From The Philadelphia Inquirer

February 11, 2001

Writing Genius of Don DeLillo

By Walter C. Uhler

As a hard-core enthusiast of Don DeLillo's work, I must dispute the assertion in Carlin Romano's fine review of The Body Artist (Inquirer, Feb. 4) that it's "DeLillo diminished."

Over the last three decades, I've laughed myself to tears over Billy's precious description of his college course about "The Untellable" (in End Zone), been stunned to numbness by Glen Selvy's final encounter with the running dogs of war (in Running Dog), and attracted and repelled by the verisimilitude of Bucky Wunderlick's world as rock; musician icon, (in Great Jones Street). That was before becoming a hard-core addict after reading DeLillo's first masterpiece, White Noise, with its "Hitler Studies" professor who doesn't know German, its "airborne toxic event" that forces the town's evacuation and its many mordant observations, such as the comparison of Tibet with America: "Here we don't die, we shop. But the difference is less marked than you think."

DeLillo's magnum opus, however, is Underworld, a massive, majestic search for life's meaning (and bold challenge to professional historians) in unofficial, unrecorded, underground movements and moments. Juxtaposed with it (one of the finest works in the world's literature), this hard-core enthusiast did, indeed, find DeLillo's The Body Artist to be "diminished."

As novices to the master, however, let us entertain the possibility that DeLillo intentionally answered his epic masterpiece with its opposite—sparse and banal lives condemned to feeble, pedestrian, poorly articulated and ultimately unsuccessful searches. Like the incomparable Dostoyevsky, he may be subjecting his, and our, beliefs to the "crucible of doubt."

Walter C. Uhler
Philadelphia
waltuhler@aol.com