DeLillo

[Ben Yadon]

He hasn't really "been doing the film thing" as far as I can tell.
'Game 6' (2005) was written in 1990 and then mired in the studio
system for years. He was not personally involved in any of the
production. Interestingly Cosmopolis (2003) uses many very similar
plot points, locales, etc. Almost as if he reworked and tries to
salvage them after it looked like his earlier screenplay would never
see the light of day. He has of recent, been doing the theatre thing-
his new play 'Love-Lies-Bleeding' is either still in its Chicago run
or just finished and opens in June at the Kennedy Center in D.C.

I have read all his work and absolutely love him. I would have taken a
lot longer finding my way to TRP if it wasn't for the constant praise
DeLillo heaps on him:

Don DeLillo on Pynchon from http://bookforum.com/archive/sum_05/pynchon.html:

"It was as though, in some odd quantum stroke, Hemingway died one day
and Pynchon was born the next. One literature bends into another.
Pynchon has made American writing a broader and stronger force. He
found whispers and apparitions at the edge of modern awareness but did
not lessen our sense of the physicality of American prose, the shotgun
vigor, the street humor, the body fluids, the put-on.
I was writing ads for Sears truck tires when a friend gave me a copy
of V. in paperback. I read it and thought, Where did this come from?
The scale of his work, large in geography and unafraid of major
subjects, helped us locate our fiction not only in small anonymous
corners, human and ever-essential, but out there as well, in the
sprawl of high imagination and collective dreams."

I think Mao II's protagonist Bill Gray is definitely at least
partially inspired by TRP. A reclusive author not photographed in
years. Interestingly, Pynchon supplied the blurb on the back...

Either way, the two certainly overlap as far as themes go...
Losers, alienation, conspiracy, mystery drugs, pop culture,
technology, the role of the artist in society, terror, privacy, jazz
etc etc etc

Ben





On 6/3/06, bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>
>
> I totally agree.  Underworld was some kind of megafiction and DeLillo took
> it as far as he could.   And then he tried to go the other way with his
> minimalist works,  The Body Artist and Cosmopolis.  The themes are still
> there.  The words aren't.  It's been 4 years now and I want another novel
> from him but he's been doing that film thing.
>
>
>
> Bekah