On Don DeLillo

First, according to my best information his name is pronounced (duh-LEE-lo). Let me check the internets and see if I can get a 100% positive on that. Wait patiently please, I'll be right back. Sorry, according to a 1997 radio interview, it's pronounced (duh LIL oh).

In a recent post about how to fix the massive up-fucks architects are prone to when writing, I encouraged everyone to avoid poetry as if it was a mental image of your parents having sex. That's how awful the prospect of poetry should be to you. Unless you are Don DeLillo. If you are him it is a big part of what you do.

I read of book of collected interviews with DeLillo. That's how big a fan I am. It was a scholarly treatise on DeLillo's writing process and other amazingly boring topics. I wanted, I suppose, to hear him speak. Or, better put, to find out if he speaks and writes with the same voice. The answer is sort of. He describes the joy of his work as trying to make words do what they can. And in interviews you can almost hear him struggling to speak with the same uncanny precision with which he writes.

I started reading DeLillo because so many people I trusted had such a high opinion of White Noise. Then I went on to Underworld, back to Libra, and then just decided I would read everything he wrote. There are themes and motifs that recur in DeLillo's work - the desert, pop culture, the hidden processes behind the world we see. I'm not going to write about those because you can find, with very little effort, much better than I would be capable of producing. I'm going to offer a simple warning from my own experience.

There are some writers best left alone when your world lacks solidity. DeLillo is definitely one. Murakami is another. If you are in the middle of a major change - getting married or divorced, changing jobs, moving to another city - leave DeLillo on the shelf. His relentless picking at the assumptions which keep the world a safe place to live, his investigation and inhabitation of the in-between spaces is dangerous and unwelcome when your own life begins to lose coherency. I never try DeLillo when my circumstances are uncertain. It's too risky. He is, however, a very great author.

I am tempted to think this warning is some measure of his greatness. His ability to unnerve is unbearable in those already partially unnerved. That is a tribute. I don't fear any author as much as I fear Don DeLillo. And I can't think of any author who is as good in both the large and small - where the large is all that the book contains and the small is the magic of the language, the craft of each sentence.

If you haven't read anything by him, I suggest Pafko at the Wall if you can get it in a first edition. Not just because it is fantastic and fully demonstrates what DeLillo can do when he puts his back into it, but also because it is almost impossible to find any of his other works in first editions - and when you do they are prohibitively expensive.