The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 17 August 2014
by Don DeLillo
The best literature asks the big questions. It can therefore be dark and full of foreboding. Indeed, much of Western culture is about the denial of the biggest question of all: death. A century or two ago, death was part of everyday life. You might say that it is now, too, with the way our media harps on sex and death. But that's someone else's death, reduced to abstracts and cinematic events. Everyday death is another matter. Our loved ones, our selves. We'll all go sometime. You might think that would make a novel a grim affair, and it does, but Don DeLillo also accomplishes wit and irony. Our hero, Jack Gladney, is a professor of Hitler studies at a small liberal arts college in a small town (that sounds like a suburb of Pittsburgh). He is a thrice-divorced father of a bunch of kids, and he is married to Babette, a divorced mother herself. They live a busy suburban life, comfortable and full of conversation and activity. But Jack is asking himself the big questions. He is middle aged and beginning to see the End on the horizon. He is terrified, as are we all, mystified and yearns for some answers or outright blind escape. Into this story falls a message from above, the Airborne Toxic Event, a poisonous release of gas and smoke from a rail car at a nearby chemical facility. The authorities respond, residents are calmly evacuted, a few are dangerously exposed. But there is a casual nature to all of this. The citizens take their fate in stride. It even fades quickly from the news. This is the world we have created, full of media indifference and random anonymous hazards. Somehow, we accept it all as our lot in life, a world so dangerously full of existential hazard and the constant flow of media to help us escape. Where is there any connection to humanity any more? Jack thinks he may have found an escape when he discovers his wife is popping pills designed to short-circuit our fear of death. Indeed, it is our awareness of mortality that makes us fundamentally different from other animals on this planet. So, despite uncontrollable hazard, despite the certainty of Jack's historical studies, despite the colorful and melodic experience of everyday life, our hero still feels the onrush of Eternity. How can he now look at the world around him? The book is yet full of wit, a biting view of our desperate and scattered culture. Published in 1985, it is also startlingly present in its grasp of event and experience. The story comes at us in a tumble of small media references, little lists of the stuff of everyday life, the random conversations of people accustomed to one another. And yet, the darkness looms under it all. It is a brilliant evocation of the split experience of life in the face of death. In the end Jack attempts to transcend his fate, to leave a footprint on the Earth. But we are small on this planet, which itself is tiny in this universe and against eternity. What hope do we have? Pass the Dylar...
(For this novel, DeLillo was awarded the 1985 National Book Award for fiction.)