A permeating paranoia. Profound absurdity. Conspiracy and terrorism. Technological alienation. Violence bubbling, ready to boil. This has long been the stuff of Don DeLillos masterly fiction. Its now the air we breathe. For nearly 50 years and across 17 novels, among them classics like White Noise, Libra and Underworld, DeLillo, who is 83, has summoned the darker currents of the American experience with maximum precision and uncanny imagination. His enduring sensitivity to the zeitgeist is such that words like prophetic and oracular figure frequently in discussion of his work. They will very likely figure again in regards to his new novel, The Silence, in which a mysterious event on Super Bowl Sunday 2022 causes screens everywhere to go blank. The way our culture moves along changes the way all of us think, DeLillo said. I dont think its a question of better or worse. Its simply inevitable.
Let me ask about something thats not in The Silence, at least not anymore. In the first galley copy I read, theres a scene in which a character is reciting disastrous events and mentions Covid-19. Then I was told there were changes to the book and was sent a second galley. Covid-19 was gone. Why did you take it out? I didnt put Covid-19 in there. Somebody else had. Somebody else could have decided that it made it more contemporary. But I said, Theres no reason for that.
Im shocked that an editor or whoever had the chutzpah to jam anything, let alone a Covid-19 mention, into one of your books. It wasnt going to stay, thats for sure.
Still, The Silence feels attuned to current anxieties. What planted the seed? What got me going was the idea of a blank screen. It led everything. Then there was the notion of the Super Bowl, which has been in the back of my mind for some years. Watching the football game joins us together in one aspect and then looking at a blank screen suddenly is a kind of cataclysmic footnote. There was also a flight I was on between Paris and New York, and for somewhat mysterious reasons, I made notes. There was a screen under the overhead bin. So I watched the screen and there was information there like outside air temperature, time in New York, arrival time, speed, etc. I wasnt accustomed to this.
I hate when Im on a plane and realize Im compelled to keep staring at that screen. What intrigued you about it? What was intriguing is that I was also compelled to look. Id never experienced this before.
Don DeLillo in 1991. Louis Monier/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty Images
That makes me think of the characters Max and Jim in The Silence, who are always looking at screens as a substitute for generating their own thoughts, which a lot of us do these days. In what ways does having the constant cognitive crutch of a screen to look at affect our minds? Technology has changed the way we think, talk. Everything was different before this somewhat abrupt technological advance. Our thinking is less meditative and somewhat more instantaneous. I dont use a cellphone, because I want to keep thinking in a traditional manner. It helps me concentrate on words on a page. This has always been an important element in the way I work: simply the appearance of words on a page, letters in the word, words in the sentence. If I can go on for a minute, I think it started with The Names, which I wrote in the early 1980s: I recall clearly seeing the visual connection between letters, between letters in a word, words in a sentence. When I started working on The Names I decided to limit each page to a paragraph, one paragraph per page, which helped me in a visual sense to concentrate more deeply, and Ive been doing it more or less consistently ever since. For example, theres a phrase I remember at the end of Underworld: Raw sprawl. The word raw is contained in the word sprawl. That sort of thing became more apparent to me after The Names. I have to add this: I still use an old Olympia typewriter. It has large type and allows me to see more clearly the letters on a page.
What youre talking about is a sensitivity to the aesthetics of words and language. Has digital life changed things in that regard? Is it all degradation? I dont think of it as degradation. Its simply what happens. Its a form of progress. This is the path of technology. I dont necessarily long to go back to precomputer days. I accept what we have and in many ways Im astonished by it.
What do you find astonishing? The enormous thrust forward, if it is forward. Whatever technology is capable of doing becomes what it must do. Its uncontrollable.
Like, if we can surveil someone through their phone, we will surveil someone through their phone? Absolutely. If a certain thing can be developed, it will be developed. Many things are being developed to the general advantage of people and civilization and then there are the things that individuals will do because they find a way to do it. This is what causes all sorts of disruptions in technology and peoples lives. Because an individual can find a way to do something technologically, he or she, depending on the kind of person, will do it.
You dont use smartphones and computers, right? Very little. Im more comfortable with an old telephone. Im speaking to you on an old landline, and this is what I like to do. It makes me feel normal.
Do you often feel abnormal? [Laughs.] I dont. Maybe subnormal.
Do you read any websites? No, I dont. My wife has a computer, but no, I dont have any interest in that.
Your fiction, inasmuch as its about any one particular thing, is about what makes us uncomfortable. So Im curious: What gives you comfort? Writing gives me comfort. Trying to understand can be somewhat self-enlightening, maybe in a self-deceptive way, but thats helpful. My personal question is, Will I keep writing fiction? The answer is that Im just going to see what happens. Its possible that Ill try to think about arranging a volume of my nonfiction work. I dont know.
A scene from White Noise, Daniel Fishs 2019 play based on DeLillos novel. Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
Maybe this is a stupid question and maybe the answer to it is the novels themselves but after 50 years of thinking and writing, do you feel as if you have a firm understanding of this American society that in so many ways flummoxes the rest of us? I think Ive remained open to whatever happens around us and as confused as other people become by what happens around us. I dont think that the work Ive done gives me any great, deep perception about whats going on. I mean, I couldnt discuss with you on a certain level of intelligence the current presidential campaigns.
Nor presumably would you want to. Youre right. Will I be looking at the presidential debate? I may be watching baseball.
Have you been watching the games played in empty stadiums? Ive watched some. The empty seats are astonishing. I much prefer the empty seats to other stadiums where they have fake faces in the stands. I think thats a desecration of baseball. The empty seats, theyre satisfying in a curious way. The simple, traditional game of baseball is almost elevated to an element of art by the lack of people in the stands. Its all very stylized. I notice things I havent usually noticed. People keep hitting foul balls. More than ever, it seems. Foul balls. Foul balls. Three-and-two count, foul ball almost inevitably on a three-and-two count. The oddness of it all. Hitting a home run to empty stands. Yeah, it becomes a form of art in a way.
If you have written your last novel, which as you suggested remains an open question, how do you feel about what youve accomplished? I never expected my first novel to be published, and it was published by the first publisher to look at it. Ever since then Ive felt lucky.
I understand your gratitude at being able to make a living as a writer, but from a self-critical perspective have you done what you set out to do? I could have done better perhaps in the 1970s and, to a lesser extent, since then. But at the time I thought I was doing as well as I could. In retrospect, certain novels probably could have been better. Can I possibly say that I should have resisted the urge to get going on such novels?
Which ones? Should I really say?
Only if you want to. Amazons aside, of course. [Laughs.] Maybe I could have done better with The Body Artist; Point Omega. There are enthusiastic responses to these books, particularly Point Omega, but when I was working, I dont think I totally reached the level of enthusiasm that I usually do. But I kept on going.
Is The Silence intended at all as a kind of career summary? I ask because it calls to mind a bunch of your other books. Like Players it begins in an airplane. The Super Bowl is a football connection to End Zone. Theres a cataclysmic event as in White Noise. Theres even a quick back-and-forth in which two characters try to remember details about the scientist Celsius, which is close to a back-and-forth in your short story Midnight in Dostoevsky, where people are trying to remember something about Celsius. Is that all a coincidence? I dont think in terms of connection between books. Except perhaps that the assassination of President Kennedy mysteriously turns up in a roundabout way at the end of my first novel, Americana. The character drives his car along the motorcade route that President Kennedy took. Then years later I decided it might be interesting to write a novel based on the assassination of President Kennedy. This was a major decision, and it required me to do an enormous amount of research. Curiously enough I ended up in the Bronx, where I was born and grew up, because I learned that Lee Oswald had spent a year in the Bronx with his mother, living within walking distance of where I lived. I went to visit his old neighborhood. Maybe that is what got me started on Libra. I decided to name the novel after his birth sign. I was hoping it was Scorpio, because I liked that word. But his birth sign turned out to be Libra, the scales. I settled for that.
You know who else shows up in two of your books? Murray Jay Siskind. Both times described as having an Amish beard. Murray Jay! Remind me, what book is he in?
White Noise. And where else?
Amazons. Oh god. How do you remember that? I dont remember that.
I think I just got a scoop. I dont know if youve ever publicly acknowledged that you wrote Amazons. I probably did, somewhere or other. [Laughs.] Maybe to an interviewer from Thailand.
Let me get back to themes from your work: paranoia, conspiracy, information overload. None of these things have become any less potent, which is part of what accounts for the prophetic qualities people see in your books. What do you take from seeing your themes continue to play out in the world with such force? Well, I thought of the entire set of decades after the Kennedy assassination as the age of paranoia. For people of my age or perhaps a little younger, this is what overtook the entire culture. People were paranoid about everything, and suddenly there were all the books, the studies of the assassination. I have an entire library shelf, including the 26 volumes of the Warren Report, half of which I read fairly thoroughly when I was working on Libra. It consumed the culture. Thats not an exaggeration. After 11/22/63 everybody began to think in terms of paranoia. Then it was gone.
You think the culture has not become more paranoid? We could say that there was a conspiratorial element in the current situation in the pandemic but Im not sure how seriously the commentators and students of this era take it. Otherwise, I think that sense of conspiracy is less prevalent now than it used to be.
Robert Pattinson in the film adaptation of DeLillos novel Cosmopolis (2012). Caitlin Cronenberg/Entertainment One, via Everett Collection
Let me take a shot in the dark: Have you ever read the cultural critic Raymond Williams? I dont think so.
He had this idea of how every era has what he called a structure of feeling, which is basically the way that people experience the times in which they live. And in the past youve written about how J.F.K.s assassination and 9/11 fundamentally altered our understanding of the world. Will the pandemic change our structure of feeling? Absolutely. The question is how will it change? When we are finally able to live, so to speak, normally again, which is probably a long way off, how will we think back upon the pandemic? Are we going to continue to be affected by it? I think we have to be in some way. We may feel enormous relief, but for many people, its going to be difficult to return to what we might term as ordinary. I dont know how thats going to feel. I hope that its mainly a sense of rediscovered freedoms. You want to go to a movie. You want to go to a museum and eat in a restaurant. Those ordinary things are going to seem extraordinary.
Youve been in Manhattan during the pandemic. What are your impressions of the city? If I take a walk, a street that has four people on it will seem almost crowded. Were supposed to be wearing masks, not everyone does, and one has to veer away from certain people. One has to be consciously aware of whos coming toward us. Whos behind us. As much as an individual might look forward to going out for a while, these self-imposed restrictions begin to assert themselves and whatever pleasure one anticipated may not be experienced fully.
That sounds exactly like something from your novels. Honestly, Im not aware of that. Im just babbling.
Characters babble in your novels, too! See, its all connected! It is all connected.
Ive obviously been reading too much Don DeLillo. Speaking of which, can I ask you a left-field Ratners Star question? I always wondered how much Thomas Pynchon influenced that book. To me it feels stylistically closer to his work than the rest of your own. My goodness. I dont know if I can answer that question. I was enthusiastic about the Pynchon of that period. Did it have a direct influence? It probably did have some sort of influence, but I dont know quite how to answer that.
I have another style question: Theres an argument to be made that a book like Zero K embodies what might be thought of as late style. Do you see any validity in thinking about it in that way? When I think of Zero K, to the extent that I can remember it, I think visually. One of the characters, Jeff, walking along long corridors and then the secret desert compound and the underground chamber, cryonic suspension, people hoping to resume life at some point. There are famous athletes who did that.
Ted Williamss head was frozen. It was Ted Williams. Can people return to life? Thats the question. Again, I was thinking visually: rows of people in these pods in cryonic suspension. When I was working on Zero K, I was thinking that Id actually seen such a thing, which of course I hadnt. The other thing I remember is the odd part titles, Part 1: In the Time of Chelyabinsk. Part 2: In the Time of Konstantinovka. I did have a reason for doing that but who the hell knows what it was.
I suspect that could be your answer to a lot of my questions. And itd be the honest answer, believe me.
Opening illustration: Source photograph by Nicolas Guerin/Contour by Getty Images
This interview has been edited and condensed from clarity from two conversations.
Follow this link:
We All Live in Don DeLillo's World. He's Confused by It Too. - The New York Times
Recommendation and review posted by G. Smith
