Don DeLillo, The Angel Esmeralda
Featured Book
A tour through one of the most fertile literary careers of the past 40 years
The best way to look at Don DeLillo’s new collection of short stories is as a tour through one of the most fertile literary careers of the past 40 years. It’s hard to believe, but DeLillo published his first book way back in 1971, and the stories in The Angel Esmeralda cover almost that entire stretch, from 1979-2011. DeLillo makes theses nine stories feel large, and they encompass his best themes: terror and its handmaiden, politics; plus technology, pop culture, and, of course, the absurd. “Creation,” published in 1979, strikes a Beckettian note as it details the seductions between a man and a woman stuck waiting for a plane that won’t come. It recalls DeLillo’s early absurdist novels (1978′s Running Dog revolves around a sex tape made in Hitler’s bunker), even as its condensed intensity offers the characteristic smack that DeLillo has become a master of delivering. “Baader-Meinhof” (2002) is one of DeLillo’s prototypically rich readings of a graphic artist — this time it’s Gerhard Richter, whose paintings of the titular terro-anarchist group’s prison-cell suicides force out some of DeLillo’s most intense descriptions: “The woman’s reality, the head, the neck, the rope burn, the hair, the facial features, were painted, picture to picture, in nuances of obscurity and pall, a detail clearer here than there, the slurred mouth in one painting appearing nearly natural elsewhere, all of it unsystematic.” And the blackly humorous “Human Moments in World War III” (1983) tells the story of two astronauts viewing an Earth where “the banning of nuclear weapons has made the world safe for war.” Although DeLillo ranges broadly through these four decades of fiction, he always comes back to a question found in “The Starveling” (2011): “If we’re not here to know what a thing is, then what is it?” DeLillo’s stories derive a rich, cosmic energy from the search for this unquantifiable quantity, this little something that haunts each of these well-honed tales. DeLillo’s search for it is a necessary, and undeniably beautiful, investigation.
