Here's the copy from the original dust jacket:
Americana, End Zone, Great Jones Street--with these three novels Don DeLillo has established himself as one of the most interesting and various writer of his time. Now, in Ratner's Star, he has concentrated his unique talents on a central paradox of our age: the delusions and chimeras of the scientific mind.
A radio message, in code, has come from distant Ratner's star. Who--or what--has sent it? What does it have to say? A fourteen-year-old mathematical genius and Nobel laureate--Billy Twillig, from the Bronx--is asked to decipher this first, and possibly crucial, message from outer space.
Within the framework of this single action, the book's characters participate in a broad investigation of mathematics, language, mysticism and other games. Wild-eyed scientists and giddy wits, they carry out their chapter-length lives at Field Experiment Number One, a vast research center devoted, more or less, to saving the world. Here Billy encounters, among others, Henrik Endor, his predecessor on the code, who now lives in a hole ... Orang Mohole, the acknowledged kingpin of alternate physics ... Shazar Lazarus Ratner, a renowned astronomer turned mystic ... Elux Troxl, a "semi-treacherous entrepreneur" who deals in leased computer time, chain letters and bat guano ... Robert Hopper Softly, Billy's pint-sized mentor with the ticktock walk.... After twelve days in this gently demented landscape, the youthful hero is led to its logical opposite--a single long night devoid of customary reference points. His guiding principle--a piece of wisdom picked up along the way: "Keep believing it, shit-for-brains."
Creating peotry out of mathematical highjinks, laughter out of philosophical pretension and visions out of nightmares, Ratner's Star is a dazzling book by a major writer.