DeLillo's third novel ["Great Jones Street"] … is narrated by a revered and temporarily retired American rock star, so burned out and eaten up by the insanity of the demands upon him that he's holed up in a crummy room on New York's Great Jones Street until he somehow regains his will to go on. I wish this novel could be described fairly as a book set in the rock and drug world—as DeLillo intends—but it doesn't work that way, and the failure is just about fatal. (pp. 2-3)

DeLillo's descriptions of the pre-art-scene Bowery neighborhood are lovely; they evoke exactly the aura of quiet, desperate lives going on in an atmosphere of industrial emptiness that suits the events that promise to take place, a kind of eerie, post-destruction silence, pervaded by an air of panic.

The panic comes from some initial suspense about whether Bucky has...