"Hammer and Sickle"—one of nine short stories compiled from the last 30 years of Don DeLillo's career in his first-ever anthology, "The Angel Esmeralda"—features two prepubescent girls who anchor a children's news program. Their local access broadcast purports to offer international investment advice, and the scripted dialogue alternates between sounding—as it should—inane and informed. Their father, a man behind bars, watches them on television and thinks to himself their lines must have been written by his wife. Although fewer and fewer prisoners return to watch subsequent airings of the program, the dialogue of the children's show is unforgettable:
"The word is Dubai."
"Say it."
"Dubai."
Combining inscrutability and piquancy in equal measure, lines like these are sure to return to the reader a week or a month after seeing them, as lyrics from catchy songs are often apt to do.
If it's not a line that comes back to the reader, it might be an ending (like that of the rhythmically haunting eight-page-long "The Runner") or an image (like the paintings in grisaille of three German terrorists' corpses in "Baader-Meinhof," a gem of a story on the different ways in which terrorism continues to pervade society in the post-9/11 era).
Many of the stories are structured around similarly enduring symbols that—although occasionally overwrought—give the stories incredible dimension the second and third time around. In "The Ivory Acrobat," a woman traumatized by an earthquake forgets about a palm-sized figurine of a female bull jumper until she finds an analogy between its subject and her own life. DeLillo's stories provide similar illumination for readers; because they are universally applicable, readers might expect to learn something about themselves when certain details come back to them.
Perhaps it's because the writing in "The Angel Esmeralda" is so masterfully harrowing and unflinchingly bleak that these short fictions reverberate the way they do. Or else a result of the fact that each is so precise and piercing in their observations on contemporary existence. Or something that naturally follows from the subtle ways DeLillo's stories shift from the past to the present tense in a way that provides a kind of abstract commentary on the plight of his protagonists.
Take, for example, "The Starveling," a rumination on epistemological doubt that draws inspiration from the allegory of Plato's Cave. The story depicts a middle-aged, down-on-his-luck divorcé who spends most of his day every day at the movies and begins—one afternoon—tracing the footsteps of a fellow moviegoer as she makes her way through the city.
Referring to the ex-wife with whom the protagonist shares an apartment, the story begins: "When it started, long before the woman, he lived in one room. He did not hope for improved circumstances. This was where he belonged, single window, shower, hotplate, a squat refrigerator parked in the bathroom, a makeshift closet for scant possessions. There is a kind of uneventfulness that resembles meditation. One morning he sat drinking coffee and staring into space when the lamp that extended from the wall rustled into flame." Such momentary shifts in tense are seamlessly woven into the narrative fabric and allow the author to neatly generalize from the particular.
In one way or another, DeLillo's protagonists all sound like disenchanted outsiders trying to break free of the regular rhythms of modern society. The suggestion seems to be that everyone today fits the same profile, more or less.
All nine stories in "The Angel Esmeralda" flirt with the ways in which people handle uncertain knowledge—whether that means a vacationer who can't seem to catch a flight off an unnamed island cheating on his wife in the absurdist "Creation," or an elderly nun compulsively praying and washing herself in the mind-blowing tale from which the collection takes its title.
The stories are also linked by their commentary on the inadequacies of language. The main character of "The Starveling" is described at one point "thinking whatever he was thinking, none of it reducible to words."
Even the less lofty worries that occasionally afflict DeLillo's cast of characters contain a kind of depth. The concerns of the protagonist in "The Starveling" appear trifling at first, but prove to be devastatingly deadpan and purposeful when considered closely: "His name was Leo Zhelezniak. It took half a lifetime before he began to fit into the name."
As the story progresses, it opens up questions about whether certain things in the world take on significance because people afford them significance or because those things are inherently so imbued.
DeLillo's stories demand to be reread time and time again. After just a few pages, readers will want to drown out everyday concerns and fully immerse themselves in this tour de force.