Mixed4ColumnsIn what may be the most high-concept book of his nearly fifty-year career, the plot’s inciting incident is the abrupt outage of all electronic screens ... In the author’s signature style, distilled half-thoughts make their way into elliptical dialogue or accrete in anxious meditations ... tension pulls across the textual divide, that is, in the frisson between the characters haltingly, scarcely being and the narrative convention in which something must give. It doesn’t much. This will disappoint some readers ... In the austere mischief of DeLillo’s novel, what is real is that no matter how long Max stares at the black box of a dead screen on Super Bowl Sunday, it will not reveal who’s truly lost. It never did.
