Look homeward, angel

The Angel Esmeralda By Don DeLillo 211 pages available at Powerbooks

Don DeLillo is an ever-circling satellite, orbiting the postmodern zeitgeist. Or maybe not. Maybe he’s something else completely. In his journey, documenting the zeitgeist, he’s moved from slim novels to very thick, ambitious ones (Libra, Underworld) to slim novels again (Cosmopolis). Last year’s short story collection, The Angel Esmeralda, gathers pieces dating from 1979 to 2011 — in other words, the years before 9/11 and the years afterward. Though Manhattan is not the locale for most of these nine stories, which range freely from the West Indies to outer space, New York has long been his post of observation, and many of these stories seem to emanate outward from there, or at least from Ground Zero, even if written long before Sept. 11, 2001.

Proof of this comes in the second story, “Human Moments in World War III,” published in 1983. There are intimations of trouble in the future, a trouble that will change the way mankind looks at crisis itself:

People had hoped to be caught up in something bigger than themselves. They thought it would be a shared crisis. They would feel a sense of shared purpose, shared destiny. Like a snowstorm that blankets a large city — but lasting months, lasting years, carrying everyone along, creating fellow feeling where there was only suspicion and fear. Strangers talking to each other, meals by candlelight when the power fails. The war would ennoble everything we say and do… But what happens when the sense of shared crisis begins to dwindle much sooner than anyone expected?

DeLillo can read like a canary in a coalmine, especially here, positing a future mankind orbiting the planet while war plays out far below. The passage seems to foreshadow the shroud covering New York City, some 18 years in the future, and its after-effects.

Other stories focus on discreet human moments. A man and woman trapped at a primitive airstrip in the midst of a West Indies vacation, the wife sent onward in the first plane available, while the man stays behind and promptly begins a new, uncharted relationship with a stranger, a similarly stranded German woman (“Creation”); two strangers, a man and woman, witness a mother whose baby is abducted from a picnic site in a city park — the man tries to convince the woman onlooker that it must have been an estranged husband who took the kid, because the possibility of random baby snatching seems too horrible to contemplate (“The Runner”). Then there’s the title story, about two nuns surveying urban squalor in a neighborhood where the death of streetchildren is marked by graffiti artists. When a young girl is murdered, witnesses start seeing her image appearing on a billboard advertising orange juice whenever an El train passes by at night. (A version of this apocalyptic story also turned up toward the end of Underworld.)

Broken into three parts, The Angel Esmeralda’s stories seem to share thematic concerns. While the first section’s two stories chart ways of seeing the world, the second section concerns our talismans — the things we need to hold onto in order to make sense of this life, like the Minoan statuette clutched by a woman in “The Ivory Acrobat,” or the flickering image of an angel child on a billboard in the title story.

The third section is harder to pin down, but the stories seem to revolve around transaction, financial and otherwise: two strangers discuss an artist’s work in a museum, then have an ill-fated encounter in her apartment (“Baader-Meinhof”); two students try to detail the realities of passing people without breaking the boundaries and making contact (“Midnight in Dostoevsky”); and a white-collar prisoner has an almost-religious epiphany about capitalism when his young daughters start delivering financial news on a local cable TV station (“Hammer and Sickle”). In the final story, “The Starveling,” a New Yorker’s hi-and-bye relationship with a woman is described thus: “She touched the side of his head, honoring the memory of his sideburns, of what had been there before the barber. Then she danced away, into her jacket and out the door.” (I love that “danced away.”)

Amid the fanciful set-ups, DeLillo encodes his usual strafing of ideas. Dialogue glides by in waves of vaudevillian patter that call into question our own process of hearing and understanding; characters spout insights that sound like manifestos (“Money makes you live longer. It seeps into the bloodstream, the veins and capillaries”; or “People say great art is immortal. I say there’s something mortal in it. It carries a glimpse of death”). In another story, he has a professor postulate: “If we isolate the stray thought, the passing thought, the thought whose origin is unfathomable, then we begin to understand that we are routinely deranged, everyday crazy.” Such pronouncements amount to DeLillo testing the waters of his own theories. But this concise collection of stories — all previously published over the course of three decades — amounts to something more: a palpable statement, a time capsule of the passing zeitgeist.

Fictionist George Saunders talks about short stories being like a “black box”: you enter the box seeing the world one way, and exit it with your viewpoint somehow altered. DeLillo’s stories are like that, and unlike some of his lengthier works, these short pieces eschew the oblique strides and lengthy abstractions he’s known for to focus instead on imperceptible points in time where people’s lives change. Or at the least, our view of their lives undergoes a change.