Teeters between phoned-in self-parody and vintage DeLillo. His hallmark prose—those probing, cutting sentences—is still intact. He is among the very best ever at saying that thing you’ve always known but never found words for, or, things you knew but didn’t know you knew (unknown knowns). His dialogue (in which everyone speaks fragmentally, elliptically, and past each other), like poetry, hints at something realer about the way we talk to each other than any realistic fiction. But ultimately the feeling as a reader is that the great writer was not at his most inspired in this particular instance. The instance is: a man beyond wealth, beyond power, obsoleting words and concepts as quickly as they pop into his head; a man belonging to the next century. Truly operating along the schizophrenic logic of capitalism—finding diffuse and unexpected, nonsensical connections in the overwhelming chaos of information—and succeeding, to a point. What could he not want?

If I had found this in a timeline where I had just read American Psycho and had never read any other DeLillo, I would have loved it—a much more mystical, obtuse look into power than B.E.E. is capable of. Unfortunately, in this timeline, it feels a bit meh compared to the other great DeLillo books I’ve already read.

Still a categorical must-read if you sense the strange glory DeLillo taps into, i.e. if you love his other stuff. Won’t take you more than a few days, anyway