[With] precision and order, Running Dog reveals pattern and network linking seemingly unrelated individuals and their rituals of distance, devotion, quest, connection, and separation enacted around a "pornographic" film. That film and the inability or unwillingness of the individuals involved to comprehend or transcend the true nature and full extent of their actions and relationships lend moral perspective to DeLillo's novel….

Running Dog belongs to a special category of art, one that includes, say, Conrad's Secret Agent, Goddard's Weekend, and Tooker's paintings of petrified subway patrons. Works of this kind situate us precisely and concretely—if ironically—in recognizable contemporary reality slightly but purposefully heightened to exploit the ambiguous interfaces between system and chaos, the commerce between meaning and absurdity, perversion and normalcy. They show us society as an anti-anthill, a hive of grotesque conspiratorial cells, a dangerous maze of cross-purposes. But there is no preachment in Running...