The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories

As a novelist, Don DeLillo has written a lot of whoppers—Underworld and White Noise, just to name a few—but The Angel Esmeralda is his first collection of short stories. Written over three decades, the stories vary greatly in content, yet distrust of reality ripples beneath the surface of nearly every one of them. From urban nuns in the title story to an account of men on a military mission in outer space, DeLillo's characters always seem to be animated by concerns peculiar to postmodernity. In "Human Moments in World War III," two astronauts begin to doubt their mission when a noise is heard over the spacecraft radio and Colorado Command refuses to admit that it may be human in origin. When Sister Gracie in "The Angel Esmeralda" takes to the streets of New York City, she says, "Brussels is surreal. Milan is surreal. This is the only real. The Bronx is real." Throughout the book, DeLillo's signature jazz-influenced layers of detail and dialogue build a sense of quiet anarchy among the routines of everyday life, giving the mundane an audacious and surprising quality, such as when a man in "The Starveling" eats "fistfuls of saturated fat" and his wife comments on his "emasculated" sideburns after a haircut. This juxtaposition of odd regularities and disbelief in reality swells to a panoramic vision of contemporary life, and in DeLillo's hands it's a life that presents its characters with the paradoxical notion that what is regular is frequently strange and reality might not be real.