Issyvoo

Mr. DeLillo’s novels published after Sept. 11 have tended to be disappointing, substituting gauzy musings about mortality and time for dead-on observation, Pinter-esque silences for razzle-dazzle dialogue and tactile prose.

Many of DeLillo’s novels are propelled by an acute sense of communal dread—of crowds, of surveillance, of the desperate “creativity” of the terrorist, of an “airborne toxic event”—and long before living history affirmed a number of his paranoid presumptions, his novels were making the case for America as a place where nothing very much was reliably innocent or safe.