There are many characters in Great Jones Street, but the narrator, Bucky Wunderlick, his agent Globke, the megalomaniacal head of Happy Valley, Bohack, and the wizard of drug dealing, Dr. Pepper, are the primary antag onists. Bucky's sometime girlfriend, Opel, plays a significant part in the plot, primarily by dying, and delivers a thematically important monologue about the relationship between "identity" and the phenomenal world. That sequence is scarily terminated by one of DeLillo's stunning but simple sentences: "When I turned from the window, Opel was dead."

Globke, the head of Transparanoia, is a nightmare version of a nightclub comedian's description of his agent.

His attention acknowledges only moneymaking options; he has no personal or aesthetic interest in the artists he manages; he is a monster of manipulation. In an especially revealing moment, he telephones Bucky on a line Bucky thought was inoperative: "They did it from their...