The Jewel of P-listers' library/DeLillo

[Tore Rye Andersen]

>From: "Ya Sam" <takoitov at hotmail.com>
>To: torerye at hotmail.com, pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: RE: The Jewel of P-listers' library
>Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2006 15:32:24 +0300
>
>
>What hath DeLillo done to deserve thine ire?

It's hard to put into words, even though I've tried to do so previously on 
the P-list. This is what I replied to The Great Quail when he recently 
criticized DeLillo (sorry to those of you who've read this previously):

"Boy, is it great to hear someone finally speak out against 'the Great 
DeLillo'. His novels just raise my hackles (with the possible exception of 
Libra), or - alternately - leave me completely cold. I don't agree with 
everything Leslie Fiedler says, but his take on DeLillo (from an interview 
at Salon.com) is deadly accurate: "In some ways, he never seems committed to 
me to what he is writing. Very nice surfaces, but he's got nothing 
underneath." - There's just no passion at all in his writing. The single 
most riveting sentence in Underworld is "Oatmeal bubbled on the stove" (p. 
236). After that, it's all downhill. Furthermore, it's as if DeLillo always 
wants to be one step ahead of his reader. He wants to show (a vice he shares 
with Paul Auster) that he grasps every profound implication of what he's 
writing, and doesn't really trust the reader to make his or her own 
connections. Underworld takes the idea from Gravity's Rainbow that 
"everything is connected", but where Pynchon us that everything is 
connected, DeLillo just tells us - over and over again - that that is the 
case. Pynchon's long novels are long because Pynchon has a lot he wants to 
tell us. Underworld is long because DeLillo consciously set out to write a 
masterpiece. I've tried to convince my friends that 'the Great DeLillo' is 
in fact pretty minor, but he does seem to have his devout followers. 
Sometimes, however, I wonder whether they really love great literature, or 
whether they merely love the IDEA of great literature."

....yeah, something of a rant, I know, but DeLillo kind of annoys me. With 
Pynchon's novels, you sense a human being behind the brilliant verbal 
surface - with DeLillo's novels you sense a machine programmed to write nice 
sentences. In the end it's all deeply subjective, of course, and a matter of 
taste, but Leslie Fiedler's comment about DeLillo's lack of commitment 
sounds just about right to me. And I even think DeLillo feels the same way, 
at least a little bit. There's some telling stuff in 'Underworld' about 
Nick's emotional distance from his surroundings:

"I've always been a country of one. There's a certain distance in my makeup, 
a measured separation [...] that I've worked at times to reduce, or thought 
of working, or said the hell with it.
    I like to tell my wife. I say to my wife. I tell her not to give up on 
me. I tell her there's an Italian word, or a Latin word, that explains 
everything. Then I tell her the word.
[...] The word that explains nothing in this case is lontananza. Distance or 
remoteness, sure. But as I use the word, as I interpret it, hard-edged and 
fine-grained, it's the perfected distance of the gangster, the syndicate 
mobster - the made man. Once you're a made man, you don't need the constant 
living influence of sources outside yourself." (Underworld, p. 275)

In light of his cold writing it's hard not to read this as a description of 
DeLillo himself - as an oblique self-critique.
One final thing I can't really stand about DeLillo is his attempt to emulate 
Pynchon's exile from the public sphere. Was I the only one who found it a 
little bit pathetic that DeLillo still handed out his pre-printed "I don't 
want to talk about it"-cards at the National Book Award ceremony in 1997? 
(He gave Tom LeClair a card just like it when LeClair visited him in Greece 
in 1982, but LeClair of course got his interview anyway). DeLillo constantly 
tries to pose as an outsider, as a literary rebel, and the media are lapping 
it up: most of the many interviews DeLillo give are still prefaced with the 
information that "the shy DeLillo rarely gives interviews". It's hard not to 
be a bit sceptical about this assertion when, for the umpteenth time, it is 
accompanied by a large color photo of a smiling Don DeLillo, ne?
Well - I hope this kind of answers your question.