I might as well admit this up front: I’m a sucker for the early, disreputable novels of the acclaimed. This is particularly true in the case of my favorite writers. Were I packing for a vacation on a remote island—a vacation free of the small charming dictators who masquerade as my children, and thus a vacation in which I might read for more than three minutes without having to arbitrate a dispute involving Popsicles—I would choose Sula over Beloved. I realize the latter is considered one of the greatest works of American fiction, but I find its dense collage of interior monologues needlessly confusing. As far as I’m concerned, Toni Morrison peaked in 1977, with Song of Solomon, in which her stunning lyricism and allegorical ambitions sharpen, rather than obscure, her characters. In the case of Martin Amis, I find myself rereading, every six or so days, Money, his paean to the sociopathic charms of the Reagan-Thatcher axis. I then pick up the more seriously regarded The Information and lose steam on page 71.

Nowhere is this early-career fetishism more scandalous than in my attitude toward Don DeLillo. Of his sixteen novels my favorites remain his first two, Americana and End Zone, works rarely cited in the company of later heavyweights such as Libra and Underworld. DeLillo himself declared the original manuscript of Americana “very overdone and shaggy,” an apprentice work. I also have a soft spot for White Noise, his commercial breakthrough, though the book has been reviled by critics ranging from Jonathan Yardley (“a trip to nowhere”) to the dyspeptic B. R. Myers, who dismissed its “spurious profundity.”

As a short-story writer, I was especially eager to read DeLillo’s first-ever story collection, the newly published The Angel Esmeralda. As in all his work, the prose is mesmerizing at the level of the sentence. But the stories unsettled me. There is a hollowness at their core, a profound despair. And this feeling triggered a curious side effect: I suddenly yearned for those early, shaggy novels, for the chance to reimmerse myself in the imperfect hope of Don DeLillo’s literary youth.

 

The rest of this essay will amount to an apology for my taste, though it won’t sound like an apology. It will sound more like a set of theories, implorations, and asides. This is the modern American apologia, a sort of defensive rhetorical jitterbug. It’s a lot of what Don DeLillo does. He apologizes for America without really apologizing. He investigates how a nation could fall so far away from its collective decency without much apparent moral disruption.