Author of two fine novels, Americana and Great Jones Street, and one dazzling novel, End Zone, Don DeLillo [in Ratner's Star] writes the American version of a European novel of ideas. Perhaps he most resembles Thomas Mann, lacking Mann's mysticism and long-windedness but sharing his remarkable ability to evoke and evaluate the ideas, language and attitudes of a wide range of intellectual disciplines. DeLillo also possesses an undercutting skepticism proper to the age of Beckett and Borges, an eye for rational absurdity as keen as Barthelme's, and a sparkling comic inventiveness that fills his narratives with flashes of delight. He is already the writer Vonnegut, Barth and Pynchon were once oddly and variously taken to be, and he shows no signs of flagging, many signs of promise.
In End Zone one of DeLillo's many topics was the deceptive and incomplete nature of knowledge; another was the disparity between what we can manipulate intellectually, on the one hand, and "the untellable," on the other; a third was the contradictory temptations of complexity and simplicity; yet another was those unknowable, unspeakable fundamentals of existence, excrement and death. These topics recur in Ratner's Star, where excrement is pervasive and infectious, and death takes many forms, including decay, shadows, flooding, historical reversal, and cosmological black stars and black holes, as well as the moral and cultural death implied by corporate greed.
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