As a European, I sometimes wonder whether the kind of fiction that Don DeLillo and other Americans are writing can be termed novels in the sense still current in Europe. Here it is legitimate to fictionalize the breakdown of civilization, but only from the viewpoint of a protagonist who holds to the values out of which the novel-form was begotten. We need humanity to observe the death of humanity. But in Running Dog, and in much contemporary American fiction, we have no humanity at all—bodies, nerves, trigger-fingers, money-lust, power-lust, but no (ah, ridiculous Dostoevskian archaism) soul. Americana is the title of DeLillo's first novel; Americana are still, in his sixth, his theme. Americana is a neuter collective: American things. His characters are all American things….
In Running Dog, Radial Matrix, the ultimate intelligence agency, and several underworld characters are fighting to get hold of film mistakenly believed to be unedited cinema verité of a final orgy in which the Fuehrer himself took part. The pornmen want the film, and some of them are prepared to kill to get it. It is, so to speak, the ultimate stimulus in a sex-absorbed society that approaches impotence. The film, however, turns out to be scenes of Hitler doing a Chaplin act for Goebbels's children….
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