A lack of ambivalence

• Mark Binelli interviews Don DeLillo in Guernica Magazine.

Worth reading, if only for the bit about Pynchon.

Guernica: In a number of your past books, your characters have also expressed ambivalent feelings about the idea of terrorism. In the opening of Players, you describe the “glamour of revolutionary violence, the secret longing it evokes in the most docile soul...” And in Mao II one of the characters says of terrorists, “It’s difficult when they kill and maim because you see them honestly now as the only possible heroes for our time... the way they live in the shadows, live willingly with death.” Did what happened on September 11th change your own thoughts about terrorism?

Don DeLillo: No. I tend to write through character consciousness, and different people in my books have different feelings about this matter. One of the characters in Falling Man, Martin, makes a greater attempt to understand the complaints against the narcissistic heart of the West. The character he argues with, Nina, does not disagree with this in theory, but when the attacks occur, something else occurs, which is a terrible outrage.

Guernica: Did you struggle with similar responses yourself, after the attacks?

Don DeLillo: No, I didn’t struggle. I knew I was totally opposed to what happened and to the reason for it.

DeLillo's return

• Adam Kirsch reviews Don DeLillo's latest in The New York Sun.

A well-written review of Falling Man. Consensus seems to be mixed -- Scott at Conversational Reading linked to another mezzo-mezzo review -- but I'm still looking forward to it.

Mr. DeLillo has even envisioned the writer and the terrorist as direct rivals, each seeking the power to change history by changing the way it is understood. As he told an interviewer in 1985, "There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to." This insight, which once might have seemed paradoxical or frivolous, now looks like a simple statement of fact. Terror, we have learned during the last five years, regards individual bodies as a medium through which to affect the collective imagination. That is why the terrorist can so savagely disregard his victims' suffering, and why resistance to terrorism is always also an affirmation of humanism.

..."Falling Man," then, offers neither the sprawling historical canvas of "Underworld," nor the thesis-driven postmodernism of "Libra" and "Mao II." Instead, like Mr. DeLillo's last two novels — "Cosmopolis" and "The Body Artist," neither very well received — the new book is small-scale and subdued, at times even a bit airless. Reading "Falling Man," it is easy to see what Mr. DeLillo meant when he said that "the major influences on me have been European movies, and jazz, and Abstract Expressionism." The book is structured like a film, a series of brief episodes that fade in and black out. Indeed, the main characters — Keith Neudecker, a lawyer who worked in the towers, and his ex-wife, Lianne — each have moments of estrangement when they view themselves as if they were actors in a movie. "In the movie version," Keith thinks as he climbs the stairs to his deserted apartment in Lower Manhattan, "someone would be in the building, an emotionally damaged woman or a homeless old man, and there would be dialogue and close-ups."

Dialogue and close-ups are, in fact, Mr. DeLillo's preferred narrative tools. He keeps a tight focus on Keith and Lianne, in regular alternation, as they move through the days and weeks after September 11. And his prose eschews special effects, acting instead as a bleak, lustreless lens. Here is Keith picking a fight in a department store: "The man was listening to his companion but did not move. Keith was happy to stand and watch and then he wasn't. He walked over there and punched the man." This sounds more like Hemingway than what we usually think of as Mr. DeLillo's style, and the long stretches of curt, repetitive dialogue sometimes read like a parody of David Mamet.

DeLillo update

Here's the Falling Man cover art:

DeLillo's latest

• Don DeLillo's newest novel is coming out this summer.

Via Don DeLillo's America:

What it's about: The Scribner Summer 2007 catalog is describing the book like this:

In the opening pages of Falling Man, Keith Neudecker emerges from the smoke and ash of the burning tower where he worked and makes his way to the apartment of his ex-wife and young son uptown. Throughout this bold and haunting novel, DeLillo traces the way the events of September 11 kindled or rekindled relationships, reconfigured our emotional landscape, our memory, and our perception of the world. Falling Man is a direct encounter with the enormous force of history, yet the story is told through the intimate lives of a few people immediately affected. It is beautiful, heartbreaking, and ultimately, redemptive.

DeLillo on 9/11... the mouth waters.

Listmania strikes again

• The New York Times tallies up the votes for "the best works of American fiction in the last 25 years."

The winners: Beloved by Toni Morrison, Underworld by Don DeLillo, American Pastoral by Philip Roth, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy and John Updike's four-book "Rabbit" series.

Let's see, I've read Underworld and American Pastoral (and both are extraordinary), and maybe one or two of Updike's Rabbit Engstrom books (which I liked less than some of his other works, like In the Beauty of the Lillies and The Witches of Eastwick). Beloved has sat on my shelf for years, tempting me, but I've put off reading it mostly because it seems more like homework than anything else; something I should read as opposed to something I want to read.

What struck me most was the dominance of Philip Roth in the runners-up, five strong including Operation Shylock, a book which drove me up the wall. I can understand Roth's reputation, especially amongst the urban literati types that made up the panel of judges, but come now, he's not the only top-notch writer out there. Personally, I would have bumped DeLillo's White Noise into the top position; Underworld is great and all, but White Noise, to me, is far more focused, precise and effective. (Meghan O'Rourke has a great piece at Slate that discusses the lack of "small" novels in the Times' list of winners & nominees.)

One good thing about these lists is that they can turn you on to books and authors that have never crossed your radar before; I'd never heard of Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale before, for example. Another attribute is that they can get discussions going about the many deserving writers that didn't make the cut; some that came immediately to mind when scanning the list included, among others, Thomas Pynchon, Stanley Elkin, John Barth, William T. Vollmann, Jonathan Safran Foer, Michael Chabon, T. C. Boyle and Jonathan Lethem, who've all published some great works in the last quarter-century (and that's just for starters). The flipside, however, is that listmaking is a double-edged sword, buttressing already-established writers' reputations while shoving others even further towards the fringes. Instead of making a list that's all about everyone's idea of "the best," why not try putting together a list focusing on the most underappreciated works of American literature in the last 25 years?

Are the selections safe choices? Maybe, maybe not. Times critic A. O. Scott wrote an excellent companion essay to the list which illustrated its inherent pitfalls and made a number of prescient points about the state of American literature. I'll end this with Scott's thoughts on the general thrust of the selections:

We - Americans, writers, American writers - seem often to be a tribe of mavericks dreaming of consensus. Our mythical book is the one that will somehow include everything, at once reflecting and by some linguistic magic dissolving our intractable divisions and stubborn imperfections. The American literary tradition is relatively young, and it stands in perpetual doubt of its own coherence and adequacy - even, you might say, of its own existence. Such anxiety fosters large, even utopian ambitions. A big country demands big books. To ask for the best work of American fiction, therefore, is not simply - or not really - to ask for the most beautifully written or the most enjoyable to read. We all have our personal favorites, but I suspect that something other than individual taste underwrites most of the choices here. The best works of fiction, according to our tally, appear to be those that successfully assume a burden of cultural importance. They attempt not just the exploration of particular imaginary people and places, but also the illumination of epochs, communities, of the nation itself. America is not only their setting, but also their subject.

It's a guy thing

• The Guardian explores "the books that move men."

And the winner is... Albert Camus' The Stranger. (Apparently, across the pond it's known as The Outsider... po-tay-to, po-tah-to.)

Yeah... check. That one's been an all-time favorite ever since I read it in English class in 11th grade. But the Big 3, the books that really reshaped my conception of writing, were Richard Adams' Watership Down, George Orwell's 1984 and Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Orwell, of course, gets the mention in the Guardian piece, but then again, he's a homegrown hero over there.

We found a strong sense of nostalgia among male readers as they looked back to their formative years; many had tended to lose interest in fiction in favour of non-fiction on entering into adulthood. One consequence of this was that several men admitted that they were reluctant to reread a book which had been almost painfully important to them at puberty. "I'm afraid I might find it mawkish now", "It might not live up to my memories", "It might read as dated now" became familiar responses.

Men also recalled a kind of "mentoring" by authors encountered as a teenager - the same word was used by a surprising number of those we interviewed. Having found an author who "spoke" to them, a man would have trusted them as a literary guide, reading all of their works, and also works quoted from or cited by them. Orwell, in particular, was cited frequently as having guided our male reader in his choices of author. This idea of mentoring had never cropped up in our survey of women's reading, though word-of-mouth recommendation by other readers regularly had (men mentioned word-of-mouth much less often).

I admit, I haven't reread any of the above books in many, many years, but not necessarily because I'm afraid of finding them to be lacking; it's just that there are too damn many other books I haven't read yet.

As for authors who've become mentors by proxy, well, I've read just about everything Stephen King has ever written, but I wouldn't necessarily consider him to be a guiding light. (Despite the fact that many of his books feature as a central character a screwed-up writer type.) I have, though, discovered authors and gone through phases where I read everything by them I could get my hands on; writers including (but not limited to) Richard Russo, Arthur Koestler, Don DeLillo, John Barth and T. C. Boyle have always left me hungry for more.