Plenitude and excess distinguish much of our best fiction: Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Coover's The Public Burning, Gaddis's JR, McElroy's Lookout Cartridge. Don DeLillo has their exhaustive impulse, but his six novels, singly and together, are a reversed cornucopia. They spiral from the overripe riches of America toward a difficult silence. More than any other novelist to emerge in [the '70s], Don DeLillo knows the spoiled goods of America and knows as well that a novel made in the USA may be implicated in the waste and noise of its place. His tactics have been attack and withdrawal….
"The beast is loose/Least is best" say the lyrics of Bucky Wunderlick in Great Jones Street. Minimalism has its great exemplars in Beckett and Borges, but it also has its attendant difficulty: "The less there is," says a character in Running Dog, "the more you're tested to find the things that do exist." It is a test for reader and writer alike, one that DeLillo does not manage well in this new novel. Narrowed, flattened and polished, Running Dog reads too much like some compacted version of the literary waste—the intrigue—from which DeLillo has presumably meant to separate it with artful reduction. But because Running Dog features the contractive method that worked in the earlier books, especially Players, it remains an interesting novel, an experimental coda to a major writer's career. (p. 33)
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