Don DeLillo, Connoisseur of Chaos

style="overflow: hidden; color: #000000; background-color: transparent; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; border: medium none;">Don DeLillo is a connoisseur of chaos. His authorial stance, if he may be said to have one, to the disasters peculiar to our time is that of a witness, bemused, detached, finical, whose task it is to render measured reports of the mind-numbing things that take place daily before his unblinking gaze. The tone of voice is steady, the temperature degree zero. DeLillo’s writing style owes much to the French nouveau roman and its theorists, led by Roland Barthes and Alain Robbe-Grillet, and mediated through the work of closer-at-hand messengers and exemplars such as Susan Sontag and Joan Didion. From these and most figures in the field, however, he differs in at least one significant aspect; namely, his humour. As anyone will attest who has read White Noise, for instance, DeLillo is disruptively and subtly, even surreptitiously, funny.