The Essential Don DeLillo

For years when I was younger, and still dreamed that I might be a novelist instead of an editor or a critic, I kept a quote from Don DeLillo’s 1993 Paris Review interview pinned to the bulletin board above my desk as a sort of talisman or goad prompting me to write: “Do you think it made a difference in your career,” Adam Begley asked him, “that you started writing novels late, when you were approaching 30?”

DeLillo’s mild answer (“Well, I wish I had started earlier, but evidently I wasn’t ready”) mattered less to me than the breathless audacity of the question itself, the blithe assumption that by your 20s — your 20s! — you were already too old, off the pace. And to ask that of DeLillo, who by the time of that interview had poured out almost a dozen novels in a torrent of productivity, probing his interests in everything from sports to mathematics to the inflection points of the American century … well, no wonder the man had a reputation for being paranoid.

In fact, despite all of DeLillo’s fascination with terrorism and death cults and the impotence of the individual swept up in unstoppable social forces, I’ve never considered him to be an especially paranoid writer. Anxious, sure — anxiety being one of his great themes, and one of the reasons he has so often seemed prophetic — but as a stylist he’s too cool and too alert to absurdity to be a true paranoid. I mean cool in every sense of the word: a little chilly, a little detached, and also ironic and knowing and hip, cool like the jazz he has cited as an influence on his sentences.

“He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.” That’s the opening to “Underworld” (1997), and it’s not just jazz, it’s poetry: the alliteration, the internal rhyme, the direct invocation to fellow citizens. DeLillo’s prose often summons this kind of music, whether he’s writing about nuclear annihilation or the Zapruder film or mass media or Hitler’s sex life. His syncopated riffs on culture’s weirder turns and mundane follies have influenced younger writers from Jennifer Egan to Jonathan Franzen, Dana Spiotta to David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith to Richard Powers to Colson Whitehead to Rachel Kushner and many more.

With some overlaps, his career is neatly divided into three distinct phases, and the very beginning is not necessarily the very best place to start. The early promise of his debut, “Americana” (1971), and the novels that followed is evident in certain characteristic touches: the sympathy for neurotic misfits — even wildly successful ones, like the rock star Bucky Wunderlick in “Great Jones Street” (1973); the ear for off-kilter dialogue; the anthropological instinct; the chiseled prose that announced the arrival of a dedicated stylist. (The opening sentence of “Americana,” “Then we came to the end of another dull and lurid year,” was catchy enough to provide the title for Joshua Ferris’s own debut novel 36 years later.)

But those early books are also marred by a shaggy, frenetic jokiness and a sense that DeLillo was still finding his way. His potential is more fully realized in the midcareer books that started with “The Names” (1982) and culminated in “Underworld,” after which he shifted to the starker, sparer — but still exhilarating — style that has marked most of his subsequent work. In other words, there’s something for everyone. Start here.