I've heard him acting like he made a stunning turn in his literary life after the 80s began, after The Names was released, but damn, DeLillo's good anytime he's writing. Everything he's written is my favorite. I was like "where do I stack this alongside or against his other work?" and then thought about it and put it right there, in the middle, with the rest.

DDL to DFW in correspondence:

"Once, probably, I used to think that vagueness was a loftier kind of poetry, truer to the depths of consciousness, and maybe when I started to read mathematics and science back in the mid-70s I found an unexpected lyricism in the necessarily precise language that scientists tend to use My instinct, my superstition is that the closer I see a thing and the more accurately I describe it, the better my chances of arriving at a certain sensuality of expression."

Something both have in spades is accuracy coupled with humor in their descriptions and dialogue. The humor while being deadly serious makes every paragraph unmissable.

3.5 stars

поки найслабший Делілло для мене. хаос подій і персонажів. починається з таємниці, а завершується змовою. світ мистецтва як бізнесу (галерія Лайтборна), де секс - це теж великий бізнес, проте це радше беззмістовний конспірологічний квест. веремія непорозумінь. Running Dog як Rolling Stones+натяк на долю детектива як собаки-посіпаки (Глен Селві).
про найцікавіше не кажуть: зокрема, головна героїня Молл Роббінз загадує, як до подій роману жила з dial-0-bomb терористом Гарі Пеннером, а тому нічого не боїться.
зате є докладний опис "порнофільму з Гітлером" (адже "якщо є нацисти, це автоматично стає еротикою", а Гітлер - це "сучасний рок-н-рольщик" і, до речі, просто чудовий постмодерний пасаж про те, як Адольф вдає Чапліна з фільма, де той вдавав Адольфа). світ 70-х, де системи починають брати своє, а камер стає все більше, і вони наглядають не тільки за чужими.

this is quite the story...

Ça ressemble à un thriller, un polar dont on épouse tous les codes stéréotypés pour que finalement tout s’effrite dans un jeu de dupe. D’une grande intelligence.

This 1978 postmodernist novel emulates a spy thriller. It has a breezy delivery with a great set of mysterious and colorful characters. I liked its stylish and ironic presentation, but all the suspense and action boils down to a shaggy dog story, which I personally don’t favor. Others may appreciate better the little absurdities in the nefarious machinations of the secret power brokers behind the U.S. government and corporations, but in the light of the Iran-Contra scandal of the 80’s the plot here is a bit tame. I was looking for something more over-the-top as part of a recent reading tour I took in search of exemplars of radical fiction.

The tale begins with an Austrian trying to sell a film from the last days in Hitler’s bunker to a dealer in erotic art, Lightborne. When the former gets murdered, interest in the film by various factions grows exponentially from the imagination of what its pornographic contents might be. Minions of a prominent U.S. senator and of a pornography empire run by the Mafia are two such factions with intense interest. Our erstwhile heroes on the case include a journalist, Moll Robbins, who does exposes and conspiracy stories for a DC magazine called “Running Dog”, and Glen Selvy, who scouts out and buys erotic art for a senator’s secret collection. A hot sexual relationship soon binds them together, a bond sealed when they escape a machine gun attack on a bar where they are chatting. His expert responses and handy work with a pistol reveals to her that he must be no ordinary staffer.

Here is a delightful snatch of dialog between them in the middle of the night after relieving their tension:
“Who are you, Selvy?”
He sat back in his chair, an intentional countermotion, a withdrawal, and smiled in deep fatigue, self-deprecatingly. He speared to be dissociating himself from whatever significance the question by its nature ascribed to him.”
…”What is it like, secrecy? The secret life. I know it’s sexual. I want to know this. Is it homosexual?”
“You’re way ahead of me,” he said.
“Isn’t it why they seem so good at it, which comes to the same thing. Isn’t it almost rooted in national character?”
“I didn’t know the English controlled world rights.”
“To what?”
“Being queer, “ he said.
“No, I’m saying the link is there. That’s all. Tendency finds an outlet. I’m saying espionage is a language, an art, with sexual sources and coordinates. Although I don’t mean to say it so Freudianly.”
“I’, open to theorizing,” he said. “What else do you have?”
“I have links inside of links. This is the age of conspiracy.”
“People have wondered.”

It turns out that the senator is heading up a closed-door Congressional investigation of the abuses of PAC/ORD, an acronym for the equally obfuscating “Personnel Advisory Committee, Office of Records and Disbursements” (don’t you love DeLillo’s names?). Apparently its benign role in administering the budgetary operations of the entire intelligence enterprise is a front includes some funding of operations beyond the purview of legislative oversight. What we come to learn is that its spawn for funding covert operations, Radial Matrix, has gone rogue, a transformation made possible by its development of its own money-making schemes. Kudos for prescience on that. Recall how a decade later Maine Colonel Olliver North sold arms to Iran to facilitate release of American prisoners and used the money raised to support the Contras war against the leftist Sandanistas in Nicaragua and generate more funds for them through the drug operations run by Panamanian president Noriega.

The reader is at sea over the intersection of the quest for Nazi film and the brewing conflicts over exposure of secret intelligence operations. All we know for a long time is that someone powerful wants to shut Selvy or Moll down. Selvy in fact may or may not work for Radial Matrix or may or may not be a target for a hit. Moll has free reign either to uncover the story about the senator’s porn art obsession or the story about the PAC/ORD investigation, so she works toward both, using her feminine allure to draw upon the senator’s lust for her. She also tracks down the mastermind of Radial Matrix, Earl Mudge, who has a similar weakness for her charms. Brilliant cat and mouse between Moll and Mudge. DeLillo gives him wonderful quirks, such as an avid hobby of creating a zoo in Vietnam when he ran the CIA contracted operations of Air America and his current metallurgic engineering of lucrative munitions at his current mansion in Virginia. Moll’s boss at Running Dog is compromised in her direction under blackmail threats, but is still able to convey her overall outlook to her:

“Want to hear my theory? …All men are criminals. All women are Mafia wives. …
I was married to the same man for eleven years. I did his bidding. Not fully realizing. His silent bidding. Somehow, mysteriously, unspokenly. It’s built into the air between us. It’s carried on radio waves from galaxy to galaxy. …
The ultimate genius of men. Do you care to know what it is? Men want. Women just hang around. Women think they’re steaming along on a tremendous career, toot toot. Nothing. Nowhere. I’m telling you. Men want. Bam, crash, pow. The impact, good Christ. Men want so badly. It makes us feel a little spacey, a little dizzy. What are we next to this great want, this universal bloodsucking need of theirs?

DeLillo has some fun painting the post-Vietnam character of Washington, DC, and New York City as a backdrop to his tale. We end with a cinematic fade to the American West and the Mexican border with Selvy on the run toward some kind of showdown. Like James Bond, he doesn’t neglect picking up a new playmate for a travel companion on the way. What does it mean that his pursuers turn out to Vietnamese? What is the outcome of the quest for the Nazi smut movie? Enquiring minds want to know, but will you be satisfied with the answer?

This book reminds me a lot of William Gibson’s espionage books (the so-called Blue Ant series). For both I appreciated their flow, cool, crisp dialog, and odd characters. Yet both leave a lot of their implications to hand-waving. DeLillo admits in interviews covered in Wikipedia he regrets not spending more effort on this and others of his early period (supposedly Running Dog was written in a four-month period). I’ve only read two works from the apogee of his arc, “White Noise” (1985), which mystified me with its dissection of consumerism and obsession with death, and “Underworld” (1997), which felt like a masterful take on paranoia and the Cold War. I look forward to reading more of his work, which includes quite a variety of subjects.

Fairly bizarre plot, great dialogue.

"qual è il tuo nome indiano? Cane che corre"

una pellicola che pare sia stata girata nel bunker più famoso della Seconda Guerra mondiale, un mercante d'arte erotica, un agente segreto, vietcong, mafiosi, giornaliste avvenenti e politici assatanati...un funerale tibetano...forse ;-)
la storia è serrata e il racconto avvincente, Delillo ci mette un pizzico di paranoia governativa, che all'epoca in cui scriveva era senza dubbio più motivata di oggi, e i personaggi sono talmente ben delineati che si riesce persino a immaginarne il volto...di tutti, pure del killer scemo che si fa sparare mentre cerca di ammazzare un agente segreto, per conto di un'altra agenzia dello stesso governo
e poi
che cattiveria il finale, una vera cattiveria, e dire che questo è uno dei rari libri di Delillo che un finale ce l'ha :-P

It's 1978 (4 full years even before "Joust"!), mom won't spring for Atari (but fobs us off with a cloned "Pong" from K-Mart), and...and Double-D can somehow hear the Seven Seals a-opening and knows how it's all gonna play itself out (the shadowy horses, their long manes a-shake, riding four strong winds toward us, etc., etc.):n  

As I say, I’ve unlinked myself. Too much software, hardware, so on. Technology. The whole thing’s geared to electronics. There’s a neat correlation between the complexity of the hardware and the lack of genuine attachments. Devices make everyone pliant. There’s a general sponginess, a lack of conviction.”[...] “When technology reaches a certain level, people begin to feel like criminals,” he said. “Someone is after you, the computers maybe, the machine-police. You can’t escape investigation. The facts about you and your whole existence have been collected or are being collected. Banks, insurance companies, credit organizations, tax examiners, passport offices, reporting services, police agencies, intelligence gatherers. It’s a little like what I was saying before. Devices make us pliant. If they issue a print-out saying we’re guilty, then we’re guilty. But it goes even deeper, doesn’t it? It’s the presence alone, the very fact, the superabundance of technology, that makes us feel we’re committing crimes. Just the fact that these things exist at this widespread level. The processing machines, the scanners, the sorters. That’s enough to make us feel like criminals. What enormous weight. What complex programs. And there’s no one to explain it to us.”

n (78) Though one of the endings still baffles me, I'm awarding this the five full stars , since I was never less than fully entranced by this novel, its numerous threads being woven into a paranoid tapestry that never feels like patchwork, and which imparts that long-lived, haunting quality of Delillo's best work—for me, its up there nipping at the heels of, or pre-figuring his very best (Libra, Underworld (ofc), The Names, White Noise, and Mao II)

Recommended.

Review posted at Tzer Island book blog:

https://www.tzerisland.com/bookblog/2...

The art-world/spy-thriller vibe reminded me uncannily of William Gibson's "Spook Country," minus Gibson's tech obsession. Even so, there was a nice timeless/futuristic feeling to DeLillo's spare paranoia.