The Review of Contemporary Fiction

American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo's Dialogue with Culture by Mark Osteen
Irving Malin

Mark Osteen. American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture. Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. 299 pp. $42.00.

Although there have been books (by Tom LeClair and Douglas Keesey) and collections of criticism (by Frank Lentricchia), Mark Osteen’s book on DeLillo is surely the most comprehensive and daring yet. His title is taken from White Noise—Murray Siskind, an expert on tabloid culture and shopping, wants to “immerse himself in American magic and dread.” The phrase points toward DeLillo’s beginnings as a Catholic. His religious background—his desire to find a kind of transcendence in our underworld—is one of the secret sources of all DeLillo’s fictions. Osteen’s previous book on Joyce, his awareness of Catholic rituals and language, his belief in the supernatural, all provide the central part of his criticism. I need merely note some of his chapter titles—“The Theology of Secrets,” or “The Nature of Diminishing Existence”—to demonstrate the religious subtexts. If I turn to any page by Osteen I find a brilliant explanation of details I have missed in my previous readings. On page 79, for example, he refers to the Nobel Laureate Shazar Lazarus Ratner (who gives his name to Ratner’s Star) and suggests that his middle name “implies his potential for regeneration. A believer in kabbalistic number-mysticism, Ratner (an avatar of Pythagoras) appears in Chapter 10 as if to verify that 10 embodies perfection.” On page 140 Osteen uses Tap’s interest in glossalalia to discuss the relation of language and theology in The Names. Likewise, Nick’s fascination with “The Cloud of Unkowing” in Underworld, is elaborated brilliantly. I find it interesting that Underworld, like The Recognitions, Mason and Dixon, and Women and Men, assumes or denies a spectral dimension. Such a brief clue provides an antidote to the usual criticism of these works as merely paranoid. It broadens the awareness that texts do not merely engage in contemporary concerns. [Irving Malin]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo's Dialogue with Culture by Mark Osteen Irving Malin Mark Osteen. American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture. Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. 299 pp. $42.00. Although there have been books (by Tom LeClair and Douglas Keesey) and collections of criticism (by Frank Lentricchia), Mark Osteen’s book on DeLillo is surely the most comprehensive and daring yet. His title is taken from White Noise—Murray Siskind, an expert on tabloid culture and shopping, wants to “immerse himself in American magic and dread.” The phrase points toward DeLillo’s beginnings as a Catholic. His religious background—his desire to find a kind of transcendence in our underworld—is one of the secret sources of all DeLillo’s fictions. Osteen’s previous book on Joyce, his awareness of Catholic rituals and language, his belief in the supernatural, all provide the central part of his criticism. I need merely note some of his chapter titles—“The Theology of Secrets,” or “The Nature of Diminishing Existence”—to demonstrate the religious subtexts. If I turn to any page by Osteen I find a brilliant explanation of details I have missed in my previous readings. On page 79, for example, he refers to the Nobel Laureate Shazar Lazarus Ratner (who gives his name to Ratner’s Star) and suggests that his middle name “implies his potential for regeneration. A believer in kabbalistic number-mysticism, Ratner (an avatar of Pythagoras) appears in Chapter 10 as if to verify that 10 embodies perfection.” On page 140 Osteen uses Tap’s interest in glossalalia to discuss the relation of language and theology in The Names. Likewise, Nick’s fascination with “The Cloud of Unkowing” in Underworld, is elaborated brilliantly. I find it interesting that Underworld, like The Recognitions, Mason and Dixon, and Women and Men, assumes or denies a spectral dimension. Such a brief clue provides an antidote to the usual criticism of these works as merely paranoid. It broadens the awareness that texts do not merely engage in contemporary concerns. [Irving Malin]

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