The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories [Hardcover]

There is something fascinating and frightening about the way that Don DeLillo sees the world. It's not that he sees it differently than you or I, he sees it more clearly, he makes connections most of us don't dream of. For this reason he has been called "weirdly prophetic" about the millennial decades. For example, the World Trade Center Towers featured prominently as the site for terrorists attacks in more than one novel. How did he know that they would be a target almost 30 years prior to the events of 9/11? He looked at those Towers and saw something so monumental that they would have to come down, one way or another.

These stories span almost over 30 years of time, and DeLillo's writing has under gone many evolutions since then. I've read every single one of his books and many of these stories fit well into the spaces between novels.

I prefer not to summarize plots in my reviews, simply because I go into book and stories completely blind and discover it. I would hate to rob anyone of anything. So, I will say that one of the things I've always loved about DeLillo is the way he takes everyday events and infuses them with a sense of dread. We all get flat tires, or miss flights, or call a wrong number - but in the DeLillo world these things are signs of something much larger at work, even if it's never revealed the fear is felt.

DeLillo recently wrote a short story that was published in the New Yorker called "Midnight In Dostoyevsky," in which two young men follow a man in a strange coat. The act itself is fairly innocent, but the way Delillo writes it makes you wonder if the two boys are going to rob or murder the man in the coat.

The sentences are astonishing, as well as the words he uses, which aren't necessarily big and unpronounceable, but uncannily perfect for whatever he is describing.

My only complaints are I wish this book would have collected more of his stories and "The Angel Esmerelda" will be recognized by those of you who have read "Underworld," although it is a bit different, it still felt familiar. This is excellent reading for anyone who appreciates intelligent fiction, but in the end it just makes me want to go back and read his novels.

This is Delillo's first collection of short stories. Underworld was a great book, a big book with big themes and long storylines. This brings him back to scale -- stories that allow him to focus on small, well-contained themes that you can take in and toss around in your mind without a lot of strain.

There are numerous themes in these stories, but the one that grabbed me most was a recurring one-sided way in which characters in the stories bridge the gulf between their own inner lives and those of other people, where they have only the external marks as evidence -- the way they walk, the expressions on their faces, the clothes they wear.

Delillo's characters often encounter each other through this kind of opaque externality, never directly interacting in conversation but constructing whole narratives of familiarity from the barest hints and great leaps of surmise. Leo Zhelezniak in The Starveling, follows, even stalks, a woman who seems to share his own alienated lifestyle, spending their days going from theatre to theatre in New York, watching movies in sequences coordinated with travel times and subway routes. He comes to "know" so much about her without ever talking to her, that he can cross the gulf between them on this bridge he's built entirely on his own, as if the familiarity and shared experience of life he has constructed is really there.

It's something we all do, just not so starkly as Zhelezniak, or the characters in Midnight in Dostoevsky who construct the life of "the man in the hooded coat". We have our daily encounters with one another, and we build our understandings of each other on what, in the full scope of our lives, are really only glimpses. But it is how we understand each other.

It's all a fragility that miraculously holds together, like the highway traffic Jerold Bradway watches in Hammer and Sickle. "Why don't they crash all the time?" he asks, watching cars speeding by under the separate control of distracted drivers, with little actual communication or coordination between them. Like Zhelezniak and other characters in these stories, Bradway looks at the drivers, wondering who they are and where they are going. And at the same time he thinks at least some of them are looking at him, wondering the same things.

When I read White Noise a long time ago, I thought it was one of the best novels I'd ever read. Since then I've made a point of reading everything I could get my hands on by Don Delillo. This is very different, but one of his best, I think.

The Angel Esmeralda is a book I would recommend to readers unfamiliar with Don DeLillo's work because the stories were written over a 33 year period, the earliest,"Creation," from 1979 to the most recent, "The Starveling," (2011). The best of them, "Human Moments in World War III," "Hammer and Sickle," and "The Starveling," show us how DeLillo's work nearly always captures something about American life many of us miss. "Human Moments," for example juxtaposes the perspective of two astronauts orbiting the earth with the wars occurring all over the planet. In this quasi-sci-fi tale, nuclear war has been banned so that humanity can better fight conventional wars without destroying itself altogether. It's the astronauts' job to monitor these wars from above so that the belligerent activity doesn't get out of hand. Although published in 1979, the piece seems a parable about how we have become accustomed to a planetary landscape of continuing and continual wars. Ironically, the view of the entire planet, made possible by space travel, has not brought us together, but has given us the tools to observe how screwed up we are as a species. "Hammer and Sickle" takes us inside a prison "camp" for financial criminals, giving us a unique perspective on the current world economic meltdown. As always, DeLillo's style is dense and not for everyone, but you enjoy exercising your neurons and synapses, this is a must read.