’And what do you remember, finally, when everyone has gone home and the streets are empty of devotion and hope, swept by river wind? Is the memory thin and bitter and does it shame you with its fundamental untruth — all nuance and wishful silhouette? Or does the power of transcendence linger, the sense of an event that violates natural forces, something holy that throbs on the hot horizon, the vision you crave because you need a sign to stand against your doubt?’



Gerhard Richter’s The Funeral, featured prominently in the story.

.’After hearing the opening lyrics to the Bright Eyes song Gold Mine Gutted , I spent 2 years of high school believing that Don DeLillo was some obscure brand of whisky. While passing time between lectures in college, I stumbled upon DeLillo’s short storyin my lit. textbook and, after feeling slightly dense, dove in. I was instantly transfixed by the stories prose and poignancy, falling in love over and over again with each blessed word.The power of transcendence lingered in my 19 year old heart, so I read White Noise soon after and would become swept up in the vein of postmodernism from there on out. The short story, and the startling nun scene at the conclusion of White Noise has lead me to always associate DeLillo with nuns and his exciting blend of hope and emptiness that he enacts with his nun figures. Within this collection, the nine stories ordered chronologically from 1979-2011, DeLillo continues to dazzle by highlighting the ironies of life. Sifting through the white noises and silence of life, DeLillo has a gift of honing in on the building blocks of human consciousness and our most deep primal instincts of fear, longing, loneliness, and wonderment to place them in tangible, carefully chosen and neatly ordered words that manage to define the ineffable.I was initially surprised to seeto be the title story of this 2011 publication, as I had been under the impression – once again, wrongly – that DeLillo’s short fiction, especially a story that has already been anthologized in textbooks, were commonly read and previously collected. DeLillo actually began his writing career by publishing short fiction in magazines, getting his bearings and exercising his style before switching to the longer form¹. His first return to the short form in 1979 spawned this collection’s first story. This book, a finalist for both the 2011 Story Prize and the 2012 PEN/Faulkner award, offers a broad look at the ideas and social critiques, ideas that defined him as a leading literary figure when he expanded upon in his novels. Through ideas ranging through war, religion, technology, Logic class, stalkers and natural disasters, DeLillo pinpoints how we all have some ‘’ as members of the human race. We are all an orchestration of our fears and desires and are corralled into our lifestyles and livelihoods by the larger working society we dwell within. Despite occasionally seeming dated, DeLillo is the scream from the modern human soul, drown out by the buzz of society.’ he asks us in, which features two astronauts drifting above the earth, pondering on the masses below, as they seek out enemy satellites to destroy. Looking outward to define what we feel inward is a major motif working through many of these stories. What we see around us, the events/objects/people that disgusts or delights, works as a sort of sonar for our interior self; we go out and bump our consciousness against the world, and what bounces back tells us a great deal of who we are. Inwe follow a man as he follows a woman through the streets and subways of New York, observing the insights into her character which allows him to reflect on the similarities within him and putting his own self-analysis into form.works in a similar fashion, as a woman side-steps her own discomfort with her life by observing the pathetic conditions of another. Despite disliking him and despite her inner voice warning her against, she invites him into her own apartment because that unconscious bond formed through their common, pitiful humanity. Both stories conclude with a confrontation, a metaphorical bumping into one another’s consciousness. These collisions leaves behind a residue, an abstract human stain on surface of our consciousness². ‘’ is the feeling that lingers with the woman once the man has left. Our realities become fractals of thought, an infinitely telescoping association of any object with everything we have ever experienced.Such an overload of associations in our lives manages to go relatively unnoticed through our waking life, yet it eats at the fringes of our mind, leaving us elusive pangs of discomfort. We all have different methods of assuaging the discomfort, ironically looking outward again for an inward comfort. Continuing on the story, the woman spends three days staring at Gerhard Richter’s series of painting on the Baader-Mienhof Baader-Meinhoff gang’s deaths and funeral.’ she asserts to the man, ‘’. These words, incredibly portentous of the story’s conclusion, reflects on how she see’s meaning associated with everything around her, yet is not able to process it all into one streamlined, structured and succinct statement on what anything truly means. She silences these inner pangs by looking outward to a painting, hoping to understand one small object as a compensation for all the other meanings that escape her. In the powerfulinmates at a minimum-security prison all gather around the television to watch the daily economics report put on by two young girls. The inmates, most of them for incarcerated for economic reasons ranging from failure-to-pay-taxes to market manipulation and arms-dealing, find a sense of community and comfort watching the world market crumble. They watch two girls apply blunt meaning well beyond their capacity to intricate systems, while also being able to express inner angst together as a group.’ This line fromplays out the irony of the interior self with the exterior world. Through these stories we watch people either find comfort by staying closed within themselves, safe from the greater picture, or moving out into the wide, anonymous comfort of being just a face in the masses. In, the streets and the concern of those around Kyle are her comforts during earthquakes, whereas the unnamed runner inis a background-extra of sorts in a discomforting event while in a park, seeing the interior world of his well organized office building to be comfort away from the erratic outside.makes some of the best statements on societal interaction, showing the comfort of group support, while also extolling the virtues of self-reflection and reverting back to the basics. The inmates lives are much easier and more stress-free without being constantly plugged into society at large. Cellphones and up to the nanosecond market updates keep the world running 24-7, stretching the sanity of any person to the limits when they are forced to keep up in such an information age. Similar to, where a man finds the greatest comforts in a tropical paradise, floating free and cut off from the world, yet is singularly focused on the longings of human need for companionship, such as the extramarital affair with a fellow vacationer.My personal favorite story, a story crackling with beautiful prose that becomes the silent, still winter landscape of a quiet campus, was. The story, named for a quote from the Frank O'Hara poem Meditations in an Emergency that a character references, features two college students walking around the city, affixing meaning to everything they see. The two students attend a logic class together, and the power of words and language, the deep meanings that lurk within everything, becomes a bit of an obsession for them. Like MFA students, they create an entire life for an old man they follow, insisting on plausibility and total, well-rounded understanding of even the most mundane details of his existence and history. They use language and logic as a form of pure creation, giving meaning to others to give meaning to their own vacant hours between classes. Language becomes the tool of creation, much like it is for DeLillo himself writing the stories. His use of language to express the ironies that flow through this collection are at their best in. Phrases like ‘,’ ‘,’ or his comment that a Mission Specialist is one who, all exploit the wonderful ways one idea can be formed by two separate, merging ideas that seem as if they should be like oil and water when analyzed on their own.DeLillo has some marvelous turns of phrase and poetic expressions that dazzle the mind like fireworks to the eye, as well as incredibly insightful social commentary. That said, there are times where his ideas and words fall a bit flat. For example, the heavy-handedness present when a spacecraft’s weapons system is called being ‘open-minded’ when activated is a little bit of a groaner in a story about two astronauts reflecting on the human condition while simultaneously playing a part in it’s destruction. DeLillo takes a lot of criticism in his novels for having dated ideas and references, however, reading them in their present gives a very authentic feel., written in 2011, is eerily relevant with the Euro crisis of the past year and words like ‘smartphone’ feel natural. However, such a term may seem antiquated in ten or twenty years if it recedes from common usage, and the idea of outdated technology being called ‘smart’ may seem comical to those using what may be extraordinarily more advanced technology in the years to come. Even when DeLillo’s prose is faulty, it is more like a commercial firework that fails to lift off the ground and instead tips over to gyrate across the lawn still spewing bright plumes of colored sparks rather than a mere dud that becomes a silent void beneath the dark sky.These short stories are brief bursts of genius. While there is a bit of filler, some stories seeming dull beside the rest, there are many moments of heart-in-your-throat enjoyment as each word passes through you.just might be one of my favorites short stories of all time now. DeLillo offers an incredible dose of irony that harnesses an authentic human nature dwarfed within a threatening existence. Like the astronauts in, we sit silent and detached from the world, looking back at it and wondering how people manage to survive with so much fear, violence and destruction. I feel compelled to spend a long time immersed in the mans novels now. Although he is not actually some little-known exotic whisky as I had once thought, it is good to know you can still get drunk off his prose. And for that, I raise my glass to you, Don DeLillo.¹ ‘NPR’s All Things Considered. ‘² The best mentioning of things bumping into one another is found in the title story. There is a powerful questioning of faith and God’s purity, asking how could a God stay pure when always reaching out to clean the impurities of the world by having us hear the inner conflicts of a nun washing her hands: ‘The artwork depicting Midnight in Dostoevsky that accompanied the story when it was first published in The New Yorker.