James Wood sobre DeLillo:
« . . . DeLillo can write exceptionally well, with exactitude and lyrical originality. (...) But [he] is a very strange writer. For every elegant, compact sentence closing around its meaning as if delicately preying on it, there are passages that bear the other DeLillo mark, which could best be called a kind of fastidious vagueness. These are passages in which fancy words are deployed with a cool, technical confidence, in a spirit of precision, as if they have actual referents, but in which meaning is smeared and obscured.
(. . .)
The 9/11 novel, if one must call it that, has been effective at depicting the impact of the trauma on ordinary lives: marriages repaired or broken by the event, projects and plans sundered, lives recalibrated, and the presence of a new, seeping anxiety. What it has been unable so far to achieve, as this novel and John Updike's Terrorist prove, is anything like the examination of the psychological sources of resentment that Dostoevsky and Conrad produced. Updike's eighteen-year-old Muslim firebrand was entirely incredible, nothing more than a scarecrow and scapegoat stuffed full of obvious authorial research. In Falling Man, DeLillo devotes two brief, misbegotten sections to the 9/11 plotters: we see them assembling in Hamburg, and then later in Florida. The writing is a good deal better than Updike's, but it lacks conviction, again because inquiry is not sustained but merely arranged. The chapters are so short that they lack the space to become serious; they seem dropped into the novel. The book, one feels, should either have omitted the terrorists altogether or trained its gaze centrally on them, as DeLillo sustainedly pictured the impotence and resentment of Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra. As it is done here, the fleeting imagining of radical evil seems shallow, and only adds to the general impression of a book that is all limbs -- many articulations and joints, an artful map of connections, but finally no living, pulsing center.»
« . . . DeLillo can write exceptionally well, with exactitude and lyrical originality. (...) But [he] is a very strange writer. For every elegant, compact sentence closing around its meaning as if delicately preying on it, there are passages that bear the other DeLillo mark, which could best be called a kind of fastidious vagueness. These are passages in which fancy words are deployed with a cool, technical confidence, in a spirit of precision, as if they have actual referents, but in which meaning is smeared and obscured.
(. . .)
The 9/11 novel, if one must call it that, has been effective at depicting the impact of the trauma on ordinary lives: marriages repaired or broken by the event, projects and plans sundered, lives recalibrated, and the presence of a new, seeping anxiety. What it has been unable so far to achieve, as this novel and John Updike's Terrorist prove, is anything like the examination of the psychological sources of resentment that Dostoevsky and Conrad produced. Updike's eighteen-year-old Muslim firebrand was entirely incredible, nothing more than a scarecrow and scapegoat stuffed full of obvious authorial research. In Falling Man, DeLillo devotes two brief, misbegotten sections to the 9/11 plotters: we see them assembling in Hamburg, and then later in Florida. The writing is a good deal better than Updike's, but it lacks conviction, again because inquiry is not sustained but merely arranged. The chapters are so short that they lack the space to become serious; they seem dropped into the novel. The book, one feels, should either have omitted the terrorists altogether or trained its gaze centrally on them, as DeLillo sustainedly pictured the impotence and resentment of Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra. As it is done here, the fleeting imagining of radical evil seems shallow, and only adds to the general impression of a book that is all limbs -- many articulations and joints, an artful map of connections, but finally no living, pulsing center.»
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