Don DeLillo's Underworld (1997) was in many ways a farewell to paranoia. Not the paranoid style in American politics, to quote the title of a famous essay by Richard Hofstadter (how could anyone say farewell to a mode so lavishly on the rise?), but to the paranoid fictions that animated DeLillo's own novels The Names (1982) and Libra (1988), and went all the way back to Pynchon's V (1963) and The Crying of Lot 49 (1966). Those were the days when we knew the score: it was whatever the authorities were not telling us. Conspiracy theory wasn't even a theory, it was a basic interpretative procedure, a way of getting through the week. There was 'a world inside the world', as Lee Harvey Oswald kept saying in Libra. And then one day there wasn't. The world was just the world, a vast clutter of causes and coincidences. The underworld emptied itself onto the streets, and mere suspicion began to seem naive, a form of reverse faith. Things were what they were, and quite bad enough at that.

LRB 22 April 2010 | PDF Download