In 1979, at the age of forty-two, the distinctly American writer Don DeLillo made a change that would have a profound impact on his work: he left the United States. Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship that year —his first accolade after a decade’s run of his first six novels—he used the money to decamp with his wife to Athens, Greece, a decision that might have been prompted by a midcareer plateau. His novels until then had the classic trademarks of any cult writer, critically received and publicly ignored. They were also products of their time, madcap plots that laced together football and nuclear war, parodied Rolling Stone and rock and roll, and bedded Wall Street hubris with harebrained terrorism. But the reliable romp he injected into these early works was wearing thin on critics. Running Dog, published the previous year, about the search for a pornographic tape involving Hitler, was described in the Times as “not so much a novel as a swift and skillful exhibition of landscapes, characters and precarious situations . . . an air of weariness, of routine violence and acceptable paranoia, of intrigue without point or profit.”
Read Full Article »
