Plenitude and excess distinguish much of our best fiction: Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Coover's The Public Burning, Gaddis's JR, McElroy's Lookout Cartridge. Don DeLillo has their exhaustive impulse, but his six novels, singly and together, are a reversed cornucopia. They spiral from the overripe riches of America toward a difficult silence. More than any other novelist to emerge in [the '70s], Don DeLillo knows the spoiled goods of America and knows as well that a novel made in the USA may be implicated in the waste and noise of its place. His tactics have been attack and withdrawal….

"The beast is loose/Least is best" say the lyrics of Bucky Wunderlick in Great Jones Street. Minimalism has its great exemplars in Beckett and Borges, but it also has its attendant difficulty: "The less there is," says a character in Running Dog, "the more you're tested to find the...