The Last Page

My beach book this past summer was Don DeLillo’s 1997 novel Underworld. Near Asbury Park, on a beach that was eroding by the hour, where the emergency jetty was blown away and the surf rushed at us like a gang shoving outsiders off its turf, it felt just right. My wife says she’s never seen me cling to a new book so intensely.

I’ve always wanted to love DeLillo: he’s so damned smart, and he comes from the Bronx. He is amazingly fluent in modern language-games—academic, corpor...