Don DeLillo: Balance at the Edge of Belief

Don DeLillo – winner of the National Book Award, the William Dean Howells Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize – is one of the most important novelists of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. While his work can be understood and taught as prescient and postmodern examples of millennial culture, this book argues that DeLillo’s recent novels – White Noise, Libra, Mao II, Underworld, and The Body Artist – are more concerned with spiritual crisis. Although DeLillo’s worlds are rife with rejection of belief and littered with faithfulness, estrangement, and desperation, his novels provide a balancing moral corrective against the conditions they describe. Speaking the vernacular of contemporary America, DeLillo explores the mysteries of what it means to be human.