The chronicler of America

[bekah]

Thanks,  Dave and to all who are interested - the article is 
spoiler-free.   :-)

Bekah
eagerly awaiting the next DeLillo,  knowing full well it may disappoint



At 9:55 AM -0500 4/22/07, Dave Monroe wrote:
>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