Don DeLillo is often cited as the Great American novelist, or as the New York Review of Books called him, “the chief shaman of the paranoid school of American fiction”. He himself says he writes not simply in English but “American”, and has received just about every other award that the US establishment can throw at him.

Even so, DeLillo has never written like an insider, or behaved much like one. He no longer carries around a card saying “I don’t want to talk about it” to give to members of the press, but he still carries a mystique. You may have enjoyed noticing how many “rare” interviews appeared in the run-up to the release of Zero K, for instance. He also, crucially, writes from the point of view of people who don’t quite fit into the world in which they find themselves. People who often seem to be trying to decipher and translate messages from elsewhere.

Perhaps part of his ability to speak so well for America comes from his understanding that it is (or at least, it was) a country full of such outsiders. As he told the Paris Review: “America was and is the immigrant’s dream, and as the son of two immigrants I was attracted by the sense of possibility that had drawn my grandparents and parents. This was a subject that would allow me to develop a range ... a range and a freedom.”

He has also described travelling a similar psychological distance to his parents, when he crossed the bridge from his own Italian neighbourhood in the Bronx to Manhattan. He was arriving somewhere different and baffling – and it was this realisation that partly inspired his first novel, Americana.

Blacksmith seems like a safe, quiet dream of the US, in the same middle-American territory as the Simpsons' Springfield

He must have undergone a similar mental transition when writing White Noise. Only this time it was as the quintessential New York native, the determinedly difficult novelist who was “part of a long modernist line starting with James Joyce”, ending up in a “small-town setting”.

Not that the character Murray Jay Siskind in any way speaks for the novelist. But you can imagine a wry smile from the author as he describes this fellow New Yorker’s attempts to come to terms with suburban life, declarations such as: “I can’t help being happy in a town called Blacksmith. I’m here to avoid situations...” The assumption that Blacksmith will be free of “situations” turns out to be wide of the mark – but it’s easy to understand why Murray thinks so. Blacksmith seems like a safe, quiet dream of the US, occupying the same vaguely middle-American territory as the cartoon Springfield – and much like the Simpsons’ hometown, Blacksmith is recognisably typical, even if much about it is heightened, teetering on the absurd. It’s an ideal location for DeLillo to wander into, with his outsider’s ability to see the strange in the everyday, and to start testing out ideas about what it means to experience America. How it feels to be embedded in a world of mantra-like jingles, of consumer bounty, of lines of station wagons and of the promise of better living through chemistry and technology.

As I read this satire of US culture and assumptions I was curiously reminded of another outsider view of America. I kept thinking about the very English (and Old Etonian) Aldous Huxley’s transposition of what he saw as American culture on to a futuristic London in Brave New World. In fact, Blacksmith could be taken as a realisation of everything Huxley feared about “Americanisation”. Like Huxley, DeLillo describes characters so distracted by the products in the supermarket, by goofy entertainers (Elvis Presley in White Noise), and by unstoppable media saturation, that they don’t even notice their own slavery.

Once I started along this line, I started seeing parallels everywhere. Huxley’s characters worship “Ford”, DeLillo’s say “Toyota Celica” in their sleep with religious fervour. In Brave New World, the drug soma offers a holiday from reality; in White Noise, Dylar takes away the fear of death.

Such parallels are interesting and come from a similar standpoint, slightly removed from an all-immersive culture. But the differences between the books are just as telling as the similarities. DeLillo’s Blacksmith is a more complicated place than Huxley’s future London, even if it also seems like a cartoon version of the US. In Brave New World, the counterpoint dystopia comes in the form of John the “savage”, whose apparently primitive instincts allow him to see beyond the fetters of the World State and to escape them. Savagery is presented as an antidote to technology and all it brings. In White Noise, there’s a different equation at work. As DeLillo explains it (again to the Paris Review): “As technology advances in complexity and scope, fear becomes more primitive.” Here, our primal instincts don’t help us overcome technological oppression; instead, they are subject to technology. They also leave us ever more in thrall to the consumer world. Jack Gladney’s rich American life, full of distractions and material possessions, drives him and his wife Babette ever deeper into the most basic of all problems: how to avoid dying. Their solution is to seek out the advanced medical technology of Dylar, which becomes a brilliant metaphor for the empty promise of the American dream. Not least because it doesn’t seem to work as it should. And it sends Jack and Babette yet further into despair and desperation. Small wonder that Babette complains, “The theme of this story is my pain … and my attempts to end it.”

Viewed this way, it seems that DeLillo has conjured an even bleaker scenario than Huxley. In his world, there’s no point trying to fight back, or question, or even try to ease your pain because to do so is to go against the inevitable. “All plots tend to move deathward.” It’s bleak. You can see why, writing in the Washington Post, the columnist Jonathan Yardley accused DeLillo of holding “an ostentatiously gloomy view of American society”.

Yet as always with Don DeLillo, there’s another layer. The bleakness is offset by, to quote Murray Jay Siskind, “a wonderful brimming spirit of innocence and fun”. Just as Murray urges his students to take delight in the “can-do” spirit of movie recreations of car crashes (surely a reference to another quintessential outsider, JG Ballard), so DeLillo invites us to enjoy Jack Gladney’s attempts to escape overwhelming events like the airborne toxic event, and his own death. Nor are we just laughing at him: we also sympathise with him and appreciate his rich sense of the absurd. How not to like someone who asks the boy planning to break the world record for sitting in a cage with snakes: “Do you understand that you are risking death for a couple of lines in a paperback book?”

By the end of the book, it’s hard not to feel close to Jack Gladney, for all his faults. We have to have some sympathy, after Don DeLillo has allowed us to spend so long in his home, among the intimate, affectionate back and forth of family life, following him around so much of Blacksmith. It’s hard not to feel that we have been given an inside view, even if we also have an outside perspective.