SOURCE: "Postmodern Romance: Don DeLillo and the Age of Conspiracy," in The South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 89, No. 2, Spring, 1990, pp. 337-53.

In the following essay, McClure examines novelist Don DeLillo's adaptation of popular novels of different genres, including science fiction, espionage, and occult adventures.

Don DeLillo crafts his fictions out of the forms of popular romance: out of the espionage thriller, the imperial adventure novel, the western, science fiction, even the genre of occult adventure. He may conduct us, in one novel, across several genres: Running Dog begins as a spy story, turns, as one of the characters remarks, into a western, and ends on a note of New Age adventure, with the introduction of a figure out of Castañeda's Don Juan books. Contemporary literary theory invites us to see in such minglings the project of pastiche: a play across forms uninflected with any impulse to criticism or...