This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves. The fiction of Don DeLillo exhibits an ongoing concern with the proliferation. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. In his 1988 novel, Libra, DeLillo explores the life of Lee Harvey Oswald. Such is the interplay between theories of the postmodern and the content of DeLillo’s novels, one might be forgiven for thinking either that the theorists who posited such notions have done a fine job of capturing the spirit of our times, or, indeed, that DeLillo is one of the few practising novelists who actually reads such theory.

Where Coover employs the bombastic style and language of what Tom LeClair calls the ‘art of excess’, DeLillo’s more measured, reserved style, might, for some, provide evidence that there is, as the Columbia History of the American Novel suggests, a form of ‘postmodern realism’.1 Indeed, it is the very presence of the ‘real’ in the novel which, for some critics, means that Libra should not be read as ‘one more enactment of postmodernism’, but rather ‘as a realist novel’.2 And yet it seems to me to be impossible to ignore the fact that the book, and indeed DeLillo’s entire corpus since his third novel Great Jones Street (1973), is replete with many of the traits and themes of postmodernism so all-pervading is the air of the postmodern in his works indeed, they seem to attest to the accuracy of Fredric Jameson’simplicit suggestion that postmodernism is the cultural dominant of the latter half of the twentieth-century. Don DeLillo’s relationship to postmodernism seems to differ considerably from that of a writer such as Robert Coover.

Libra by Don DeLillo