Some decades ago when David Foster Wallace was proceeding to write the great confounding masterpiece of his generation Infinite Jest the writer he took most seriously – and criticism concurred here – was Don DeLillo.

If fiction that turned the world on its head and somehow reflected it back to you was what you wanted DeLillo was the reigning master of a late postmodernism that was vibrant and mimetic, strange-shaped but intelligible and which seemed unlikely to develop further than this great master.