In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel

"In The Loop" is the first study of Don DeLillo, one of America's most importatnt novelists. While providing an overview of DeLillo's career and a book-by-book analysis of his eight novels, Tom LeClair constructs (and placess DeLillo's fiction within) a new critical category - the systems novel. Like other "systems novelists" - William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, and Robert Coover - DeLillo employs the new scientific paradigm of "systems theory" as a basis for his novelistic analyses of human survival in various spheres, from the nuclear family to that encompassing reciprocal loop, the ecosystem, that is DeLillo's fundamental model of value.