“HOW BEST TO DESCRIBE DELILLO AND HIS PLACE IN OUR CULTURAL LANDSCAPE?” This is one of the questions Matthew Thomas attempts to answer in his Fiction Advocate review of the novelist’s first collection of short stories, “The Angel Esmerelda.”
Taking as his starting point a blandly aggressive techno-frisking in a backed-up New York airport security line, Thomas concludes that “The world that Don DeLillo promised us decades ago had finally been delivered.”
He goes on from there:
Nearly everything his work addresses, be it a failed afternoon tryst or the fate of humanity, is observed with equal weight, largely free of dread, and with an indifferent perspective that borders on solipsism. This is the work of a man who simply enjoys our increasingly strange and terrible world just as much as we enjoy seeing it reflected (however portentously) in his novels.