There have been many-too-many novels in which the protagonist tries to find himself: [in "Americana"] … he tries to lose himself.

"I'm trying to outrun myself," says ex-network executive David Bell (pausing for breath on an Indian reservation) and one must count his effort a success. There is no real identity to be found in this heaping mass of tossed word-salad. There are thickets of hallucinatory whimsy, an infatuation with rhetoric, but hardly a trace of a man.

Don DeLillo 1936– © Thomas Victor 1983

The purple nightmares conjured up by Don DeLillo—in the form of various transcontinental interludes—are only fitfully interesting, although they do propose some curious images…. [The] most one can say for Mr. DeLillo's novel is that we're a bit closer to learning why Dave wants to lose himself.

Martin Levin, in a review of "Americana," in The New York Times Book Review (© 1971 by The New York...