John Leonard, noted critic and former literary editor of The Nation, died Wednesay at 69. This was one of his last pieces published in the magazine.

From DeLillo, cryptic and reclusive, we have come to expect these bulletins from zones of dread--about memory, mystery, movies, myth and apparition. About private armies, intelligence networks, back channels and terrorist sects. About violence, conspiracy, coincidence, chaos and the loneliness of long-distance lunatics. About soot-faced pushers of shopping carts, sleepers in tents and subway tunnels, missing children on milk cartons and women who live in garbage bags "like some Bombay cartoon." About wave fronts, labyrinths, spycams, video streams, digital mosaics and magnetic flash. About sacred formulas, circular systems, cycloid forms, rogue programs, sequence grids, dark matter and boomerangs. About, alas, stun guns, rubber bullets, polygraphs, caliber readings and death squads. But also about speaking in tongues, playing with snakes, animist spores, Buddhist swastikas, Kabbalistic sperm demons, hermaphroditic Hindu doll gods, Roman Catholic rosary beads, the ninety-nine names for Allah in the Koran, goat bells, wild poppies and avant-garde mathematics. Endor told us in Ratner's Star: "Einstein and Kafka! They knew each other! They stood in the same room and talked! Einstein and Kafka!"

In fact, some Endor or Fenig or Owen or Martin is always hitting us between the eyes with something DeLillo thinks we need to know. We will be informed: "If it's Nazis, it's automatically erotic. The violence, the rituals, the leather, the jackboots. The whole thing for uniforms and paraphernalia." Or: "I don't trust anybody's nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It's a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country." Or, and this may really be profound: "Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there's kitsch, schlock, camp and porn."

And the way the men and women talk to each other--omniscient, ironic and ominous--you'd think Beckett or Pinter had written their scripts. Whole marriages are hung out to dry, like knickers or negatives on a line. This can be funny, as it was in The Names when the filmmaker Volterra said of his girlfriend: "Look at her. Those oversized glasses. With her thin face and that short hair.... She looks like a science-fiction insect." To which she cleverly replied: "Suck a rock, Jojo." But more often it's right on an almost invisible line between tickling and exploratory surgery, or surgery and torture. In Falling Man, Keith and Lianne know each other so well that they have to keep reminding themselves of what must not be said so as to get them safely through the day, as if they, too, dangled from some viaduct. He will fail to inform her of the weird affair he's having across town with Florence, the young black woman whose briefcase he mysteriously removed from the burning World Trade tower. Once he's at home again, "alone in time," strange to himself, what Keith does mostly is watch. Lianne, whose father shot himself rather than face senile dementia, won't tell her husband how scared she gets in the therapy group at "the first signs of halting response, the losses and failings, the grim prefigurings that issued now and then from a mind beginning to slide away from the adhesive fiction that makes an individual possible." Instead, she gets into a fight with the downstairs neighbor who, over and over again, plays the same CD of "music located in Islamic tradition"--"Middle Eastern, North African, Bedouin songs perhaps or Sufi dances." He watches poker on television, from a casino in a desert, and wonders whether "he was born to be old, meant to be old and alone.... Everything now is measured by after." She thinks his exercises for his wounded wrist "resembled prayer in some remote northern province, among a repressed people, with periodic applications of ice." Once, together, they watch what happened on television:

The second plane coming out of that ice blue sky, this was the footage that entered the body, that seemed to run beneath her skin, the fleeting sprint that carried lives and histories, theirs and hers, everyone's, into some other distance, out beyond the towers.

He agrees that even the camera seemed surprised by the first plane. But by the time of the second, "We're all a little older and wiser." And God's name must have been on the tongues of killers and victims both.

Obviously, we can read DeLillo backward, as if his detective novels, science fictions, road shows, espionage thrillers, academic hanky-pankies and hockey porn were warming up for Falling Man--a novel that reminds us of how we really felt before we were bushwhacked; of our fugue state on that election day, in the endless nightmare feedback loop of jet plane, firebomb, towers falling, another in a long line of cheesy Hollywood films in which the crystal palace of Manhattan is destroyed by comets, plagues, apes, aliens, insects, androids, hydrogen bombs, tidal waves or toxic waste. Yet on the strange parenthetical streets outside, silent but for sirens Tuesday night and Wednesday, in the compulsive cluster of people on the streets walking to air the mind, there was behind the eyes a kind of inner Beirut, the rubble left behind by the kamikazes of Kingdom Come. If the contemptuous purpose of terrorism is to dominate and humiliate, to turn citizens into lab rats and cities into mazes, then Al Qaeda did not succeed. But we certainly couldn't say that the bombs had scattered seeds of anything savory or uplifting. We really needed time to think. Unfortunately, the event was hijacked immediately by putschniks.

DeLillo returns us to that parenthesis. In this, among the 9/11 novels I have read, by Ian McEwan, Reynolds Price, Jay McInerney and Jonathan Safran Foer, it most resembles the best of them, Lynn Sharon Schwartz's The Writing on the Wall, in which, after the divebombing of the World Trade Center, a linguist named Renata at the New York Public Library is asked to add Arabic to her other exotic languages (Bliondan, Etinoi), even as she tries to cope with a crazy mother, an importunate lover, a teenage mute, a dead twin and the child she thinks she lost on a merry-go-round. In both books, the melding of the psychological and geopolitical dreamworlds feels inevitable rather than willed, as starkly elegant and illuminated as the calligraphy of medieval monks. DeLillo, predictably, goes further. He has practiced overkill in Underworld, that treatise on the cold war and other repressions. He has practiced performance yoga in The Body Artist, that pure blue note of Zen. Secrets are the normal respiration of his intelligence, and so is fearfulness, and so, too, is a cry for pity and saving grace. That history and intimacy should collide with and collapse upon each other, like charged particles in the cloud chamber of a cyclotron, has been fundamental to his method and his metaphysics.

So Hammad will have second thoughts, a bit late, and rather less persuasively than John Updike's New Jersey teen in Terrorist. At least Updike, who takes sacred texts as seriously as he does medicine, has written already on Gilgamesh, the Mahabharata and the Analects, and exerted himself to think about Abraham and Isaac in the inflections of Dante and Kierkegaard, will mount the Prophet's winged horse Buraq and ride with the robed warriors and the elephants into the Koran's crushing fire. So Justin, three years after his father didn't die, will march with his mother in an antiwar parade on Charlie Parker's birthday. So Keith, who "could not find himself in the things he saw and heard," "in the ash ruins of what was various and human," will run away from "the dream of paralysis," "the dream of asphyxiation," "the dream of helplessness" and any breath of God as well--into the limbic wastes of professional poker, where he gets to choose yes or no with the turn of every card, call or fold. (We have been here before with DeLillo, haven't we, in Players, where the Stock Exchange is a Temple Mount, and money moves in green numbers and deathless waves across the floor; and in Cosmopolis, where the mathematical properties of sunflower seeds and deep-space pulsars describe currency fluctuations, and the cycles of grasshopper breeding and the almighty market are interchangeable?) Whereas Lianne has tried hard to fight off the God of her fathers and mothers, "because once you believe such a thing...then how can you escape, how survive the power of it, is and was and ever shall be." She finds herself nevertheless "breathing the dead in candlewax and incense," dreaming toward something "at the limits of matter and energy, a force responsible in some way for the very nature, the vibrancy of our lives from the mind out, the mind in little pigeon blinks that extend the plane of being, out beyond logic and intuition." Besides, "isn't it the world itself that brings you to God? Beauty, grief, terror, the empty desert, the Bach cantatas."

From dense light and mauled stones, DeLillo, a closet holy roller, writes a radiant sermon. Meanwhile America, having lapsed into a "protein stupor" like one of the East Harlem Alzheimer's patients, has forgotten where she came from and who she was supposed to be.

But you are wondering about Janiak, the performance artist, the falling man, the Humpty Dumpty. Let me suggest, if not Adam, then possibly Icarus.

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