Don DeLillo, American Original

Book excerpt: Don DeLillo, American Original is a startlingly original and provocative reinterpretation of one of the most important novelists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Adopting a direct approach that steers clear of debates with secondary literature and covering the full arc of Don DeLillo's career from A to Z – Americana (1971) to Zero K (2016) – Michael Naas shows that the extraordinary power, authority, insight, and inventiveness of DeLillo's fiction are the result of the way it traffics everywhere in contraband goods and narratives, in doubleness or duplicity of every kind, in multiple voices, story lines, times, places, and media that at once interrupt and complement one another. This is a book that invites skimming and dipping, structured into easily digestible sections on everything from weapons and drugs to erotica, nuclear waste, and secret societies, each preceded by humorous and incisive epigraphs from DeLillo's novels. Michael Naas reads DeLillo's fiction as a way of life or as equipment for living, rather than as a critical puzzle to be solved – and thereby opens up new horizons for thinking about why literature matters in the 21st century.