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
