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OSTEEN, MARK.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. 299 pp. $42.50 (L31.50).
Mark Osteen's American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo's Dialogue with Culture is the third book-length study (or sixth, if we include essay collections) devoted exclusively to DeLillo and offers the first thorough treatment of his early short fiction. Tom LeClair's landmark work, In the Loop (1987), read DeLillo as a systems novelist; Douglas Keesey's Don DeLillo (1993) provided an overview of DeLillo's relationship to narrative traditions (thriller, French New Wave cinema, and so on).1 Of the collections, Frank Lentricchia memorably "Introduced" DeLillo in 1991, the same year that he edited New Essays on White Noise; more recently, Hugh Ruppersburg and Tim Engles brought us Critical Essays on Don DeLillo (2000). If these books and DeLillo's own Underworld (1997) helped secure the novelist's place in the 20th century canon, Osteen's study shows us why DeLillo should remain an important voice in the 21st century.
With the thoroughness characteristic of his earlier books, The Economy of Ulysses: Making Both Ends Meet (1995) and the critical edition of DeLillo's White Noise (1998), Osteen, in American Magic and Dread, establishes DeLillo as an American James Joyce. More than just another lapsed Catholic with encyclopedic knowledge, DeLillo shares Joyce's devotion to the transforming power of language. As Osteen puts it, DeLillo's "language is the magic that diffuses dread" (119). Central to Osteen's argument are the notions that art can both nourish and fortify us, and that the intertextuality of DeLillo's art helps both novelist and reader resist the systems in which both are implicated. An assiduous chronicler of DeLillo's references, Osteen provides a valuable service to those of us who have not read as widely as DeLillo has. Yet, in Americana (1971), for example, the novelist's many allusions are not merely a form of high...