Maybe this is a stupid question — and maybe the answer to it is the novels themselves — but after 50 years of thinking and writing, do you feel as if you have a firm understanding of this American society that in so many ways flummoxes the rest of us? I think I’ve remained open to whatever happens around us and as confused as other people become by what happens around us. I don’t think that the work I’ve done gives me any great, deep perception about what’s going on. I mean, I couldn’t discuss with you on a certain level of intelligence the current presidential campaigns. What do you find astonishing? The enormous thrust forward, if it is forward. Whatever technology is capable of doing becomes what it must do. It’s uncontrollable. DeLillo's fourth novel, Ratner's Star (1976)—which according to DeLillo is "structure[d] [...] on the writings of Lewis Carroll, in particular Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass [5]—took two years to write and drew numerous favorable comparisons to the works of Thomas Pynchon. [16] This "conceptual monster", as DeLillo scholar Tom LeClair has called it, is "the picaresque story of a 14-year-old math genius who joins an international consortium of mad scientists decoding an alien message." [21] DeLillo has said it was both one of the most difficult books for him to write and his personal favorite. [22]

The book's title comes from Oswald's astrological sign, and, as a picture of a scale, symbolizes for Branch the outside forces of history weighing in on Oswald's fate as well as the fate of the entire assassination plot. According to DeLillo, the scale also hints at how "a man could tip either way" with regard to committing the ultimate crime, [1] and suggests a man torn between conflicting ideas and impulses, exemplified by the tension between his service in the United States military and his communist beliefs. [4] Reception [ edit ]Adam Begley of the London Review of Books deemed it the author's best book up to that point, praising him for avoiding caricature in portrayals of disturbed individuals such as Ferrie and Ruby and "[leaving] room for pity, if not for compassion." Begley also argued that DeLillo "never seems overwhelmed or constrained by the facts of the case. Nor is he vexed by contradictions and omissions. Libra displays his genius for creative paranoia: he fills the gaps in the record with his imagination, spinning a brilliant web out of a heap of improbable coincidences." [7] Libra is a novel that takes a different approach of portraying the events that led up to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, following the life of his accused murderer, Lee Harvey Oswald. Beginning in the childhood of Oswald, the book continues to describe his time with the United States Marine Corps, and his marriage of a young Russian woman, all of which may have played a role in the assassination, according to DeLillo. DeLillo's concerns about the position of the novelist and the novel in a media- and terrorist-dominated society were made clear in his next novel, Mao II (1991). Influenced by the events surrounding the fatwa placed on Salman Rushdie and the intrusion of the press into the life of J. D. Salinger, Mao II earned DeLillo significant critical praise from, among others, John Banville and Thomas Pynchon. [6] It won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1992.

Although they have received some acclaim in places, DeLillo's post- Underworld novels have been often viewed by critics as "disappointing and slight, especially when held up against his earlier, big-canvas epics", [28] marking a shift "away from sweeping, era-defining novels" such as White Noise, Libra and Underworld to a more "spare and oblique" [28] style, characterized by "decreased length, the decommissioning of plot machinery and the steep deceleration of narrative time". [39] Following this early attempt at a major long novel, DeLillo ended the decade with two shorter works. Players (1977), originally conceived as "based on what could be called the intimacy of language—what people who live together really sound like", [23] concerned the lives of a young yuppie couple as the husband gets involved with a cell of domestic terrorists. [23] Its 1978 successor, Running Dog (1978), written in four months, [14] was a thriller about a hunt for a celluloid reel of Hitler's sexual exploits. Oswald is a loser, a loner, pathetic and self-aggrandizing, one of those people who seize crazily upon the significance of every insignificant coincidence. He tries to shoot the right-wing general Edwin A. Walker but hits Walker's window frame instead; Axton is not unusual in this regard. His American associates are all stereotypes, energetic corporate men and their lonely wives, cool and intelligent and as soulless as the risk assessments they carry out in places where dollar investments have been made. They are alternately puzzled by Greece and oblivious to it, unable to make sense of the graffiti they occasionally encounter in Athens (“Death to Fascists”) or the rant about NATO delivered to Axton by a choleric Greek man called Andreas. Speaking by telephone from his home in the New York City suburbs, Don DeLillo said he spent three years researching and writing ''Libra,'' a fictional biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, as a way of filling in the painful gaps in our knowledgeDon DeLillo's apocalyptic imagination takes on the assassination of John F. Kennedy... Breathtaking' Of Running Dog, DeLillo remarked, "What I was really getting at in Running Dog was a sense of the terrible acquisitiveness in which we live coupled with a final indifference to the object. After all the mad attempts to acquire the thing, everyone suddenly decides that, well, maybe we really don't care about this so much anyway. This was something I felt characterized our lives at the time the book was written in the mid to late seventies. I think this was part of American consciousness then." [24] and more associates - first the two former colleagues he trusts most and then other men less predictable, less controllable, as his plan takes on a life of its own. Nicholas Branch will reappear only rarely, sinking ever deeper in did she want her Alpo. He parked in a lot across the street from the Western Union office. He opened the trunk, got out the dog food and a can opener and fixed the dog her meal, which he left on the front seat. He took two thousand dollars

Ted Williams’s head was frozen. It was Ted Williams. Can people return to life? That’s the question. Again, I was thinking visually: rows of people in these pods in cryonic suspension. When I was working on “Zero K,” I was thinking that I’d actually seen such a thing, which of course I hadn’t. The other thing I remember is the odd part titles, “Part 1: In the Time of Chelyabinsk.” “Part 2: In the Time of Konstantinovka.” I did have a reason for doing that but who the hell knows what it was. the stale facts and weaves them into something altogether new, largely by means of inventing, with what seems uncanny perception, the interior voice that each character might use to describe his own activities. Here, for instance, DeLillo's inaugural decade of novel writing has been his most productive to date, resulting in the writing and publication of six novels between 1971 and 1978. [8] he tries to renounce his United States citizenship but it's early-closing day at the embassy; he tries to defect to the Russians but they're not so sure they want him. Still, sometimes when he's discussing his dissatisfaction permitted him to go where the facts could not. ''In this version, we know how it happened, so the novel, working within history, is also outside it, correcting, clearing up, finding balances and rhythms. I think readers areThe prize honors "an American literary writer whose body of work is distinguished not only for its mastery of the art but for its originality of thought and imagination. The award seeks to commend strong, unique, enduring voices that—throughout long, consistently accomplished careers—have told us something about the American experience." [3] In a statement issued in response to the award, DeLillo said, "When I received news of this award, my first thoughts were of my mother and father, who came to this country the hard way, as young people confronting a new language and culture. In a significant sense, the Library of Congress Prize is the culmination of their efforts and a tribute to their memory." [55] been the most haunting book I've ever worked on. Oswald was the focus, but of course the assassination itself sends out tributaries in a number of different directions, from the U-2 incident to the Bay of Pigs.'' an important role nevertheless. He reminds us of the broader view; he casts the light of history over the other characters' most commonplace moments. over into fiction? The book is so seamlessly written that perhaps not even those people who own both upstairs and downstairs copies of the Warren report could say for certain. Oswald's mother, for instance, with her nonstop, plaintive, DeLillo published Point Omega, his 15th novel, in February 2010. According to DeLillo, the novel considers an idea from "the writing of the Jesuit thinker and paleontologist [Pierre] Teilhard de Chardin." [19] The Omega Point of the title "[is] the possible idea that human consciousness is reaching a point of exhaustion and that what comes next may be either a paroxysm or something enormously sublime and unenvisionable." [19] Point Omega is DeLillo's shortest novel to date, and he has said it could be considered a companion piece to The Body Artist: "In its reflections on time and loss, this may be a philosophical novel and maybe, considering its themes, the book shares a place in my work with The Body Artist, another novel of abbreviated length." [43]