Don DeLillo is insufficiently known, although his last novel [Players] got some media play. Like Shakespeare (how's that for a start?) he is seldom sufficiently serious; only End Zone displays his remarkable abilities with consistency. But he admirably refuses to repeat himself: after surveying America in Americana he considered a range of philosophic and ethical complements in End Zone, worked out a fantasy of drugs and rock in Great Jones Street, got into science fiction with Ratner's Star, brooded about urban violence in Players, and now has written an amusing and imaginative send-up of the spy novel, with overtones [The Running Dog]. The predictably violent crimes and creeps are here, the mysterious overlords, the sexy women, the quaint settings, the spaghetti-structure plot, the absurd treasures (for instance a porn movie made in Hitler's Berlin bunker), and the obligatory paranoid chase—all reported in a remarkably crisp, witty, and...