Everything about it is so thoroughly up-to-date that you can see why Geoff Dyer called it ' a 21st-Century novel, published in 1982.' Its characters have modern, hard-to-describe jobs: the narrator James Axton struggles to say what he does for a living. The Names is about Americans abroad, mostly in Greece and the Middle East. These books are still about things, yes, but they also are the things themselves: highly self-aware literary works, recreations of modern society so intense that they make us see it afresh – intensely DeLillo-esque books about an intensely DeLillo-esque world.

It is on the five-book run of the 1980s and 90s – The Names (1982), White Noise (1985), Libra (1988), Mao II (1991) and Underworld (1997) – that DeLillo's colossal reputation stands. And they started to win him a reputation: ' There's Norman Mailer, there's Thomas Pynchon, now there's Don DeLillo,' gasped the Los Angeles Times on the paperback cover of Running Dog.īut it is widely agreed by his admirers that the next stage of DeLillo's career rang in what we might call his imperial phase.

Later in the 1970s he began to grow and experiment more: novels like Ratner's Star (1976), Players (1977) and Running Dog (1978) were playful, intricate and increasingly uninterested in forcing DeLillo's talents into standard literary forms: they mashed up elements of science fiction, thrillers and satire with big-brain subjects (astronomy, economics, social history). DeLillo's early novels were about things – advertising (Americana, 1971), sport (End Zone, 1972), rock music (Great Jones Street, 1973).

Point Omega by Don DeLillo