Don DeLillo: watching the American way of life

SHORT STORIES: The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories, By Don DeLillo, Picador, 211pp. £16.99

IN GENTLER TIMES than ours the US writer Don DeLillo would be respectfully acknowledged as a literary soothsayer. But it is now, and he is a witness of the moment, albeit a witness who saw it all coming long before everyone else did – with the honourable exception of the great JG Ballard.

DeLillo came to the art of fiction fully formed, as his first novel, Americana, indicated on publication as long ago as 1971. Now, a lifetime later, comes an essential volume of short stories spanning more than 30 years in a career that has seen outstanding, visionary work, including The Names(1983) his mysterious study of displacement and possibly his finest work, although cases will also be made for the bleakly hilarious, Gaddis-like Bright Noise(1986), Mao II(1991) and Underworld(1997), while Point Omega(2010) has been nominated for the 2012 International Impac Dublin Literary Award.

It was DeLillo who predicted in Mao IIthat the visual image was supplanting the word.

The nine stories in this collection run parallel with the novels. As always the tone throughout is one of detached, almost fascinated despair. DeLillo's response is thoughtful, low key; even his satire is deadpan. Most of all he sees the sheer threat involved in the business of living. In one of the weaker stories, a futuristic skit, Human Moments in World War III(1983), the narrator notes that "the banning of nuclear weapons had made the world safer for war".

The stories are arranged in three parts, which seems merely a tic of design and is a meaningless division. One thing is certain: although the two earliest stories may well be the weakest, they are still cool and sophisticated. The strange and uneasy are his natural territories, and he has always retained a rueful social consciousness that never falters into easy polemic.

The title story, The Angel Esmeralda(1994), opens with a detailed account of an aged nun beginning the daily chore of easing her arthritic bones out of bed, "feeling pain in every joint. She's been rising at dawn since her days as a postulant, kneeling on hardwood floors to pray." Her ancient body is described as "the spindly thing she carried through the world, chalk pale mostly, and speckled hands with high veins".

Yet this is no nostalgic tale of convent life. Instead old Sr Edgar, who announces, “I’m older than the pope,” is involved with tracking down teenage drug addicts, of which Esmeralda is one. Efforts are made to save the girl, but they are to no avail, and the expected call is made: “Somebody raped Esmeralda and threw her off a roof.” But the dead youngster is not forgotten: “Then the stories began, word passing from block to block . . . It was clear enough that people were talking about the same uncanny occurrence.” Sr Edgar is left pondering the madness and expectation that begin to surround alleged visions.

Even more unsettling is Baader-Meinhof(2002), in which a lonely woman keeps vigil in an art gallery, aware "that she was sitting as a person does in a mortuary chapel, keeping watch over the body of a relative or a friend". It seems calm, but it isn't. She thinks she is alone but suddenly hears "a man's heavy shuffling stride". The exhibition consists of studies of the slain members of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist group; the man asks the woman, an art teacher, for her views on the artist's motives. A conversation develops; it moves on to a snack bar and, ultimately, to her apartment, where he stands by the kitchen window "as if waiting for a view to materalize".

The mood shifts from tentative exchanges to one of menace in the space of a sentence. DeLillo brilliantly conveys the woman’s mounting fear as she realises she wants the man to leave. The dialogue is batted back and forth until she notices that “his voice carried an intimacy so false it seemed a little threatening. She didn’t now why she was still sitting here.” Not for the first time, DeLillo explores the need to hide and the panic that attends flight.

As a title, Hammer and Sickle(2010) was never going to work, but DeLillo's topical gag about world finance does. In it the narrator is a dealer gone the way of so many financial players: down. Jerold – he had changed the spelling of his first name – is being held in a kind of prison for disgraced bankers.

Meanwhile, his daughters have become famous for a routine they perform on daytime TV in which they lampoon the international markets. “Bankers are pacing marble floors,” chant the girls: “Dubai has no oil. Dubai has debt. Dubai has a huge number of foreign workers with nowhere to work.” Jerold’s daily nightmare and the international financial scene are one and the same – a bad joke but one that DeLillo tells cleverly.

Best of all is the final story, The Starveling,written this year. It reveals DeLillo at his most tender. Middle-aged Leo Zhelezniak fills his day by going to the movies. He is divorced but continues to share his ex-wife's apartment. Her name is Flory, and she is an actor, "occupationally out of work", who does voiceovers and has a news slot on the radio. She likes to punch him in the stomach, "for fun". He tries to see the humour in it. She is erratic and slightly crazy, but he is defeated: "There was his face in the mirror, gradually becoming asymmetrical, features no longer on the same axis . . . When did this begin to happen? What happens next?"

The description of Leo’s nonrelationship is touchingly etched. He suspects that people can’t remember why he and Flory ever got married. He can’t remember why they got divorced. Then he recalls: “It had something to do with Flory’s worldview.”

In the course of his moviegoing he notices a thin young woman who also frequents the cinema. He nicknames her the Starveling – no, not a good title for a book, either. When he follows her into a restroom he tells a little story that amounts to a remarkable declaration in a scene of devastating humanity.

Philip Roth in late career became the chronicler of the United States; Don DeLillo, however, has long been his country’s wisest seer.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times and author of Ordinary Dogs(Faber)