DeLillo Interviews: NPR radio interview with DeLillo about Point Omega

"DeLillo's Man in the Desert, Up Against the Wall"

Above I have provided a link to a 2010 radio interview with DeLillo. Listen to DeLillo as he talks about many of the familiar themes in his work (war, images, death, mass media, etc.) and a few that are perhaps not so familiar (time as anxiety and the sublime).

In addition, he also speaks about being a writer and about his attraction to people in small rooms (Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra, Bill Gray in Mao II, etc.).

Finally, in another self-referential moment, he comments on "living in dangerous times."

DeLillo was nearly 75 at the time of the interview, so one can't help but smile when he says, "I'm still 22 in my mind."

Favorite Passages: "It's all about time"

What more could be said about the relationship between contemporary existence and literature?

It's all embedded, the hours and minutes, words and numbers everywhere, he said, train stations, bus routes, taxi meters, surveillance cameras. It's all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story.

-- Point Omega

DeLillo Book Reviews: The Angel Esmeralda

This summer, I wrote a review of DeLillo's The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories for Goodreads. Given the nature of the site, the purpose of the review is not so much to analyze the work, but rather to get readers who are unfamiliar with DeLillo to be interested in him.

Here's the link: Review of The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories

I've also reproduced the review below.

Enjoy!

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THE PERFECT INTRODUCTION TO DON DeLILLO

Don DeLillo is currently my favorite writer, and I've been on a quest to read all of his works over the past few months. Whenever anyone asks me about DeLillo and to recommend a book by him, my response has usually been something like this: 

"I think he's an amazing writer, but I also recognize that he's certainly not for everyone. My suggestion is to read White Noise, since it's relevant, easy to find, and highly accessible, and then decide for yourself." 

After having completed The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories, however, I revoke this past statement of mine. It's not that White Noise is a bad book with which to expose yourself to DeLillo; it is a phenomenal piece of fiction, and if you choose to read it first (as I did), my bet is that you won't regret it. 

But, as a novel alone, White Noise (1985) perhaps paints an unfair portrait of DeLillo's writing career, which has spanned more than fifty years (1960-present). In other words, if you read this particular novel first, you may -- for better or for worse -- come to expect this kind of writing in all of DeLillo's works, and consequently you may find yourself a bit disappointed when you get around to his post-Underworld works (The Body Artist, Cosmopolis, Love-Lies-Bleeding, etc.).

The Angel Esmeralda, on the other hand, manages to cover more ground than White Noise in terms of DeLillo's career, seeing as the nine stories that comprise it were published between 1979-2011. But it is not for this reason alone that I believe The Angel Esmeralda represent the perfect introduction to this hilarious, haunting, and rather enigmatic American author, the litmus test for deciding whether or not to get involved with DeLillo.

Without spoiling the stories themselves, I will at least say that here readers will find many of the qualities and themes that make DeLillo the celebrated author that he is. To name just a few: his masterful discussion of airports; his passion for describing New York City; his belief that "the future belongs to crowds"; the influence of mass media; the impending financial collapse (as he predicted in his 2003 novel Cosmopolis); the way in which people almost systematically impose stories and backgrounds on other people in order to make sense of them; his interest in art; his insightful and ironic humor; and, finally, not only his admirable command of language, but his interest in language itself.

Although it is difficult to do so, I will pick a single passage from The Angel Esmeralda to quote, from "Midnight in Dostoevsky" (2010): 

If we isolate the stray thought, the passing thought, the thought whose origin is unfathomable, then we begin to understand that we are routinely deranged, everyday crazy.

Anyway, if you are one of those readers who's teetering on whether or not to pick up a book by Don DeLillo, then The Angel Esmeralda is where to begin -- and it may just push you over the edge.

DeLillo News & Notes: he confirms that he is working on a new book

In late April, DeLillo confirmed that he is working on a new novel (though, seeing as it's now September, perhaps he's already finished it). Not only am I very excited to learn this news, but I'm also not surprised in the least about the book's purported subject matter: images, disasters, footage, all classic DeLillo themes. Below I have reproduced the section of the interview where he talks about this upcoming novel:

It is because when I write, I need to see what is happening. Even when it is just two guys in a room, writing dialogues is not enough. I need to visualize the scene, where they are, how they sit, what they wear, etc. I had never given much thought about it, it came naturally, but recently I became aware of that while working on my upcoming novel, in which the character spends a lot of time watching file footage on a wide screen, images of a disaster. I had no problem describing the process, that is to say to rely on a visualization process. I am not comfortable with abstract writing, stories that look like essays: you have to see, I need to see.

(See the full interview HERE.)

The great thing about this quote is how DeLillo manages to bury a golden nugget of information within a great insight into his writing process. One day, I hope to put together insights like these, of which there are many, and further develop an interpretive approach that I have tentatively been calling "cross-media theory."

Still, no one is blind to the fact that DeLillo is getting up there in his years, and he probably doesn't have much time left for writing (though, I'm sure he has no shortage of ideas). Anyway, this realization reminded me of a moment near the end of the interview that he gave with Adam Begley in 1993. Asked about his future plans, DeLillo confessed:

[...] I'm aware of the fact that time is limited. Every new novel stretches the term of the contract--let me live long enough to do one more book. How many books do we get? How much good work?

DeLillo Interviews

In 1987, The New York Times published the following interview with DeLillo, which I like for a few reasons. It is straight to the point, and it discusses his work thematically (death, theater, culture, illusion v. reality, hospitals/motels, and television). And, as always, DeLillo here offers insights into his own work.

His comments on the relationship between death and theater are particularly interesting:

And I began to sense a connection, almost a metaphysical connection, between the craft of acting and the fear we all have of dying. It seemed to me that actors are a kind of model for the ways in which we hide from the knowledge we inevitably possess of our final extinction.

[...] I can't imagine a culture more steeped in the idea of death. I can't imagine what it's like to grow up in America today.

He always provides a few valuable notes about The Day Room, the highlights of which I have reproduced below:

But it's not the kind of play one can easily discuss because it doesn't involve interrelationships between characters--it involves a sense of theater, and of acting, and of human identity.

Act Two was a different matter completely--in a way, Act Two is an attempt to explain the first half of the play to myself; in a way it's the play about the play.

I guess I'm interested in the way the play forms a kind of unending circular structure--it bends back on itself. This has greater significance to me than any sense of what is real and what isn't.

I would simply say that a hospital room is an extreme condition, and much of the writing I've done, I think, is set in extreme places or extreme states of mind.

A motel is a peculiar reality [...] particularly motels in undefined parts of the landscape. You don't know quite where you are, and for a brief time perhaps not quite who you are.

Readers familiar with Players will remember, as DeLillo himself noted in a later interview, that "At the beginning of the novel we hear a discussion about motels, which is where the novel ends" (35). Perhaps the motel itself is one artifact -- both a contemporary and an American one -- through which to read DeLillo.

Update:

As I was rereading End Zone, I noticed that during Chap. 16, Major Staley lectures Gary Harkness about nuclear war, and it occurs in a motel, "a gray building, barely distinguishable from the land around it" (79).

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DePietro, Thomas, ed. Conversations with Don DeLillo. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2005. Print.
DeLillo, Don. End Zone. New York: Penguin, 1986. Print.