Running Dog by Don DeLillo

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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The Silence by Don DeLillo

Published by Scribner on October 20, 2020

Reasons for fear multiply every decade. Bioweapons. Nuclear weapons. Genetic warfare. Satellite surveillance and cellphone tracking. An overheating Earth. Microplastics in our air, water and food. The characters in Don DeLillo’s The Silence consider multiple sources of fear as they try to explain the inexplicable. Has time collapsed? Have our minds been digitally remastered? Is human existence “an experiment that happens to be falling apart?”

What exactly has taken place in the near-future (2022) setting of The Silence is unclear. A power failure silences televisions and brings the world to a halt, but what caused the power to fail? Sunspots? An electromagnetic pulse? An alien invasion? If we are all living inside a form of virtual reality, perhaps someone pulled the plug. Or the newfound silence might portend the stilling of normal experience, “a deviation in nature itself.” One character asks, “Is this the casual embrace that marks the fall of world civilization?”

The relatively brief story follows a handful of characters. Jim Kripps and his wife Tessa Berens are on an airplane, talking about the randomness of human memory (as opposed to the completeness of digital memory) while Jim reads aloud the flight data from a monitor — “Filling time. Being boring. Living life.” The plane crashes, apparently while landing, although Jim is upset that they missed the pre-landing snack. Tessa remembers that they were “sort of floating” as the plane came down and Jim remembers banging his head on the window, leaving him with a minor injury. An ambiguous van transports them to an ambiguous clinic where Jim gets ambiguous treatment for the cut on his head. Perhaps to celebrate still being alive — if they are — Jim and Tessa duck into a restroom for a quickie. Others who enter the building have their own stories: stalled elevators, an abandoned subway, barricaded storefronts. Building employees have no explanations — they are there to stitch wounds, not to answer questions — and they surely don’t have a better understanding of “the situation” than anyone else.

Jim and Tessa were planning to join Diane Lucas and Max Stenner for the Superbowl. Martin Dekker has dropped in on Diane and Max, although he does not seem to be an entirely welcome guest. Diane taught physics before she retired and Martin is her former student. When the television screen goes dark, Max surveys their neighbors and reports that they are not blaming the Chinese for the power outage. The implication is that Max might. It seems the absence of evidence will not stand in the way of conspiracy theories that are growing in the street, although without the internet, they need to spread from mouth to mouth.

Martin channels Einstein while Max adds color commentary to the game that has disappeared from the screen. Diane wonders if the game is still unfolding in Deep Space and only Max is attuned to it. Whatever the cause, Diane is happy to see Max so animated after so many years of watching him become one with the television.

Reading The Silence reminded me of watching Lost on television. I loved the characters while I wondered about the explanation for the story’s strange events. Early on in The Silence, I thought “maybe these people are all dead and not yet prepared to enter Heaven.” That would be even more disappointing coming from Don DeLillo than it was coming from the writers of Lost. Fortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case. (I have to say, though, I was a fan of the writing on Lost until the writers wrote themselves into a corner from which they couldn’t escape.)

Characters ponder explanations for their surreal present. Martin wonders if the Earth has entered a makeshift reality, a “future that isn’t supposed to take form just yet.” Tessa suggests this might be “some kind of a living breathing fantasy.” She asks: “What if we are not what we think we are? What if the world we know is being completely rearranged as we stand and watch or sit and talk?” But what has happened and why is something DeLillo chooses not to reveal. Perhaps he means to tell us that speculation about possible causes of a consequential event (like a pandemic) can become more important than the actual cause. Or perhaps his point is that the best use of a disaster is to reflect on how little we understand about our own existence.

The story is certainly open to interpretation. It seems in part to be a commentary on the role that technology plays in life. The more advanced we are, the more vulnerable we become. When facial recognition systems go down, how can we be sure of our identities? How does one respond to a loss of the systems that drive modern life? Should we be philosophical or should we concentrate on the concrete: “food, shelter, friends, flush the toilet if we can? . . . Touch, feel, bite chew. The body has a mind of its own.”

Martin reminds us that Einstein thought the next war would be fought with sticks and stones. Are we prepared for that possibility? Martin has difficulty thinking without reference to two-factor verification and gateway tracking. When he pronounces, “The world is everything, the individual nothing,” Max can only stare into the blank screen that once brought the Superbowl into his living room. Without a connection to the world, perhaps we have nothing. How can we survive without our cellphones and email to sustain us? How do we know our place in the world if we don’t know who won the Superbowl?

Having centered White Noise around “an airborne toxic event,” DeLillo is no stranger to fictional disasters. While White Noise is a dark comedy, I was never sure whether I was meant to laugh at The Silence. Characters have conversations that are amusing, primarily because the topics are unexpected, but the humor that lightens the darkness in White Noise is largely absent from The Silence. On the other hand, it is never clear whether the power failure in The Silence is the harbinger of darkness to come or a temporary glitch. That uncertainty prevents the novel from being categorized as dystopian.

This is a shorter and less ambitious novel that most of DeLillo’s work, but the style is vintage DeLillo — every word carefully chosen, every phrase a perfect encapsulation of beauty, every sentence infused with raw energy, every paragraph a surprise. Readers might want to pull The Silence off the shelf every now and then to see whether a fresh reading will unlock new meanings. Few writers encourage me to revisit their work in the hope of undiscovered rewards, but DeLillo is one of them.

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Zero K by Don DeLillo

Published by Scribner on May 3, 2016

Is life anything more than the absence of death? The question is at the heart of Zero K, a novel about life and death. What else would a Don DeLillo novel be about?

DeLillo tells us that death is coming. It may claim an individual (cancer, heart failure) or a large population (terrorism, pandemic, global warming). The odds are good an extinction event will eventually wipe out humanity. “Catastrophe is our bedtime story.” Yet even as life becomes more fragile, humans find the possibility of death increasingly unacceptable.

Jeffrey Lockhart’s wealthy father has taken Artis, his current wife, to an underground facility in a remote part of the world where she will be placed into cryogenic suspension, followed by emergence “in cyberhuman form into a universe that will speak to us in a very different way.” The facility’s approach to death avoidance, unlike Jeffrey, is deeply philosophical, blending science with a variety of new age perspectives, some of which DeLillo presents with tongue-in-cheek.

The first section of the novel takes place at the facility, to which Jeffrey has traveled at his father’s request so he can be present when Artis dies. Jeffrey engages with his father and with Artis as she prepares for death, preservation, or transition (whatever that fate might turn out to be)). He also engages with contemplative individuals who serve ambiguous purposes within the facility. While Jeffrey’s engagement is more an act of observation than interaction (he prefers to invent names for people rather than learning their actual names), one of the monks me meets is even less interactive. Perhaps being surrounded by death has that effect.

DeLillo may have intended Jeffrey to represent what life has become in the 21st century, as acts of atrocity and terror bombard us from screens that isolate us from the horror those scenes should inspire while impairing the ability to form true connections with others. Jeffrey sees a fair share of horror on screens (horror as art) during the novel, including one particularly jarring incident to which he should have a personal connection, but it isn’t clear that he processes what he sees on a human level, not in the way he experienced his own mother’s lingering death when he was a child. Perhaps the point is that 24-hour news coverage has inured us to death, has made death impersonal even when it should be very personal.

In the novel’s second part, the emphasis shifts from death to life. Jeffrey’s life involves a woman named Emma and her adopted Ukranian son. According to his father, Jeffrey has drifted through his life without having lived it. Later in the novel, Jeffrey acknowledges that he has made wasting time a life pursuit. Yet he inspects every minute in his life, counts his strides as he walks. He lives in the moment, as self-help gurus urge us to do, but is that enough? Jeffrey observes the homeless but he cannot image their lives. He interviews for jobs he will never accept. The reader is prompted to wonder whether, in Jeffrey’s case, the difference between life and death is significant. In the grand scheme of things, will Jeffrey’s life (or anyone’s) matter?

Depressing thoughts, yes, but DeLillo always adds humor to his darkness. Zero K is in part a playful novel about the power of language. Jeffrey sees the world in relationship to the words that define it. As a child, he was obsessed with precise definitions, often concocting his own, giving substance not just to the word but to the thing the word symbolizes. Like inventing his own names for people, concocting his own definitions is a habit he never lost.

The themes of language and death come together as a character suggests that “we have language to guide us out of dire times.” Perhaps we can defeat death by talking about it. Or perhaps we can assure that our consciousness will persist after our bodies die if we “follow our words bodily into the future tense.” As a novelist, it may be DeLillo’s hope that words live on even after the body dies.

The new universe that Artis will enter (Jeffrey is told) will have its own language, the language of truth, free from metaphor and ambiguity, something akin to the language of mathematics. Yet as she approaches or enters death, Artis is a being “made of words.” She does not know what the words mean but she feels they are important. What is time? What is now? What is place? “What does it mean to be who I am?” That is life’s fundamental question and, if it is unanswerable, DeLillo at least has fun exploring it.

Zero K doesn’t cohere as well as I might have liked, but neither does life. I have admired other DeLillo novels more than this one, but I suspect that this is a novel that improves with a second reading. Maybe I'll give it one if I live long enough.

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