First published in 1978
Running Dog is Don DeLillo’s sixth novel. He wrote it several years before he achieved fame for White Noise, the first in a string of award-winning books that showcase DeLillo’s quirky humor and unique perspective on the human condition. Running Dog has some thriller elements, but they give way to DeLillo’s “big picture” assessment of the quest to acquire, a quest that is often more satisfying than making the actual acquisition.
Lightborne deals in upscale erotica from his New York gallery. He acquires antiquities and minor works of art that depict erections and coitus. One collector of such products is a senator who deals with Lightborne through an intermediary. The senator keeps his collection locked away in a windowless house that adjoins his own through a fake fireplace.
Lightborne thinks he has a source who can deliver a film of an orgy that occurred in Hitler’s bunker at about the time of Hitler’s death. The agent fronting for the senator would like to acquire the film, but competing buyers are making life difficult for Lightborne. Organized crime takes an interest, as does a young but successful smut dealer in Dallas. Their competition for the unseen product puts Lightborne at risk; hence DeLillo’s flirtation with the thriller genre.
While Lightborne shares the spotlight, the true protagonist is Moll Robbins. Moll writes for Running Dog, a publication that once positioned itself as radical. The publication takes its name from the Vietnam-era phrase “capitalist lackeys and running dogs” used to describe the western obsession with consumerism and class distinctions. After the marketplace for radical publications dwindled, Running Dog began to focus on sensational stories. Moll writes about sex because sex sells but she misses the “sense of evil design” that comes with investigating government conspiracies. She’s trying to get back in the political game by investigating rumors that a wealthy senator has a hidden collection of erotic art.
During a drunken and seductive interview with the aging senator, Moll learns that a Senate committee is investigating a secret organization called Radical Matrix. Once a procurement arm of the CIA, Radical Matrix has spun off into a self-funded shop of dirty deeds operated by Earl Mudger, who flew clandestine operations in Laos under contract with the CIA before he was hired to run Radical Matrix. Moll becomes involved with Radical Matrix agent Glen Selvy, an irreducible spy who has no identity beyond his paranoid existence as a spook. Radical Matrix comes to view Selvy as a threat for paranoid reasons of its own.
All of this adds up to a dark and amusing story about people who muddle through with evil or unsavory plans to get what they want because that’s all that life seems to offer. The porn acquisition story is particularly funny because none of the people fighting over the film have a clue whether the rumors of a sex romp in Hitler’s bunker are true. The collateral story about Radical Matrix seems to be poking fun at conspiracy theories and the paranoia that afflicts the intelligence community, as well as the continuing and unsuccessful political effort to keep track of CIA mischief. While the two halves of the story never cohere, each half has some merit. Running Dog allows a glimpse of the talent that would eventually burst forth from DeLillo and, to his fans at least, might be worth reading for that reason alone.
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