These are people who believe that the first moonwalk was ‘staged on a ranch outside Las Vegas’, and then transmitted on television as if from space. When one of DeLillo’s characters thinks of ‘the paranoid élite’, we are meant to catch the friendly irony, the flicker of nostalgia. Underworld, like Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, is in this sense a post-paranoid novel. In less paranoid ages ignorance may just be ignorance. It’s that people didn’t always believe, and don’t have to believe, that what they don’t know is the deep, secret, missing truth. It’s not that the Forties and Fifties didn’t have their paranoias, or that we are short of paranoids now. There is always another level, another secret, a way in which the heart breeds a deception so mysterious and complex it can only be taken for a deeper kind of truth.’ This is getting a little fancy, but then Libra is perhaps the last really good novel of the great age of American paranoia, the age that began just before the Kennedy/King assassinations, and faded away somewhere in the early Nineties.

Larry Parmenter, another character in Libra, believes ‘that nothing can finally be known that involves human motive and need. It’s the sum total of all the things they aren’t telling us.’ Surface and secret: even when people dispute the details, the names and the numbers, they accept this two-world structure. ‘There’s more to it,’ David Ferrie says in the same novel.

The phrase suggests wheels within wheels, partly because Oswald is obsessively riding the New York subway when we first hear it. ‘There is a world inside the world,’ Lee Harvey Oswald repeats in Don DeLillo’s novel Libra (1988).

Underworld by don delillo