it is humanizing.” Of course, the Red Sox play their most humiliating game and blow the series, and Nicky becomes so unhinged that he stalks his way to the critic’s apartment to kill him, only to find him in bed with Nicky’s own daughter! There’s more, but why go on? This movie is D.O.A.

In a movie of many mistakes, the biggest mistake of all was hiring Don DeLillo to write the screenplay. How do you know if Game 6 is meant to be a fantasy, fable, comedy, farce or deeply, intensely personal drama about neurotic failure? I mean, when the radio warns that the Apocalypse is just around the corner and a man isn’t just a man, he’s someone “who sits in a small, dark apartment eating soft, white bread” … you sort of give up on the hope that logic will arrive and just start laughing. Game 6 talks itself to death before it can find its way to Blockbuster. It’s like a janitor searching for the keys to all the doors after the locks have been changed.

Scary Teens

Kinetic and suspensefully charged with the underlying themes of societal abuse and ignorance of teenage angst, Evil is an excellent new Swedish import, masterfully directed by Mikael Hafström, which reminded me in many ways of Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause. Based on a scandalous best-selling autobiographical novel by Jan Guillou from 1981, it focuses on Erik Ponti, a handsome, 16-year-old student whose life has been plagued by violence. Constantly tormented by an abusive stepfather (in the opening scene, Erik is slapped across the dinner table and then dragged from the room and beaten with a double-folded belt while his mother plays the piano to drown out the noise), the boy hits back the only way he can: by giving a good thrashing to anyone in his way. Labeled “evil” and expelled from public school, Erik is told he has one last chance to make something of himself and is sent to Stjarnsberg—a prestigious private school where he is determined not to mess up again.

Steeped in traditions strange to this wild but decent kid, Stjarnsberg has strict rules—coats and ties, prayers before meals, lights out after study—but Erik welcomes some kind of sane discipline in his life. He quickly bonds with his roommate—a shy, bookish introvert named Pierre who loves James Dean movies. Initially, Erik is overjoyed to escape his unhappy home, but he soon discovers he has merely substituted one prison for another.

The school is, in fact, run by a rigorous and unjust code, enforced by senior students rather than the faculty. The teachers (including an unregenerate Nazi who even spouts anti-Semitic tirades in class without fear of recrimination) prefer to ignore what goes on among the students, passing off severe beatings and a wide variety of humiliations as harmless “hazings.” Standing up for his rights and refusing to be bullied, Erik incurs the wrath of the upperclassmen, but he also wants to avoid the violence that landed him there in the first place. Refusing to knuckle under or apologize, and unfairly punished with detentions and hard labor because he refuses to fight, he’s nicknamed “Rat.” To make matters worse, he wins the school swimming championship, which makes him untouchable. That forces the seniors to change tactics and take out their resentment, jealousy and cruelty on his weak roommate, Pierre.

This is the story of a decent boy faced with a dangerous decision: confront his oppressors and risk expulsion, or ignore them and suffer humiliation at their hands—or, worse, let his friends suffer for him. No matter what choice Erik makes in order to graduate, it is bound to be the wrong one. Evil caused a sensation in Sweden, where distinguished private academic institutions have always been considered above reproach. This book and film led to many reforms in the private-school system, and echoes of the same kind of “hazing” are deeply felt at home, where new scandals are revealed on an annual basis. Director Hafström skillfully incorporates many 50’s flourishes—the school cafeteria is as cold and somber as a leftover set from a Troy Donahue picture—and gets a memorable performance out of newcomer Andreas Wilson.

But the most touching thing about Mr. Hafström’s writing and directing is the way he shows the mixed-up emotions of youth: Erik’s anger and ferocious sense of outrage is a resentment of class and privilege, but at the same time he longs for the respectability and acceptance that same sense of class and privilege also brings. Before the novel was published, Jan Guillou was best known as a writer of pop mysteries. The movie has the same kind of incendiary power.

An Oprah Movie

Matthew McConaughey, who can’t act, and Sarah Jessica Parker, who’s been doing entirely too much of it lately, are forced upon each other in more ways than one in Failure to Launch. Has there ever been a worse title? It writes its own review. They talk a lot of crap on Oprah. One of the things they talk about is the new trend among lazy college graduates who can’t find a job to move back into the nest for free meals, laundry and car keys. Presto: an Oprah movie, condensed-book-club-excerpt division. He’s a boat salesman who is practically 40 and doesn’t look a day under 50. He lives at home with his cranky pop (Terry Bradshaw, replete with nude scene for people on antibiotics) and doting mom (Kathy Bates, at what point was your career ambushed?). His friends all live at home freeloading, too. Enter Sarah Jessica, a professional “interventionist” hired to trick him into moving out of the house to raise his self-esteem, which is higher than the Himalayas already. These people have names like Tripp, Ace, Demo and Kit. By the time somebody wisely puts an end to the agony, it is no wonder they are all high as Goodyear blimps. Silly, obvious, hokey, predictable and funny as a knee replacement, Failure to Launch is a 30-minute sitcom pilot stretched over one hour and 37 minutes. It’s being hocked off as a date movie. True enough, if your date is a raisin.

Dale Peck is not the best literary critic of his generation. He's not even second-best. It's also true that there are pitifully few writers in his generation who could plausibly be called literary critics (the rest just write book reviews)-so maybe I should more closely paraphrase his signature insult and say: Dale Peck is the worst literary critic of his generation. He'll just have to live with the fact that the other half-dozen are better than he is.

Does the name ring a bell? Dale Peck (who's 37, in case you're wondering which cohort we're dissing) is the guy who, a couple of years ago, called Rick Moody "the worst writer of his generation." Mr. Moody (who's 42, Mr. Peck's rough coeval) is no such thing, but he did write a stunningly bad memoir, and Mr. Peck jumped all over it with both feet. (So did I, a couple of months before Mr. Peck: The Black Veil was an early and obvious contender for worst book of 2002.) Rick Moody wasn't the first author trampled by Mr. Peck, nor was the Moody review much nastier than his review of Julian Barnes' Love, Etc. or Jim Crace's The Devil's Larder-but I think it's safe to say that Mr. Moody had to suffer so that Hatchet Jobs, a loose collection of a dozen critical essays, nearly all of them as cutting as the title implies, could glint in the light of day.

The sad part of this story is not the grievous bodily harm done to poor Mr. Moody, but rather Mr. Peck's own self-inflicted wound. Because his reviews were so intemperate ("God knows I've never aspired to anything like impartiality"), and, yes, because he happens to be gay, he's been dismissed as "bitchy"-"a troubled queen." Too late, he's decided never again to write a negative review: "[O]nce you've been labeled a certain kind of writer-in my case foolish, troubled, snarky, etc. … readers will approach anything you write looking for (and finding) evidence of precisely those traits." This is the sad part: Mr. Peck is a genuinely talented writer, the kind you hope to meet whenever you open a book, the kind who can trick language into giving birth to human beings-characters you believe in and care about who inhabit a purpose-built, instantly credible fictional world. Of his three novels, the second, The Law of Enclosures (1996), is his best. And then there's What We Lost: A Story of My Father's Childhood, which is part fiction, part memoir and wholly compelling-a deeply compassionate account of a charmed year in his father's otherwise brutal boyhood. Published last year, it was dismissed in a few conspicuously acerbic reviews, and disappeared.

Well, maybe that's what you get when your hatchet jobs-screechingly negative by definition-are accompanied by stiletto asides. In passing, Mr. Peck calls Don DeLillo's books "stupid-just plain stupid," and declares that Ian McEwan's books "smell worse than newspaper wrapped around old fish." (Shall we give him the benefit of the doubt? That last slash came in early 2001, just before Mr. McEwan published Atonement, a more perfect novel than Mr. Peck, genuine talent and all, will ever write.) The most outrageous attack comes in the final paragraph of Mr. Peck's essay on David Foster Wallace, where he suggests that it would be a good thing "if the author of Infinite Jest … shut off his goddamn word processor and tried to find someone who would passionately shove a dick up his ass." (The essay was originally published "in slightly different form" in the London Review of Books; the advice on therapeutic sodomy is a late addition, available in book form only.)

I actually enjoy Mr. Peck's hysterical, off-with-their-heads ad hominems, and I admire his talent for making fun of dopey passages in books he doesn't like. His rage in the face of bad writing is authentic and implies a deep corresponding love of great writing. He's also good at provoking the reader with grand pronouncements on the order of "So-and-so is the embodiment of everything wrong with the world of letters today"-assertions that promise a thorough reading of So-and-so supported by an encyclopedic knowledge of contemporary fiction. Missing from Hatchet Jobs, however, is the connective tissue that makes for a coherent essay. Consumed by his fury, Mr. Peck forgets to plot the argument that shows how the insults and the dissections of dopey passages link up with the many brazen generalizations which, huddled together, constitute his big-picture summary of the state of our literature.

When, for example, he calls Jim Crace "the Betty Crocker of contemporary novelists," I laugh and begin to wonder whether I'm right to cherish Mr. Crace's two best novels, Quarantine (1997) and Being Dead (1999). But then, when I get to the end of the same essay, I find Mr. Peck waxing philosophical: "Fiction doesn't make meaning by reifying ideas, because you can't reify something that doesn't exist. Rather, it vests meaning in a series of contextual relationships: writer and reader, invented and actual, shapely narrative and shapeless history. Ultimately, fiction speaks to the narrativizing heart in all of us while gently admonishing that history has no such neatness, none of the inevitabilities of climax, resolution, and dénouement that religion or politics or art comforts us with." I have no objection to the bouquet of notions that make up this mini-manifesto, but I am bothered by the fact that it perfectly describes Mr. Crace's obsessive concerns. If Mr. Peck wants fiction that fits the bill, let him look again at Quarantine and Being Dead.

And what is the big picture, as Dale Peck sees it? He divides contemporary fiction into two camps and curses them both. He rails against "recidivist realists" and "recherché postmodernists" and complains that today's novelists "have either counterfeited reality, or forfeited it." Exciting stuff. I believe him when he writes, "my hands are literally shaking as I type"-after all, he's calling for "[t]he excision from the canon, or at least the demotion in status, of most of Joyce, half of Faulkner and Nabokov, nearly all of Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo, not to mention the general dumping of their contemporary heirs." He's full of passionate intensity, but there's no rational argument to back up the invective and exhortation. (Well, you ask, what did I expect from a hatchet job?)

Mr. Peck is lazy and sloppy and not quite as cultured as he wishes, intermittently, to appear. In the midst of the Moody mauling, he breaks briefly into French: "Que sait-tu? one wants to say to the writer: What do you know?" My feeling is that if you're going to provide a translation, you should also get the conjugation straight: It's "Que sais-tu?" (Pertinent question, that: Though he's Google-adept, as he proves when he's playing "Gotcha!", one does wonder what Mr. Peck knows.)

So now he says he's laying down his red pen: "I will no longer write negative book reviews." Does that mean that in the kinder, gentler reviews to come, he'll at last tell us what we should be looking for as an alternative to recidivist realism and recherché postmodernism (both of which, in his exact opinion, "suck")? He teases us, in Hatchet Jobs, with the notion that what we really need is "a new materialism," but yes, you guessed it: He never says what that would look like. Maybe the "new materialism" is what Dale Peck does when he's not wielding the hatchet.

Adam Begley is the books editor of The Observer.