Running Dog

By: Don DeLillo

Narrated by: Candace Thaxton

DeLillo's Running Dog, originally published in 1978, follows Moll Robbins, a New York City journalist trailing the activities of an influential senator. In the process, she is dragged into the black market world of erotica and shady, infatuated men, where a cat-and-mouse chase for an erotic film rumored to “star” Adolph Hitler leads to trickery, maneuvering, and bloodshed. With streamlined prose and a thriller's narrative pace, Running Dog is a bright star in the modern master's early career.

Slightly Novel Story - Severely Flawed Narration

The best way to describe this is too say it's a diluted imitation of Cormac Mccarthy's surreal and cruel world, the soft cruelty, the nonchalant shocks, and even the succinct dialogue, all dialed down three or four notches. It's not too day this is a bad novel, it's a good one but despite it's being above other ordinary novels over crowding shelves with its good dialogue, structure, plot twists, and ending, it still takes you on a very well trodden path so you almost see nothing new and you cease to be amazed, which knocks you down to the ordinary, or just above it. Maybe we should blame Mccarthy for squeezing everything out of those worlds and numbing our senses.

As for the narration, it was a bad idea to have a lady narrate this, and she made it worse, as if to prove the point, by imitating mail voices, especially hard cruel ones, sounding like a child as a result. Then the intonation! She has this one single 'trick' up her sleeves that she applies blindly, which is to suddenly raise her tone and increase the tempo a bit to show seriousness and suspense, but she sometimes feels she's been monotonic for a long time or she just misses her truck so she reaches out to her sleeves and boom! A raised serious tone while she's describing a person's attire or a mundane activity! And there you are left wondering: Where did that come from?! Calm down, sister!

"Imperialist lackeys and running dogs."

"The camera's everywhere."
"It's true." (pg 159)
"Landscape is truth." (pg 229)
"It's a fact. A truth. It's history." (pg 236)

This is one of DeLillo's earlier novels. Early, I guess. It came after:

1. Americana - 1971
2. End Zone - 1972
3. Great Jones Street - 1973
4. Ratner's Star - 1976
5. Players - 1977
6. Running Dog - 1978

So, it was his 6th novel. 40 years old. I liked it. Basically, a bunch of people (reporters, senators, the mob, and secret government organizations) are all searching for an erotic film made in the Führerbunker in April of 1945. Is it a black and white pre-suicidal orgy? Is he in it? These groups are all connected in a paranoid and weary way to each other. Each is searching for something, but also a bit indifferent. It's a philosophical, moody novel. It is weird in a way only DeLillo can be. Playing tennis on a volleyball court. Dogs. Sex and pornography discussed obliquely. Fingers tapping on walls. Lots of discussion of motion pictures, art, technology. Always, the push West, into the desert. Dying.

There is also a pressence of Vietnam that hangs on this novel. It WAS written in 1978. The echos of Vietnam are still vibrating through America. Things are being sorted. Ideas are coalesing into themes. Things collected, recorded, taped. Flash. Things given names, polished. Polished ambiguities. And always money, power, corruption.

When the reviewer stops reviewing, what does it mean? Cut.
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