DeLillo’s new book of nine stories, The Angel Esmeralda, has at its core a series of situations that lead to trance states experienced by the insulted, the injured, and the vulnerable, who in its grip sometimes begin to babble in a form of secular glossolalia:
They shook hands, pumped hands with the great-bodied women who rolled their eyes to heaven. The women did great two-handed pump shakes, fabricated words jumping out of their mouths, trance utterance, Edgar thought—they’re singing of things outside the known deliriums.
Quite often, “trance utterance” is a crowd condition, populated by “shakers and mourners, the awestruck who stood in tidal traffic—she was nameless for a moment, lost to the details of personal history, a disembodied fact in liquid form, pouring into the crowd.” What usually sets the trance into place is an image that can’t quite be opened up. DeLillo being DeLillo, the delirium has some familial connections to terror, though the connection usually remains out of reach.
“A Different Kind of Delirium.” Charles Baxter, The New York Review of Books
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