In recent years, the work of Don DeLillo has come increasingly under the critical microscope. In the wake of Underworld, DeLillo's undisputed magnum opus, numerous studies, including monographs and edited collections, have emerged, solidifying DeLillo's reputation as one of the most important living American novelists. Stacey Ostler's volume for Continuum is the latest addition to the expanding raft of DeLillo criticism and it does not disappoint. One would be forgiven for assuming the book, part of a series which focusses on the post-1990 work of contemporary American fiction writers, to be geared toward the student readership. Indeed, the texts selected for analytical scrutiny are those which appear most frequently on undergraduate syllabi. But while there is plenty here for the engaged student to sink his/her teeth into, this volume offers much for the seasoned DeLillo scholar too, with superb, original essays from the likes of established DeLillo experts John Duvall, Linda S. Kauffman and David Cowart on topics including chiliasm, globalization, metahistory and the author's uneasiness with the apparent triumph of neoliberal capitalist democracy after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Olster's firm editorial hand guides the volume. Beginning with an insightful introduction which acknowledges both the modernist and postmodernist impulses in DeLillo's writing, his concern with the figure of the artist, and the evident concern with national identity across these relatively recent novels – themes which all of the essays address in one way or another – each section is preceded by an informed and lucid discussion of the novel under analysis. Moreover, and one cannot help but feel that the editor had some role in this, almost every essay sets DeLillo within a wider literary context than that wherein he is usually cast. Across the volume, DeLillo's affinities with Joyce, Beckett or Eliot; his resumption of Keatsian ideals; or his invocation of Robert Frost's “Mending Wall” are underscored. This placing of DeLillo within a broader literary landscape breaks the mould in which he is commonly set; that is, as purveyor of postmodern bleakness in cryptic fictions of disaster and apocalypse.

David Cowart's brisk essay on Mao II addresses this issue head-on, setting a “Delphic DeLillo” within a context of writers who express premillennial dread. Cowart makes the case that DeLillo simultaneously participates in and denies the doom-laden, apocalyptic narrative and ultimately offers a vision of redemption through the writer's potential to alter the course of history. Peter Knight takes up this point in an excellent piece which addresses Francis Fukuyama's “end of history” thesis and the affinities between the West and the “rest,” and explores the links between the terrorist and the writer as those with the power to capture and shape the imagination.

David Pike's essay on the architecture of urban space in Underworld offers a complex analysis of verticality and below-surface depths, the skyscrapers and the “pockets” which appear throughout the novel, and begins by noting DeLillo's interest in mapping these spaces onto the dialectical distance between modernity and postmodernity. Pike makes a series of compelling observations on the urban contours of Underworld – the wall, the rooftop and the wasteland – as the metaphors whereby DeLillo grounds the meaning of the novel. Also addressing the spatial aspects of DeLillo's New York, Linda Kauffman's essay on Falling Man offers a superb analysis on the novel's falling women, Florence, Lianne, Nina, Rosellen, who grapple with the meaning of language, history and art in the wake of great trauma. Focussing on specific incidences involving each woman, Kauffman observes them as suspended bodies hovering on the precipice of a fall. John Duvall's stunning essay on performance art, which closes the volume, also addresses this image of the falling, traumatized subject and the potentially redemptive role of art and the artist. Linking the novel's performance artist to Kerry Skarbakka, Eric Fischl and Sharon Paz, Duvall sets DeLillo as part of a coterie of artists who confront the aestheticization of terror and trauma. In a way, Duvall's thoughts on DeLillo's desire to politicize and historicize the image bring the volume full circle, back to Bill Gray's distrust of the visual image as discussed in the earlier essays on Mao II.

Olster's volume makes a fine addition to DeLillo studies and is packed with compelling arguments, interesting anecdotes and gems of information which will ignite critical debate among scholars. Though I have been limited to just a few comments on a handful of essays, each piece in the volume offers a new and exciting contribution to DeLillo scholarship.