Don DeLillo

Putting together this post on Don DeLillo, I was struck by his age: 88 years old as of the time I write this. Thomas Pynchon is about the same age. And so is Joyce Carol Oates. They were in their mid-twenties when JFK died, and this shows in their writing. Both were a little too old for the hippies, or in the range of those likely to be drafted for Vietnam. I feel so old right now. As if watching the edge of oblivion approaching. I came late to so much of American literature that I want to drag these writers closer to me. Read them while you can, get yourself writing while you are young enough to have time to do good work, make me feel like oblivion is not around the bend.

Where Not to Start with Don DeLillo! Of course, I started in the wrong place. I agree with him on starting with Libra.

Don DeLillo's Libra - this seems a bit on the surrealistic side; a short film with DeLillo narrating from his novel. 

The same fellow reviewing Libra, and although it has now been many years since I read the novel, I think this fellow understood the novel better than I did, and so give him a listen:

A Conversation with Don DeLillo and Jonathan Franzen:

This conversation will be of more interest to any writers finding this post. Franzen goes deep into DeLillo's techniques and purposes of his writing. It is long, but I found it worth my time. YMMV.

Some items that are not videos:

Libra by Don DeLillo (biisbooks)

If you’ve read any DeLillo then you’ll probably know that plot is not his primary driver or something that features that heavily in his books. He’s a writer of ideas and concepts, he likes to explore the boundaries of language; he’s interested in motivation and influence, the swell of mass-thought and how it can be manipulated and stretched. All this is very present in Libra, but it is all spun around a much more conventional plot – perhaps because it is based on real-life events which give specific counterpoints which DeLillo has to touch in with. That being said, there’s still plenty of scope for imaginative exploration and speculation. This makes it one of DeLillo’s easier books to read, or in my opinion at least, because there’s something quite concrete to hang on to. How concrete is a question which I think is very much left to the reader’s own judgement. I am not that familiar with the facts of the events that led to the assassination of Kennedy, I guess I have seen my fair share of media on the subject but all I’ve learned from it is the basics and that there’s a lot of speculation. There’s a lot of speculation in Libra too, but I don’t think DeLillo is presenting a factual case for what he believes happened. Instead he posits an idea and explores it, explores how such a chain of events could result in that terrible day in Dallas. What might cause that chain of events to occur, the minds that might control it, want to bring it about, what they might gain and how Oswald, an outsider, might figure in those designs. How independent was he, how much a product of his upbringing and society, the era and the events and the ideas that were swilling around him? The inescapable clutch of history. It all makes for a fascinating read.

Libra by Don DeLillo (California Review of Books)

After listening to a Library of America podcast arguing that novelist, playwright, screenwriter and essayist Don DeLillo deserves to be awarded a Nobel prize for his body of work, I went to my shelves and pulled Libra from a half dozen DeLillo novels. In my early 30s I read DeLillo in the same immersive way I read Henry Miller, John Steinbeck and Philip Roth — one volume after another. DeLillo puzzled me because his novels present familiar elements that often seem alien. What Delillo does, I realized this time around, is slip the reader into the world inside the world. The world of Libra is that of anti-Castro Cuban exiles, current and former members of the CIA, mob figures who want their piece of Cuba back, John F. Kennedy, and Lee Harvey Oswald, a misguided idealist. This world exists inside the paranoid imaginings of the John Birch Society, the Cold War, and the New Frontier. Undercurrents of America: even in the age of Camelot, the country is deeply divided

DALLAS, ECHOING DOWN THE DECADES (NYTimes review of Libra)

It's in those commonplace moments that Mr. DeLillo reveals his genius. After all, he must have had the same source materials available to anyone else - the Warren Commission report, the usual newspaper articles and court proceedings. But he takes the stale facts and weaves them into something altogether new, largely by means of inventing, with what seems uncanny perception, the interior voice that each character might use to describe his own activities. Here, for instance, is a summary of Jack Ruby's movements just before he killed Oswald - a matter of public record, no doubt, but the passage displays a verve all its own:

''He was running late. If I don't get there in time, it's decreed I wasn't meant to do it. He drove through Dealey Plaza, slightly out of the way, to look at the wreaths again. He talked to [ his dog ] Sheba about was she hungry, did she want her Alpo. He parked in a lot across the street from the Western Union office. He opened the trunk, got out the dog food and a can opener and fixed the dog her meal, which he left on the front seat. He took two thousand dollars out of the moneybag and stuffed it in his pockets because this is how a club owner walks into a room. He put the gun in his right hip pocket. His name was stamped in gold inside his hat.'' At what point exactly does fact drift over into fiction? The book is so seamlessly written that perhaps not even those people who own both upstairs and downstairs copies of the Warren report could say for certain. Oswald's mother, for instance, with her nonstop, plaintive, sometimes unwittingly comic stream of talk, was probably willing to speak to any newsman who poked a microphone in her face; and therefore Mr. DeLillo had merely to transcribe her long-ago monologues. Or did he? Other voices are equally convincing, and yet obviously not all of those could have been taped. ''Jack,'' Jack Ruby's roommate tells him, ''for me to express a facial nature, you know it's hard with words, but I don't think you look so good.'' A young black marine explains his presence in the brig to a cellmate: ''There was a fire to my rack, which they accused me. But in my own mind I could like verbalize it either way. In other way of saying it, the evidence was weak.'' Both of these remarks were uttered in private - not recorded, we have to assume, but created, or at least re-created from hearsay, by a writer with a merciless ear for language.

Mao II & Underworld (Library of America)

Don DeLillo’s Underworld: Trash, Violence, and the Hidden Structures of American Life (CHANDLER JAMES)

At its core, Underworld is a meditation on concealment—on the things hidden or pushed out of sight, both literally and metaphorically. DeLillo takes the notion of trash, an object of societal disdain, and elevates it to a central motif in his examination of American life. In this novel, trash is more than refuse; it’s a reflection of who we are as individuals and as a society. What we throw away, ignore, or neglect reveals the underlying structures of our lives—the hierarchy of values we hold, the transience of our existence, and the things we deem unworthy of preservation.

One of the novel’s greatest strengths is its ability to expose those elements of human experience that often remain in the shadows. DeLillo’s exploration of trash isn’t just about the physical objects we discard. It’s a broader critique of how we treat people, relationships, and even ideas with a similar disregard. The interconnectedness of trash and lives moving through time and space is a recurring theme, reminding us that what society casts aside often holds profound meaning when examined closely.

Don DeLillo’s Underworld – still hits a home run (The Guardian) by Rachel Kushner is long and reflects the writer's passion for the novel. I quote only a fraction.

Underworld is a novel, quite simply, about what was experienced in the United States in the second half of the 20th century. An era shaped by the advent and then cancellation of the Bretton Woods agreement. Nuclear proliferation. The withering away and relocation of American manufacturing, and the rise of global capitalism. Jazz. The Cuban missile crisis (through the voice, as DeLillo has it, of Lenny Bruce). Civil rights. The CIA. Bombs on university campuses. Artists on New York rooftops, and around them, the old industrial framework of bygone city life, something aesthetic and exotic, either marvelled at or ignored. 

***

Some authors go for sweep, others for sentences, and yet Underworld is both. Sentence by sentence, it may have the highest density of great sentences of all DeLillo’s novels, at two or three times as long as the rest. How did he sustain it? I have no idea, and the how is not for me to wonder. The book exists. It raises the bar on what can be done. Its 827 pages are filled with hell-bent ambition, and yet also a deep reserve of uncommon, even egoless humility: DeLillo never insists, never veers into showy knowledge or egregious or paranoid plot. He merely goes to the horizon-line of his furthest understanding, and plumbs his love of, and respect for, the great mysteries inside us, between us, among us. 

Don DeLillo, Underworld (John Pistelli). I never heard of Mr. Pistelli until today, but his essay on Underworld knocked me out. Plenty there to think about besides and beyond the novel itself. And I suggest you read it all. Just go there now. If you balk at following the link, consider the following:

 For Underworld is, first of all, in the high tradition of the American novel, which, as umpteenth observers from Nathaniel Hawthorne forward have told us, has never been a novel at all, not a sober realist social survey, but a weird symbolic prose-poem, an inward voyage projected out onto the national landscape. Underworld places itself in this tradition with its first sentence: “He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.” The first thing to say about this sentence is that it pays tribute to two sentences from the Great American Novels of the early 1950s, the period when Underworld begins: the first sentence of Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March (“I am an American, Chicago born”) and the last sentence of Ellison’s Invisible Man (“Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”). The second thing to say is that, like a line of poetry, the sentence admits of two readings, with “American” as either a noun, which makes the sentence a direct address to the American reader, or an adjective modifying “voice,” declaring a national origin and destiny for the novel’s style. So this is an American romance, and you have to read it like a poem; and, as in Bellow’s and Ellison’s novels, or Faulkner’s and Melville’s before them, the sensibility and suffering that emerges is less the sojourning protagonists’ and more that of the organizing and presiding consciousness. As in a book of poems or in a long poem, it’s the poet you get to know best, and not for nothing does Underworld, in its final one-word sentence, echo no novel at all but the century’s most famous poem, The Waste Land. “Shantih shantih shantih,” Eliot chants in Sanskrit, which DeLillo puts into plain American: “Peace.”

[I went ahead and subscribed to his Grand Hotel Abyss on Substack and his YouTube page.]

Hopefully, I have left you with enough reasons to read DeLillo.

sch 10/9

A lecture and interview with DeLillo about Underworld:

 I have become more and more convinced that the point (well, the point relevant to me) I missed about DeLillo is finding the extraordinary in the ordinary.

sch 10/17