Don DeLillo occupies a relatively sun-lit corner of that school of American writers who might be called Occultists—not because they deal with the supernatural (though some occasionally do) but because they see hidden correspondences between phenomena of the most heterogenous kind. Everything is in code; sometimes the code is to be compared, structurally, with other codes, all of them equally filled with, or devoid of, significance. John Barth's monumental Letters is a good example of the genre. So are Pynchon's V, The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity's Rainbow. Often such fiction has a pronounced paranoid streak: not only codes but conspiracies abound, and for every conspiracy there is a counter-conspiracy and then a counter-counter-conspiracy that mirrors the first—and on and on in what can seem like an infinite regress.
Occultist novels provide engrossing games for the adept. For others, they are likely to seem static, even airless. From the start DeLillo's fiction has tended in the occultist direction, indulging obsessively in the creation or exploration of correspondences. From the start, too, his novels have been distinguished by a liveliness of style and intellect and an aptitude for vivid description that go far to compensate for the narrative inertia that has overtaken his earlier books. Since Ratner's Star, the apogee or nadir of his mirror-game experiments, DeLillo has opened his fiction to the possibilities of more extroverted action. The speeded-up pace in both Players and Running Dog seems to me all to the good. The two novels present a continually interesting, often entertaining texture, though they are likely to leave the reader eventually numbed by the unrelieved sleaziness and horror of the image of American life they project. The occult is to be found less in correspondences than in the preoccupation with covert organizations, plots, counterplots, spying, and terrorism.
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