The best of his ten previous novels-they include The Names (1982) and White Noise (1985)-are virtuoso dissections of contemporary American anomie, half-poignant, half-funny portraits of an enameled society in which ties of family, neighborhood, and religion have melted away.

A gifted writer now in his early sixties, free both of the bombast of a Norman Mailer and the hermeticism of a Pynchon, DeLillo has built a solid critical reputation and has begun to enjoy a growing influence with readers. The problem, of course, is that it is not enough for novelists to have grand ambitions they must have talents to match.Ĭonsider the case of Don DeLillo, whose latest novel, Underworld, at over 800 pages, is his longest and most ambitious to date. Minimalism, which, in the hands of a writer like the late Raymond Carver, could at its best achieve a certain haunted grace, had degenerated into a mannered, suffocating idiom, and a return to a more invigorating sense of public and communal life was something much to be desired.

In principle, this is a welcome development.

From the unwieldy, multi-pound tomes of William Gaddis ( A Frolic of His Own), David Foster Wallace ( Infinite Jest), and Thomas Pynchon ( Mason & Dixon), to the tighter and more disciplined works of Philip Roth ( American Pastoral) and John Updike ( In the Beauty of the Lilies), novelists of varying power and quality have recently been showing a renewed interest in the larger experience of their country and their time. After a long, wearying preoccupation with “minimalism,” it seems that American fiction has begun to return to more ambitious subjects.

Underworld by don delillo