An early sentence in this collection of stories, first published between 1979 and the current issue of Granta, runs thus:
We were in the late stages now, about 45 minutes out, and I was thinking it could still change, some rude blend of weather might yet transform the land, producing texture and dimension, leaps of green light, those waverings and rays, and the near consciousness we always seem to find in zones of overgrown terrain. [The speaker is a tourist in the back of a taxi on his way to an airport in the Caribbean.]
It’s not hard to see why the Atlantic critic B. R. Myers, in ‘A Reader’s Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness of American Literary Prose’, named Bronx-born Don DeLillo as one of several US heavyweights whose blather we mistake for art.
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