In the Shadow of the Towers: The World Trade Center Haunted Don DeLillo's Writing for Three Decades. Now He Draws a Stunned, Allusive Novel from Its Destruction

Poole, Steven, New Statesman (1996)

You could say there have been foreshadowings. From Don DeLillo's Underworld (1997), the great American novel of the second half of the 20th century: "My son used to believe that he could look at a plane in flight and make it explode in midair by simply thinking it ... he'd sense an element of catastrophe tacit in the very fact of a flying object filled with people." Elsewhere in that novel, in 1974, two characters watch the World Trade Center being constructed: "Very terrible thing but you have to look at it, I think." DeLillo's fifth novel, Players (1977), features a woman who works in a grief management firm high up in the newly finished World Trade Center: "the towers didn't seem permanent", she thinks, but then, "Where else would you stack all that grief?" The same novel also depicts a cabal of terrorists who want to blow up the Stock Exchange.

In Mao II (1991), "Out the south windows the Trade towers stood cut against the night, intensely massed and near. This is the word 'loomed' in all its prolonged and impending force." Mao II's novelist protagonist argues that terrorists are winning a "zero-sum game" against novelists: "Beckett is the last writer to shape the way we think and see. After him, the major work involves midair explosions and crumbled buildings. This …

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Publication information: Article title: In the Shadow of the Towers: The World Trade Center Haunted Don DeLillo's Writing for Three Decades. Now He Draws a Stunned, Allusive Novel from Its Destruction. Contributors: Poole, Steven - Author. Magazine title: New Statesman (1996). Volume: 136. Issue: 4844 Publication date: May 14, 2007. Page number: 54+. © Not available. COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale Group.

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