& Title: Cosmopolis Author: Don DeLillo Publisher: Picador I maintain that DeLillo's classic work White Noise is the only tome to (presciently) describe the melange of sensations that ran through us on September 11th. There is something in his words, in the mixture of fear and awe, in the frightening responses to the everyday occurrences, and to the way that events far beyond our control can alter our own personal lives irrevocably - well there's something there that reminds us of DeLillo's well deserved status as one of the best American writers living and, as we will see, writing about what the US has become. End Zone was first published in 1972 and it deals with the life of Gary Harkness, a student on the gridiron team at a small Texan university that's also part military college. Harkness has become increasingly concerned with the idea of an imminent apocalypse, a nuclear event on a grand scale, and so becomes involved in attempting to comprehend it. These attempts vary from working out which sectors of cities will be affected by how much megatonnage to the struggle of language to describe the atrocities of humankind. So much so, obsession takes over, Harkness telling us "I became fascinated by words and phrases like thermal hurricane, overkill, circular error probability, post-attack environment, stark deterrence, dose-rate contours, kill-ratio, spasm war." In an era of collateral damage, smart bombs, insurgency and enemy combatants, End Zone's underlying thesis, that words contribute as much as actions to war, is all the more important and justifies its reprinting. But there's also a war on the field, and DeLillo shows here how, 20 years later in the 900+ pages of Underworld, he could make sport seem so utterly important and interesting, as if the field of human battles and histories exists as much in the college stadium as it does on the fields of combat. The ball players are as dumb and determined as any troop of recent recruits ("A brave nation needs discipline," the coach tells his underlings), only Harkness standing outside of it, getting stoned before a game and walking off mid-play because he is hungry. If there's hope it lies in the momentary possibilities of love, and god almighty DeLillo knows how to show it, as "I plucked a chord or two on the tense elastic of her iridescent panties… She tickled certain vulnerable areas below my ribs." I believe, and phrases like that remind me why.
The writing on display here is terse, much more anxious then. Characters speak to, not with, each other, "I don't know how to be indifferent," his wife says in a rare moment of almost edgy intimacy, "I can't master this… In other words it hurts." Eric replies, "This is good. We're like people talking. Isn't this how people talk?" The fury of the protest is at one stage taken out on the limo, paint, urine, maybe blood, but DeLillo reminds us of the world we're living in, commenting "the protest was a form of systemic hygiene, purging and lubricating. It attested again, for the ten thousandth time, to the market culture's innovative brilliance,… absorbing everything around it." "His pain interfered with his immortality." Perhaps this is the final meaning of Cosmopolis, that even Wall St, like those who spend their lives within, can be undone by the visceral, the corporeal. If people are wandering around, looking for reason in these times of ideological clashing, perhaps DeLillo's fiction rather than the 'facts' of Fox News may me more helpful in the long run. Not more comforting, but that's hardly the point.
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Title: End Zone
As one of the characters in End Zone says, "Things used to
be so simple." By Cosmopolis, DeLillo's 2003 work now in
paperback, nothing remains simple. Eric Packer is a
billionaire, trying to make his way across New York by limo
to get a hair cut. What happens of course is anything but as
he encounters, among other things, his mistress, his new
wife, an anti-globalisation rally, a presidential motorcade, the
incredibly blinged-up funeral procession of a rapper hero,
and the collapse of much of the Wall Street index. Eric is,
quite simply, an asshole. He's nouveau riche, wants and
needs the world to revolve around him, yet must appear that
he doesn't, and if DeLillo has anything vaguely resembling a
message for him (and I doubt it), it's that for all his wealth, it
doesn't make him human. 
