The National Book Foundation recently announced that Don DeLillo would be the next recipient of their medal for distinguished contribution to American letters. This hardly comes as a surprise, given DeLillo’s 40-year writing career and the esteem in which many of his books have been held for decades. His reputation rests on a handful of extremely well-regarded novels – White Noise, Underworld and Libra chief among them – but, as a stylist, it is often difficult to know where to situate him; or what to say about his body of work as a whole.

Terrorism (in Falling Man and Players), assassinations (in Libra), conspiracies (in Running Dog), and violent fits of anarchy and anticapitalist mayhem (in Cosmopolis) pervade his work and drive his plots. But it is fair to say that his work may ultimately strike us as much less plot-centered than panic-centered. In DeLillo’s work, whatever its time and circumstance, it is almost as if everybody already knows that their acts of violence and destruction are doomed and meaningless in the face of globalised systems that devour them, but that they seem powerless to imagine any other kind of response, or any other way to feel invested or alive.

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For all of the diverse subjects and themes he has explored – the role of the media and spectacle; terrorism and political agency; information overload, waste and mass consumption; the endless and doomed quest for patterns, meaning, knowledge, and truth – there is, across the entire range of his work, a voice and a tone that predominates, one that carries beneath it this ever-present and unshakeable panic. It speaks through many of his narrators and principal characters. It is the quasi-collective voice of a fairly narrow demographic, as DeLillo understands it: mostly white, educated, middle- or upper-class; and often employed in the intertwined realms of media, finance, arts and culture, academia, and politics. Surely there are notable exceptions, but in general the typical DeLillo narrator or character employs a distinctive cultivated tone that is urbane, intelligent, morbidly witty, distracted, perceptive, self-consumed and vaguely stoic, even in (especially in) instances where the plots themselves threaten to annihilate reason, order and identity. This, in short, is the world that often shapes the conditions for those of us below, who feel somehow outside of it, detached from it and ignorant of its inner workings, even as we feel our umbilical link to it.

The signature voice that DeLillo associates with this milieu is exactly what some readers hate most about his work, but it’s also the particular thing that so many of his fans admire. The cold, disaffected and “rational” discourse that his addled thinkers spout at or past each other in great gobs of prose is a particularly loaded form of conversation, and its undercurrent is the corrosion of the soul that so many of his characters feel. Above all else, it is the systematic and laborious narration of this soul-corrosion that serves as DeLillo’s chief preoccupation and the primary narrative burden he imposes on his readers.

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This obsession with grasping futilely toward the fate of the corroded soul links many of his otherwise disparate plots: the cold war crises in Underworld, the terrorist intrigues in Players, the torments of family in White Noise. Over and over, DeLillo’s characters seem compelled to deploy the hopelessly faulty tools of morbid wit and repartee in an effort to understand something about a world that is mostly incomprehensible and inaccessible. The problem, for his characters and readers alike, is that they and we know that such an achievement is largely impossible under present conditions. And so we find DeLillo returning repeatedly in his work to the violent individual act of destruction: the shooting, the bombing and the assassination. We find it in the science-fictional labyrinth of Ratner’s Star, in the spare fable of global financial markets in Cosmopolis, and in the family drama of White Noise, and almost everywhere else.

Something desultory and jagged haunts all of DeLillo’s bored and articulate characters. His fictional universe, for good or ill, is first and foremost one in which knowledgeable, worldly, and tormented people are desperately seeking to comprehend and outrace their omnipresent fear and dread. It is there in the relentless pull of the future that echoes through Underworld and Cosmopolis; in the toxic clouds and designer drugs that permeate White Noise; in the panic of post-catastrophe New York in Falling Man; and in the fearful message from outer space in Ratner’s Star. “The theme of this story is my pain,” as Babette laments in White Noise, “and my attempts to end it.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Don DeLillo attends the 2012 Carl Sandburg Literary Awards dinner. Photograph: Timothy Hiatt/Getty Images

It may not be the most grievous pain the modern world knows, but it is no less real, and DeLillo’s work as a whole charts a path where this story of seeking an end to this particular species of pain gets told again and again. If there is something distinctly American about DeLillo’s variety of failed transcendence, it might just be his insistence on playing out, like an endless film loop of samizdat footage, the rigged contest between hope and reason, salvation and annihilation. Like many of us, he is too much a product of his time to be able to escape the panics and fears and everyday terrors of life. Each of his books returns, in its own distinct fashion, to this problem of the terrors that partial knowledge imposes on us.

In Cosmopolis, his slender tale of the collapse of global markets, DeLillo returns to an image that featured prominently in Players, written almost a quarter-century earlier. In both books, we encounter the image of a desperate and politically motivated American man who sits down cross-legged in the street, pours gasoline all over his body, and calmly sets himself on fire. For DeLillo, this horrific and spectacular act of self-immolation seems to be the logical outgrowth of our deranged society, a world where we know too much to do nothing, but a world in which we feel we have no recourse to commit meaningful violence against anyone or anything other than ourselves.