When everything could end in the time it takes to scream, the speech which precedes it must be spoken by those for whom speaking at all signifies a triumph over death. What DeLillo has found in fiction is a voice it did not know before, a new example of the ‘want to hear someone else’s voice’ that Blanchot spoke of and which remains the fundamental desire for literature. It is too obvious, too true to say simply that Delillo’s novels come after Blanchot, after Foucault, after Deleuze, that his history cannot be theirs. But when he speaks in your voice that does not matter. As the threat hovers close by, the possibility of extermination wrapped up in politicians lies, in mediated panic and people’s most hallucinatory fears, DeLillo enables literature to orchestrate a change in us who read, offering that voice in which to enunciate the peril apparent even on the days of greatest joy, when your team wins the pennant, when it's you that grabs the winning ball and escapes into the Harlem night. It's then that you steal a little slice of history for yourself, but with the pink glow of the bomb always waiting, no-one quite believes you, and your little slice freezes and disappears into the Underworld.

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