DeLillo exemplifies the high-literary, late twentieth-century White American Male style to which I aspired, at the peak of my ambitions twenty years ago, but I find that I can barely stand it today. Most prominently, the pretentious, faux-everyman dialogue that was uniformly spouted by the characters irrespective of the decade in which they were supposed to be speaking left me in a permanent state of eye-roll. I was only able to get all the way through the book by keeping a running tally of the ratio of "instances of clueless bigotry" to "moments of transcendent writing." Unfortunately, the final score was 66-32. I had resolved that a losing score of this sort would mean a one-star rating, but at least I can say that some of the characters grew on me over the course of these very long 827 pages, enough to bump it up to two stars.