‘America is the world’s living myth’, Don DeLillo once commented. The rotten core of the American Dream has been a favourite subject of various writers over the years, none more so than DeLillo himself. Revered by readers and critics alike for his doom-laden treatments of contemporary American life, and the trippy post-modernism of 1997’s Underworld, he has often been hailed as a latter-day prophet of paranoia of the ‘War on Terror’. There is plenty of foreboding zeitgeist-y angst in this, his first collection of shorter works.

The nine stories of The Angel Esmeralda are often eerily prescient, given that some of the stories were written as far back as 1983. However, the oft-noted topicality of DeLillo’s writing does sometimes fall flat. ‘Hammer and Sickle’, for instance, is a painfully contrived treatment of the banking crisis, which the incarcerated protagonist can only follow via his daughters’ financial news slot on a children’s TV channel – an overly artificial device which aims to convey the absurdity of events, the difficulties of interpretation, but feels embarrassingly laboured.

In general, though, the compression required by the short story form shows DeLillo’s masterful balance of suggesting and withholding. The consistency of style and narrative voice is particularly remarkable given that these stories span three decade of DeLillo’s career. As one reviewer commented, ‘DeLillo knows exactly what he is doing with adjectives’. And verbs, nouns, conjunctions sentences: even when the stories occasionally fall short in terms of plot, he is in impeccable command of the prose. To quote a favourite passage from ‘Midnight in Dostoevsky’: ‘If we isolate the stray thought, the passing thought’, he said, ‘the thought whose origin is unfathomable, then we begin to understand that we are routinely deranged, every-day crazy’. We loved the idea of being everyday crazy. It rang so true, so real’.

The best stories in the collection, ‘Midnight in Dostoevsky’ and ‘The Starveling’, engage with this ‘every-day craziness’, featuring one character who obsessively constructs narratives about a stranger. In an interview with the Salt Lake Tribune, DeLillo compared them to ‘private detectives, on an intellectual level. I’ve never done that myself’ – really? – ‘but I can easily imagine people wanting to recreate the life of someone who is alien to them’. One of the pleasures The Angel Esmeralda is the experience of rifling through the consciousness of some fascinatingly dysfunctional protagonists (a less sympathetic description might be ‘weirdos and losers’).  That is the beauty of this collection: it enables the reader to toy with and then discard the perspectives of the disaffected, alienated, and sometimes seriously deranged – a ageing nun with a pedant for correct grammar, a film addict, a woman who goes to the same art exhibition of paintings of German terrorists being executed for three days running…

However, the real test of any writing – particularly a short story, whose reading-time is so short-lived – is time: whether or not it stays with you, catches you thinking about while waiting in the lunch queue or just before you fall asleep. At his best, DeLillo achieves exactly that: something intangibly awful yet luminous lingers. ‘Was this meant to be erotic, or ironic’, wonders a minimum-security convict, ‘or just another random package of cranial debris?’ In the paranoid narrative-making minds of DeLillo’s characters, one can never be quite certain. There is also a wry humour at work throughout – a white-collar prisoner reflects on the ‘anti-masturbatory principles’ of ‘soccer’; one ex-pat in earthquake stricken Athens asks another ‘do you have an inner life?’, ‘I sleep’, he replies, ‘that’s not what I mean’.

‘I want words to be secretive’, muses an astronaut involved in waging World War III, ‘to cling to a darkness in the deepest interior’. In The Angel Esmeralda, DeLillo scrupulously explores that interior darkness, the basic narrative fascination with ‘people in rooms, what we see and what we miss, how we pass through each other, year by year, second by second’.