Where to Start with Don DeLillo: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Don DeLillo — whether to begin with White Noise, Underworld, or Libra. A complete reading guide to DeLillo's major novels.
Don DeLillo (born 1936) is the most important American novelist of his generation — the writer who defined postmodern American fiction’s engagement with consumer culture, media, violence, and the fear of death. His major novels — White Noise, Libra, Underworld — constitute the most sustained critical engagement with American life and American mythology in contemporary literature. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Jerusalem Prize.
Where to Start
The Best Entry Point: White Noise (1985)
The essential first DeLillo. Jack Gladney, professor of Hitler Studies at College-on-the-Hill, lives with his fourth wife Babette and a collection of children from various marriages in a world saturated with consumer products, brand names, and television — all of which function to suppress the terror of death that underlies American middle-class life. The ‘airborne toxic event’ — a chemical spill that forces the family to evacuate — brings death into direct confrontation with the mechanisms of denial. DeLillo’s dark comedy is at its most precise and his social observation at its most accurate; the novel is one of the defining accounts of American consumer culture.
The Assassination Novel: Libra (1988)
DeLillo’s fictionalized account of the Kennedy assassination — and his most conventionally plotted major novel. The novel traces Lee Harvey Oswald’s life from his New York childhood through his defection to the Soviet Union and his eventual return, and the conspiracy that uses him as its instrument. DeLillo’s Oswald is not a villain or a hero but a man desperate for significance, manipulated by others into an act he barely understands. The novel’s account of how political violence is produced — by ideology, by wounded ego, by the gap between what a person believes himself to be and how the world treats him — is DeLillo’s most historically grounded fiction.
The Masterpiece: Underworld (1997)
DeLillo’s greatest novel and one of the most ambitious works in American fiction — a 900-page arc from 1951 to the late 1990s, exploring how Cold War America disposed of what it couldn’t acknowledge: nuclear waste, cultural waste, the waste of human potential. The novel opens with one of the great set-pieces in American fiction (the 1951 Dodgers-Giants playoff game, attended by Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, and J. Edgar Hoover, interrupted by the news that the Soviets have tested a nuclear bomb), then traces a baseball hit by Bobby Thomson through decades of history. The backward and forward movement through time — ending, effectively, before it begins — is DeLillo’s most complex formal achievement.
Best approached after: White Noise and Libra. The novel’s scope requires a reader already attuned to DeLillo’s method and themes.
Falling Man (2007)
DeLillo’s account of September 11 — the most direct engagement with the event in serious fiction, and the most psychologically precise. Keith Neudecker survives the collapse of the North Tower and attempts to return to normal life, to his estranged wife, and to himself; the novel traces his failure and partial recovery through the specific forms that trauma takes in ordinary life. DeLillo’s account of the hijacker Hammad — told in three short sections that trace his radicalization — is the novel’s most disturbing achievement: a rendering of political violence from the inside that refuses both condemnation and sympathy.
Cosmopolis (2003)
A short, deliberately stylized novel in which Eric Packer — a twenty-eight-year-old currency trader — crosses Manhattan in his stretch limousine on the day that his financial empire collapses and someone is trying to kill him. The novel is DeLillo’s most obviously allegorical work (Packer is Capital itself, moving through a city that can no longer contain or reflect it) and his most formally extreme. Not an entry point; best approached after the major novels.
DeLillo’s Method
DeLillo’s fiction operates through a specific logic: the surface of American life — consumer products, media language, corporate euphemism, technological systems — is both the subject of his novels and the medium through which his characters think and speak. His characters often sound alike because they have been formed by the same cultural language; this is deliberate. Reading DeLillo means attending to the systems his fiction describes and asking what they reveal about what American culture wants and what it fears. White Noise is the best single entry to this question.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Don DeLillo?
White Noise (1985) is the universally recommended starting point — a novel about Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler Studies at a small American college, and his family's encounter with an 'airborne toxic event' that forces them to confront the fear of death they have been suppressing with consumer products, television, and the noise of modern American life. It is DeLillo's most accessible novel: funny, precise, and immediately recognisable in its account of the media-saturated American consumer environment. It won the National Book Award and remains his most widely read work.
What is Underworld about?
Underworld (1997) is DeLillo's most ambitious novel — a work of nearly 900 pages that begins with the famous 1951 Dodgers-Giants playoff game ('The Shot Heard Round the World') and traces a baseball hit by Bobby Thomson backward and forward through decades of American Cold War history. Characters include waste management executive Nick Shay, artist Klara Sax, comedian Lenny Bruce (at the game), and many others. The novel is organized around waste and the question of what American culture does with what it doesn't want to see. DeLillo's acknowledged masterpiece; best approached after White Noise.
What is Libra about?
Libra (1988) is DeLillo's fictionalized account of the assassination of John F. Kennedy — told through the parallel stories of Lee Harvey Oswald's life and the conspiracy that, in the novel, recruits him as its instrument. DeLillo's Oswald is not the simple lone gunman of the Warren Commission report but a man driven by a need for significance in a world that consistently ignores him, and therefore susceptible to being used by others. The novel is simultaneously a historical novel, a conspiracy thriller, and DeLillo's most sustained account of how violence and media intersect in American life.
Is Don DeLillo a difficult read?
DeLillo's prose is dense but accessible — he writes in complete, carefully constructed sentences that are syntactically clear, and his fiction moves at a consistent pace. The difficulty is not syntactic but conceptual: he is interested in the systems (media, consumer culture, Cold War ideology, terrorism) that structure contemporary experience, and his characters are often more representative of these systems than they are individually psychologised in the conventional sense. Readers who want deeply personal, psychological fiction may find him cold; readers interested in how American culture works will find him indispensable.
