The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories To Jostle Your Brain
By Maggie Hellwig in Arts & Entertainment on Feb 20, 2012 7:00PM
Don DeLillo's latest book, The Angel Esmeralda, is a collection of nine short stories. Some of them were written 20 years ago, some within the last year.
While it is pretty new to DeLillo fans that he would publish a book of short fiction, the themes that he has been exploring in his past novels are still present. Novels like White Noise, The Body Artist, or Falling Man have all examined traumatic or apocalyptic circumstances with their brutal, yet poignant, humor.
The Angel Esmeralda has a DeLillo tune to it. The prose is original, succinct, even playful at times. Yet, his stories have become darker with less room for a breath of relief. The reader is left in awe at his genius, amidst an unease that only comes from DeLillo's vigilant human observations.
The book begins with the eerie story, "Creation," in which the main character and his girlfriend, Jill, are stranded in a utopian paradise. The airport is consistently unreliable and, while Jill leaves the island, our unnamed man remains behind out his free will. He takes up his leisure with another marooned vacationer, Christa, but attempts to make her stay with him in the fantasy refuge. DeLillo does not shortchange the reader on creepy stories this time around. In "Baader-Meinhof" and "The Starveling," the reader is witness to men who, out of loneliness and dominant desires, project their daydreams and unwarranted actions upon female characters.
The subject matter in the aforementioned stories is disquieting, but DeLillo tells the stories in such an intimate way that the gravity goes unrealized until the reader reflects on what has been read. "The Starveling" is told from the point of view a man, Leo, who often allows people around him to define his self worth. As a result, he opts to take action out of equal parts curiosity and frustration. Leo stalks a young lady and speculates about what the woman's life must be like. Similarly, in "Midnight in Dostoevsky," two young college students follow a hooded man about town, hypothesizing about his life story. It's only when the illusion is shattered that our protagonists lose their mystique and their power.
Aside from making the reader feel uneasy, DeLillo is also a master at showing us our vulnerability. He dangles helplessness in front of the reader, pointing to it, and forces us to ponder our mortality and our bravery. In "The Ivory Acrobat," our female protagonist, Kyle, is living in Athens. She experiences a series of earthquakes and—as a result—is in a state of constant anxiety waiting for the next tremor. A boy is snatched from his mother's arms in "The Runner," and witnesses to the horrific event coax themselves with stories about an estranged father attempting to get back his son. In "The Angel Esmeralda," DeLillo's masterpiece in this book, trauma is delivered in the form of a death of a young woman; the community copes in quite unconventional ways.
Just when things are getting too heavy, there are some lighter stories for the reader. Of course, the playful tone is not without purpose. "Human Moments in World War III" and "Hammer and Sickle" are perhaps the most obscure stories in Esmeralda. "Hammer and Sickle" is set in a white collar prison for financial felons. From a detention center, Jerry Bradway watches a daily mock news show his daughters and their mother have created every day. The playful banter of this television show, highlighting worldwide stock plummet, is something with which we as readers are familiar. Names—mainly of organizations, of foreign places, and money tycoons—are intangible things that have caused economic crisis. DeLillo points out how removed and helpless modern society must feel when circumstances that affect our lives are entirely out of our hands.
"Human Moments in World War III," takes place in a future where nuclear weapons have been banned, and so "the world is free to be at war" without the threat of total annihilation. The protagonist and his co-worker, Vollmer, are "gathering intelligence" while aboard their space craft and performing nonsensical procedures. Suddenly the reader finds himself at a complete distance from war. Threat is no longer immediate, and destruction is not caused by tangible objects.
The book is intense in every aspect of the word, and entirely worth reading. DeLillo's attention to detail and precise placement of every word is enticing, resulting in stories that are impossible to put down. Every story has a moment of revelation that we all seek in our own lives, and every character—for better or worse—is unmistakably human. DeLillo continues to present the frailty of our existence, and we entreat him to do so.