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Joseph Dewey. Beyond Grief and Nothing: A Reading of Don DeLillo. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2006. vii + 172 pp.
At seventy, Don DeLillo has produced fourteen novels, seven plays, a dozen uncollected short stories and nearly as many essays. During the second-half of his four-decade career-writing that shows no sign of diminishing-he has garnered significant accolades including the 1985 National Book Award for White Noise, the 1991 PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II, and the 2000 William Dean Howells Medal for Underworld (presented every five years by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for the "most distinguished work in American fiction"). Most notably, in 1999, DeLillo was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, presented biennially to a writer of international stature whose work celebrates the dignity and freedom of the individual. DeLillo was the first American to win the award, which has previously been awarded to a number of Nobel laureates. Yet even prior to his rise to critical, and to a lesser degree, popular acclaim, DeLillo, as Joseph Dewey notes, "is that rare literary figure, massively productive yet without requiring critical apology." DeLillo "never produced a shoddy text"; "never, novel to novel, resorted to formula, to repetition" "never pandered to public interests in the hope of a best-seller or film contract" (3-5).
It is a heady and welcome undertaking then, to present a suasive reading of all of DeLillo in one slender volume, as Dewey has accomplished in this book. Dewey's introduction clearly stakes out his analytical niche in the voluminous arena of DeLillo studies. ("With the exception of Pynchon, no living writer has generated such an accumulation of explication" [4]). In contrast to the "uneven" treatment of the DeLillo canon-heavily weighted, that is, to his midcareer novels- White Noise (1984), Libra (1988), Mao II (1991), and Underworld (1997)-Dewey's study is "rigorous[ly] egalitaria[n]." He reads DeLillo teleologically, charting "a workable trajectory, a viable arc of evolution" (5) from "his earliest stories to his most recent work" (through Love Lies Bleeding [2005]) (4). Indeed, one of the most rewarding elements of Dewey's book is his weaving DeLillo's uncollected short stories and plays-which have yet attracted precious little critical attention-into his chronological study, fluently illuminating them alongside and in relation to the better-known novels of...