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Mark Osteen. American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo's Dialogue with Culture. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000. 299 pp.
Mark Osteen's latest book offers an excellent overview of Don DeLillo's novelistic career and deserves a careful reading by anyone interested in DeLiIIo. Ranging from DeLillo's early Americana (1971) to Underworld (1 997),Osteen crafts his argument around the persistence of variations on DeLillo's own terms of "magic" and "dread" and deftly traces through DeLillo's career the evolution of the forms of magic that he deploys against the continuance of dread;thus American Magic and Dread offers a counterweight to those who might identify DeLiIIo as an apologist for postmodern drift.
If it is a perverse mark of veneration and distinction in American literary circles to be sneered at in a high profile venue, then it can be fairly said that Don DeLiIIo has arrived and Mark Osteen's critical practice has, in a sense, helped. In a recent Atlantic Monthly piece (July/August 2001) DeLiIIo figures prominently (along with Annie Proulx, Cormac McCarthy, Paul Auster, and Toni Morrison among others) in what is...