| The novelist Don DeLillo has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1971, when an excerpt of his novel “End Zone” appeared as a short story in the magazine. Ten novels later, DeLillo became the shy, almost monkish subject of a Profile by David Remnick. “To meet DeLillo, at first,” Remick writes, “is to meet someone who seems to have sanded away all trace of authorial ego or personal affect: his voice is a flat, wry monotone with just a trace of Bronx; he wears enormous and very thick glasses; his clothes tend toward mail-order jeans, denim work shirts, chinos.” DeLillo’s understated comportment belied his towering stature. Already a National Book Award winner for his 1985 novel, “White Noise,” he was preparing for the release of “Underworld,” a tome that would make him a finalist, for the second time, for a Pulitzer Prize. On Friday, a film version of “White Noise” arrived in limited release on the big screen. Adapted and directed by Noah Baumbach, the movie mixes satire and suspense as its central characters flee an “airborne toxic event.” Writing in 1997, Remnick noted that the response to DeLillo’s novels, part of what has been described as “the paranoid school of American fiction,” tended to overlook DeLillo’s comic talents. “For all the cramped spaces and sweaty foreboding,” he wrote, “what’s missing from the critical work about DeLillo is the humor, the way the language undercuts, even redeems, the darkness of the landscapes.” | 
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