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Scribner, November 2011

The level of controlled finesse at work in The Angel Esmeralda is the product of a masterful author who has fully accepted the constraints of short fiction and one capable of utilizing every inch within its conceived boundaries. These stories are achingly good and brilliantly fleeting; Don DeLillo (Point Omega) works with a strict allowance of characters and settings, and with his impeccable meter is able to imbue these meager elements with a novel's strength in the span of just forty or so pages.

Written between 1979 and 2011, the nine pieces in The Angel Esmeralda are short stories at their finest. Each maintains DeLillo's exceptional standards of quality, yet manage to thematically adapt and reflect America's ever-evolving society. And, by compiling these stories chronologically, The Angel Esmeralda gains a new, troubling arc; throughout the collection's nine-step sequence, DeLillo shows not just how far the world's come in thirty years, but how bad things may be getting.

It's oddly fitting that an author with such a well-tempered command would write about those things outside our own realms of influence and control. In "Creation," a couple is endlessly on standby as they try to fly out of a West Indies vacation spot. In 1983's "Human Moments in World War III," a pair of men in a space station quietly orbit the Earth monitoring the military movements on terra firma. Physically and emotionally, these astronauts are miles away from the humanity they once knew. They search quietly for any "human moments" that may still linger within them and reflect on the deadly pace of mankind's recent developments:

"We are no longer delicate biological specimens adrift in an alien environment. The enemy can kill us with its photons, its mesons, its charged particles faster than any dusting of micrometeoroids. The emotions have changed."

This change of emotions is the result of a dying world. People have changed and societies have changed, all at the hand of globalization and our endless sprint towards the future. But not all this crumbling is inter-personal: "The Ivory Acrobat" tells of a literal tectonic shift as a woman tries to cope with an influx of earthquakes while living alone in Greece. Already somewhat alienated by the city, she finds she can no longer connect with the once-reliable ground beneath her. As her paranoia grows, she imagines the worst, "that these were not aftershocks at all but warnings of some deep disquiet in the continental trench, the massing of a force that would roll across the marble-hearted city and bring it to dust."

"The Angel Esmeralda" is the story of two nuns trying to help the needy in their impoverished South Bronx community. With little means to make a meaningful difference, their story recedes into the realms of faith and hope as the sisters and their flock try to get by on spirituality alone. When Esmeralda, a young local girl is killed, the community begins to see her face nightly in a mural, under the headlights of each passing elevated train. The sisters struggle with this miracle, uncertain what to believe in. In a breathtaking paragraph, DeLillo describes the conflicting views of Sister Edgar, who seems to want harmony as bad as she wants something real to pray for:

"Edgar was a cold-war nun who'd once lined the walls of her room with aluminum foil as a shield against nuclear fallout from Communist bombs. Not that she didn't think a war might be thrilling. She daydreamed many a domed flash in the film of her skin, tried to conjure the burst even now, with the USSR crumbled alphabetically, the massive letters toppled like Cyrillic statuary."

Growing in step with the imminent doom of today's society, how does one begin to fathom what could genuinely be an act of God, a true angel sighting? The brief, uplifting turn of faith in "The Angel Esmeralda" shines a new kind of light on the other eight stories in DeLillo's collection. What if these stories weren't just about our disintegrating society, but about the human things we cling to in the face of inevitable decomposition? What of the art exhibitions ("Baader-Meinhof") and movie screenings ("The Starveling") we frequent in solitude: could these stave off the decay of progress? It's possible. There's a complex glimmer of hope in each of DeLillo's desolate stories, and it's in these human moments that The Angel Esmeralda achieves its greatest, most resonant success.



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