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Title.

Note: I include the All the Pretty Horses film question because it provides better context for his commment.

Taken from the 2009 WSJ interview:

WSJ: "All the Pretty Horses" was also turned into a film [starring Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz]. Were you happy with the way it came out?

CM: It could've been better. As it stands today it could be cut and made into a pretty good movie. The director had the notion that he could put the entire book up on the screen. Well, you can't do that. You have to pick out the story that you want to tell and put that on the screen. And so he made this four-hour film and then he found that if he was actually going to get it released, he would have to cut it down to two hours.

WSJ: Does this issue of length apply to books, too? Is a 1,000-page book somehow too much?

CM: For modern readers, yeah. People apparently only read mystery stories of any length. With mysteries, the longer the better and people will read any damn thing. But the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore and people need to get used to that. If you think you're going to write something like "The Brothers Karamazov" or "Moby-Dick," go ahead. Nobody will read it. I don't care how good it is, or how smart the readers are. Their intentions, their brains are different.

White Noise or Underworld?

I am currently reading Blood Meridian and Gravity’s Rainbow. I have started seriously reading literature about a year ago, making my way through the classics.

I just finished it last week. Amazing book, that doesn’t need saying. I was annoyed that everyone told me that it was going to be this philosophical thriller. I didn’t get that vibe at all; the thriller part of the epithet. It was pretty typical Delillo, thematically, and more developed than some of his other novels (tourism, language, infidelity, the american family). Everything discussed on language and translation was amazing, I thought I was watching Godard. The thriller label is a real detriment to this novel

Isn't this beautiful?

Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web. There is a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely and streaks of running luster on the bay. You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness. The wind makes a sound in the pines and the world comes into being, irreversibly, and the spider rides the wind-swayed web.

I curious if anyone has paused over "the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness."

I saw the necessity of the s sound, but wondered if "stabbed" was right. I thought about "stung."

Reading the paragraph aloud using both words I concluded "stung" is more accurate but "stabbed" sounds better. Then again, there's "surely" near the beginning.

Pretend you're Don DeLillo. Explain this choice.

Dear all,

a character in Underworld paints the b52 planes. I wonder if she is based on a "real" artist, and who he or she might be. Thanks in advance!

We all want - I trust - DeLillo to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but that isn’t going to happen. For a number of reasons, none of which concern his worthiness.

Given the affection here for White Noise, I’m curious:

If White Noise were his most important novel - meaning he never wrote Libra, Mao II or Underworld - would he gain the Nobel strictly on the merits of White Noise and the works leading up to it?

View Poll

The contrarian inside may have too loud a say, but I don't care for White Noise. At best, I'd rank it at the top of his lesser novels. The return of the bad case of cleverness that marred his earlier work ruins what might have been a truly fine novel. I reread it these days only as a point of interest in the development of a very great literary artist. How lonely should I feel?

I’ve been on a Didion kick lately, starting with the famous essay collections to plug a major hole in my reading. I did have a fleeting idea that there’s some crossover between her and big Don. The era, the general mistrust and paranoia around America in the late 60s.

Hardly the most niche themes of course, but there’s a similarity in their style. The arch detachment, the metallic feel of the sentences.

Just started listening to Democracy, hardback version is in the post, and so far getting huge The Names vibes. I think the books came out around the same time, early 80s. Americans abroad, neo-colonial skulduggery in exotic locales. There’s a meta quality to this Didion novel so far that kinda tracks with DeLillo too. That obsession with language and the fourth wall.

Not one mention of Joan Didion in this sub, so wondering if it’s something that anyone else has noticed. My understanding is she was too prolific and known for DeLillo not to be familiar with her writing, but not sure if he’s ever spoken about her.

if so, which?

I am new to DeLillo, having discovered him just a few weeks ago. I've already read The Names and White Noise, and I'm halfway through Libra. (The Names and White Noise are already among my very favourite novels of all time—I read them both twice—and Libra is tremendous so far. And they are all so different!) I can't express how grateful I am that these books somehow found their way into my life, and I'm in the grips of a bit of a DeLillo obsession.

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Today's fascination is with sentence-level craft.

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Members of this sub will know that DeLillo is sensitive to the rhythm of sentences, the sounds of words, and the shapes of the letters themselves. For example, in a 1997 letter to David Foster Wallace, he wrote:

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• All I can say is that it happens more or less automatically and involves not only alliteration but reverse alliteration (words that end with the same letter or the same sound quality); rhyming or near-rhyming syllables; and (among other things) a sensitivity to the actual appearance of words on a page, to letter-shapes and letter-combinations. In a line you quote—"snow that was drilled and gilded with dog piss"—there is the assonance of “drilled” and “gilded” but also the particular shaping nature of the letters “i” and “l” and “d” in “drilled and gilded” and the sort of visual echo of the “i” in “piss” at the end of the line. And the “o” sound of “dog” and “snow” tend to mate these words (in my eyes and mind). These are round words, as it were, and the others are slim or i-beamed or tall or whatever.

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Also, in an interview with The Paris Review, he said:

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• There’s a rhythm I hear that drives me through a sentence. And the words typed on the white page have a sculptural quality. They form odd correspondences. They match up not just through meaning but through sound and look. The rhythm of a sentence will accommodate a certain number of syllables. One syllable too many, I look for another word. There’s always another word that means nearly the same thing, and if it doesn’t then I’ll consider altering the meaning of a sentence to keep the rhythm, the syllable beat. I’m completely willing to let language press meaning upon me.

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While reading DeLillo, I haven't been actively looking for alliteration, assonance, syllable rhythms, whether words are “tall” or “round.” But I have been noticing these things. Many sentences have struck me, of course, and for many reasons, but I find that it is often the sound or the feel of the sentence that is striking me, and I don't recall this happening as often with other writers.

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For example, from The Names:

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• Nothing that was lodged in the scarps could seem more lost or forgotten than the rusted mining car that had once run dirt to the sea.

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For some reason, when my eyes rolled through that last clause—“that had once run dirt to the sea”—I felt like the sentence itself had become the car, slowly and steadily lumbering out to the sea. This is probably because all eight words are monosyllabic. They have a cadenced feel like a train car steadily clacking down the tracks.

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From Libra:

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• It was all part of the long fall, the general sense that he was dying.

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When I read this, I could feel the first part of the sentence actually falling. Even the word “fall” itself, because the double “l” fades out rather than ending abruptly, seems to be slowly falling toward the comma. There are some nice rhymes in there, too. For example, the vowel sounds in “long” and “fall” match up really nicely.

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Again from Libra:

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• The waiting room was empty except for two or three station familiars, the two or three shadowy men he saw at every stop, living in the walls like lizards.

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At the end of this sentence, “living in the walls like lizards” works so much better than, say, “living in the walls like snakes.” This is because of the “l” and the “i,” but also because a word with two syllables seems to sound just right there, whereas “snakes” would have cut the sentence a little short.

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And a final example from The Names:

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• The song gathered force, a spirited lament. Its tone evoked inevitable things. Time was passing, love was fading, grief was deep and total.

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Here, the last sentence has the rhythm of a song. One-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four-five-six(-seven-eight).

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I admit I might not have picked up on these sounds and rhythms had I not read those interviews, but I think now DeLillo has gotten into my head a little. Or my ear.

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This brings me to a question and an observation.

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Question: Are there any DeLillo passages in which the rhythm or the sound of the sentences or words somehow sang out to you? (I can't be the only one!)

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Related question: In talking with The Guardian about Zero K, DeLillo said, “There’s a sentence in this book, for instance: 17 words and only one of them is more than one syllable. And how did that happen? It just flowed, it just happened.” Does anyone happen to know the sentence to which he is referring?

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Observation: It seems to me that this aspect of language—rhymes, alliteration and assonance, syllable rhythms—would be extremely difficult to capture in translation. A genius-level translator would be able to pull this off, but probably not sentence-for-sentence. In another language, for example, the words for “living” and “like” and “lizards” would not happen to start with the same two letters, but the translator might be able to find other opportunities to use alliteration and assonance, even in sentences where DeLillo himself did not, just to stay true to the style.

The title is in jest, sort of - will the concepts in the book fly over my head? I watched the movie and whilst I didn't 100% get it, it spoke to me enough to want to read it.

What made me ask is this comment I stumbled upon:

"'The Most Photographed Barn in America' may also be the best literary implementation of Baudrillard's simulacrum theory I've come across in any post-modern fiction.Still, it's the absurdist tone of much of the novel that makes it so compelling. That feeling went on to haunt me for weeks on end."

I have no idea what any simulacrum theory is. My knowledge of absurdism goes as far as what I read on r/Absurdism Top of All Time last week. I also don't know much about post modernism past vague Sociology lessons when I was 18.

Thanks!

I've noticed that his writings have this un-American, sort of foreign-influenced quality to them, and I'm not sure why.

I never get that sense with McCarthy or Pynchon (the latter in the more transitory realm, especially with books like V. and GR).

Thoughts?

Edit:

One Underworld review from New Yorker also hinted at this:

His longest, most ambitious, and most complicated novel – and his best...Underworld is the black comedy of the Cold War; it is full of sentences that capture, with the choice of the odd word, a moment in American history.

Why or why not?

I've bounced off this novel a couple times, each time knowing I needed a certain presence of mind to absorb it. Also daunted, I suppose, by only glancing knowledge of the assassination.

Now that I'm really getting into the meat of it, it's doing something few other novels have ever done. The particular sweep of history is eerie and absorbing, enhanced somehow by the knowledge that it's sort of an alternative history. I wish it was better known, but you really have to be gird up with a certain sensibility, I think, to accommodate.

Anyway...

Some writers outline their books, some don't. And some writers managed to write multiple books at the same time (McCarthy and Welsh), and someone one at a time (like Barth).

Does DeLillo fall into the latter or the former?

This is a joke please don't kill me.

Did DeLillo conjure up Elon Musk via a mohole?

I saw this film last night. The synopsis struck me as sharing a lot with “The Silence”. The experience confirmed that the film covers a lot of the same ground as the novel. I haven’t researched if there is any direct influence from the novel on the film, but I enjoyed both. I would recommend the film even if you didn’t enjoy the novel. The film’s ending was well done and there was an explicit core message delivered in the third act. I might have to revisit “The Silence” and consider it again in comparison to this film.

Just finished Underworld 5 minutes ago. Such a damn good book. My first DeLillo novel.

I had a thought as soon as I was on the last page.

I finished Infinite Jest 5 months ago and the structure of the books as well as the endings are both incredibly similar. I’m sure there are articles out there about this (I’ve never looked), and I know DFW said he loved DeLillo and gladly copied stuff from him. But Underworld was published 20 months after IJ…..

So, as Underworld being my only DeLillo read, I’m guessing there has to be other novels by him before Underworld with a non traditional/non-linear type of structure &/or viewpoints from many different characters at any given time?

I’d love to know so I can read them. Thanks!

So I started with The Names (which I loved), then went to White Noise (which is probably my least favourite, after The Silence), and have also read and enjoyed Libra and Mao II. But the two that have stuck with me longest are Point Omega and The Body Artist.

I like DeLillo's sparse, dense lingering imagery - while the farcical, humorous tone of White Noise I found off-putting.

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What do you think I should read next? (I already have Underworld coming in the post, but I'll unlikely read it until I have some longer time off, like a holiday.)

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I started White Noise yesterday after hearing a lot of suggestions for it, saying it's the best of his style all blended together. I really like it so far. I'm about 120ish pages in. What I most like about DeLillo's writing style from WN so far is that it's insightful into normal life and anxieties without being boring and is bleak yet humorous. The bleak-humor feels similar to Kurt Vonnegut (love love love Kurt!).

I have the 1980s novels collection of Delillo from the LoA, it includes Libra and The Names. I also want to buy Underworld.

So, is White Noise a good representation of DeLillo in general, or is his work classified into different stylistic phases based on the decade? Since I like WN, will I also probably like his other works? I hope so, because I'm always excited when I discover an author who I really like.