The chronicler of America

[Dave Monroe]

Profile: Don Delillo
The chronicler of America

The hugely influential author, whose masterpiece Underworld drew wide
praise, has portrayed the richness of US life in his blackly comic
fiction over the past 35 years. Now comes his keenly awaited response
to 9/11

Tim Adams
Sunday April 22, 2007
Observer

Some weeks seem to have been foretold by Don DeLillo. This past one,
dominated as it has been by the unedifying soliloquy of Cho Seung-hui,
with the banal detail of television packages mailed amid slaughter,
and the viral spread of the killer's monomania across the internet
(necessitating the downloading of Flash players) feels like one of
them.

When he first became a novelist in the late 1960s, DeLillo had two
files on his writer's desk in New York; one was labelled 'Art', the
other was marked 'Terror'. No writer since has been as alive to the
congruence of violence and its media. The currency of our age, he has
long argued, has become 'bad news, sensationalistic news. It has
almost replaced the novel, replaced discourse between people ... your
TV set has become an instrument of apocalypse'. Acts of random horror
played on a loop on the networks, obsessively talk-showed and blogged,
become self-fulfilling prophecies.

'People talk about the killing, but they don't talk about what it does
to them,' DeLillo suggests. 'The truth is we don't know how to talk
about this. Maybe that is why some of us write fiction.'

Even so, the writer of fiction, he contends, particularly the writer
of fiction in America, is engaged in a losing battle. His or her
imagination is not as powerful in shaping the present and determining
the future as that of the dominant creative force; 'Art' is not up to
'Terror'. Long before such a theory was easily imaginable, DeLillo
wrote: 'In a repressive society, a writer can be deeply influential,
but in a society that's filled with glut and repetition and endless
consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act ...
people who are powerless make an open theatre of violence. True terror
is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to
terrorist acts and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways
that writers used to aspire to.'

DeLillo's 13 novels to date, blackly comic, humming with ideas, are
laced with such aphorisms of doom, but they still aspire. Now 70, he
long ago realised that the novelist's maxim, 'only connect', is also
that of the paranoiac. The drama of his fiction comes from that
tension. In Libra, DeLillo's indelible imagining of the Kennedy
assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald is told that history 'is the sum
total of things they aren't telling us'. DeLillo filled those gaps.
'Believe everything,' says a character in Underworld, his masterpiece,
which, when it was published in 1997 featured a cover on which a bird
with outstretched wings flies towards New York's Twin Towers, shrouded
in mist. 'Everything is true.'

For some of these reasons, in the week of 11 September, when every
novelist under the sun was suddenly an expert on terrorism, DeLillo's
was one voice it seemed worth listening to. His first response to the
fall of the Twin Towers did not come until December of that year in an
article written for Atlantic magazine, which proposed a new world
order: the US and them.

'Our world, parts of our world, have crumbled into theirs, which means
we are living in a place of danger and rage,' he wrote. 'We are rich,
privileged and strong, but they are willing to die. People running for
their lives are part of the story that is left to us.'

It has taken DeLillo a further five years to confront the events of
that 'lifelong week' in fiction, but it is that part of the story with
which his new novel The Falling Man, published next month, begins. A
man emerges from the rubble of the first tower before its collapse,
dust-caked, covered in his own and others' blood and finds himself in
that place of people running, holding shoes, holding handkerchiefs
over their mouths.

'This was the world now,' DeLillo writes of a place he first properly
imagined in his first era-defining book, White Noise, in 1985. It is
his territory.

Many novelists - Jonathan Safran Foer, Martin Amis and Jay McInerney
among others - have colonised the fictional Ground Zero first, but no
one has felt quite as at home as DeLillo does. He is on first-name
terms with strangeness. 'Maybe this is what things look like when
there is no one here to see them,' he writes, a description that could
stand for the atmosphere of all of his writing.

He is alive to the detail of horror (the 'organic shrapnel' of suicide
bombers, say, that gets under the skin of their victims) and he
delivers familiar deadpan surprises: in a typical DeLillo trope, one
that should be true, a performance artist in the week of 9/11 dangles
from high buildings, suited, clutching a briefcase, in a state of
perpetual descent.

Despite all this, Falling Man is not the book you imagined that
DeLillo might write about the event that began the 21st century. All
his writing has appeared almost a preparation for the particular
imaginative effort of getting into the mind of a suicidal jihadist (in
the way that John Updike recently attempted, not successfully, in
Terrorist), but he stops short. The martyrs have only a bit part in
this story, and a faintly caricatured one at that (perhaps
fundamentalists are so sensitive to cartoons because they always seem
so cartoonish). Instead, DeLillo offers a more conventional, if
dislocated love story between survivors.

For this reason, I suspect, he will face a mixed critical reception
for Falling Man. He is used to that; though perhaps the most formative
influence on the emergent generation of novelists, DeLillo has never
been a wholly popular author, particularly with the American
establishment. Libra was condemned in the Washington Post as 'an act
of literary vandalism and bad citizenship'. (DeLillo rather liked that
idea.) Missing all the comedy of his writing, Dale Peck, the
self-appointed hatchet man of American letters, recently called his
books 'just stupid, plain stupid'. Novelist Diane Johnson wrote early
in DeLillo's career that his books did not sell in the numbers they
deserved because 'they deal with deeply shocking things about America
that people would rather not face'.

Underworld, which earned an advance of a million dollars and
extravagant critical praise ('DeLillo suddenly fills the sky,' Amis
wrote in the New York Times), changed that to a degree, but DeLillo
still refuses to play the game of self-promotion, preferring to stay
outside the literary world. Though not reclusive in the manner of
Thomas Pynchon or JD Salinger, he nevertheless characterises his
relationship with his readers as one of: 'Silence, exile, cunning and
so on.' Sightings of him are rare.

I well remember the excitement of going to hear him read from
Underworld in London before an audience of 500 or more a decade ago.
At the time, it seemed profoundly unlikely that the slight, modest,
neatly turned-out, carefully spoken man on the stage could have
produced this teeming, mythic 872-page biography of America in the
Cold War. 'He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in
his eye that's halfway hopeful,' he began. It was like watching the
Wizard of Oz pulling his levers from behind the screen.

That is the way he likes it. He appears the most regular of men,
confining his anarchy and brilliance to his sentences and paragraphs.
He grew up in the Bronx, to an Italian-American family,
first-generation immigrants (Scorsese seems a soulmate). He didn't
write at all as a child. He played street games, card games. He
devoured comic books. 'No one read to anyone else at home,' he has
said. 'That's why we had the radio; the radio read to us all.'

Discovering Ulysses as a teenager made him want to be a writer, but
his influences and references have always been as much from film and
painting and music (European movies, Abstract Expressionism and the
jazz of Parker and Mingus) as from novels. He went to a Jesuit college
where he majored in 'communication arts'. He had a job as a copywriter
at Ogilvy and Mather and freelance jobs writing for furniture
catalogues before giving up and following his vocation.

He learned to live very cheaply. His first novel, Americana, about a
megalomaniac TV presenter was published in 1971; by the time he was
married in 1975, he had written two more. His wife, Barbara Bennett,
was a banker and subsequently became a landscape gardener. They have
no children. He has said in a tone that may be neutral or wistful:
'Family complications have not been a source of difficulty for me as
they are for almost everyone else.'

He lives in Westchester these days, north of New York, suburban,
leafy, one step removed from the American 'junkspace' that tends to
make the life of his novels. Other writers, Jonathan Franzen, Paul
Auster, attest to his generosity and friendship, but he is not a
party-goer. Writing, for him, has always been a way of concentrated
thinking.

To be able to eavesdrop so intimately on that process is our continued
fortune, and America's. Not least because no one, to paraphrase Donald
Rumsfeld, better knows his way around known knowns and known unknowns
and unknown unknowns than Don DeLillo. His novels are a war on terror
by other means.

The Delillo Lowdown:

BornDon DeLillo, 20 November 1936, Bronx, New York City, the child of
Italian immigrants. Married to Barbara Bennett; no children.

Best of times Winning the American National Book Award in 1985 for
White Noise, his 'breakthrough' novel. The publication of his
masterpiece, Underworld, in 1997.

Literary critic Harold Bloom naming him one of the four major American
novelists of his time, alongside Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth and
Cormac McCarthy

Worst of times Struggling to make ends meet in the 1970s when, after
quitting his job as an advertising copywriter, a series of novels -
all pretty well received - achieved little commercial success.

What he says 'America is the world's living myth. There's no sense of
wrong when you kill an American or blame America for some local
disaster. This is our function, to be character types, to embody
recurring themes that people can use to comfort themselves, justify
themselves and so on. We're here to accommodate. Whatever people need,
we provide.'

What others say 'You pick up and travel with DeLillo anywhere - the
bliss of a baseball game, the meeting of old lovers in a desert. He
offers us another history of ourselves, the unofficial underground
moments.' Michael Ondaatje

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/7days/story/0,,2062757,00.html