[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 Dog. DeLillo has reimagined the world of our recent and present history into a compact whole of speech and action in which the details of the present are perfected through careful craft into a metaphoric vision. The language of conspiracy, with its beginnings in self-repression and its "sexual sources and coordinates"; the stance of taut, impersonal reportage; a design full of disturbing parallels, odd echoes, abrupt disjunctions, and grim humor—DeLillo has fitted these elements together into a novel as meticulously constructed as Selvy's gun. (p. 27)
Richard Kuczkowski, in New York Arts Journal (copyright © 1978 by Richard W. Burgin), #12, November-December, 1978.
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