Friday, May 16, 2008
America's premier novelist of ideas has long anticipated a world in which spectacle and terror would achieve totemic significance in our everyday lives.
Oct 23, 2001 | It's been said often enough that every age gets the art it deserves. In a memorable editorial lynching of Oliver Stone, Maureen Dowd once castigated the filmmaker's liberties with history, suggesting his popularity must signal something askew in the culture itself. Stone is not so much a savvy critic of our times, Dowd accusingly implied, as a symptom of its myopic shortcomings. Never pick a fight with Maureen Dowd.
Don DeLillo, a novelist who has made American life his explicit subject for over 30 years, has faced similar charges. Like Stone, DeLillo's fascination with conspiratorial themes has drawn no shortage of heated rebukes. His reputation as an unabashedly private and cerebral literary figure, similarly, has not always endeared him to the literary establishment. He figured prominently in an anti-intellectual broadside of so-called serious contemporary fiction this summer in the Atlantic Monthly. Even tributes have tended to diminish DeLillo, as when Martin Amis trivialized him as "the poet of paranoia." Yet his dozen novels -- and handful of plays, stories and essays -- range widely and assuredly across the broad swath of the postwar American experience. They bristle with brainy asides and lyric rhapsodies rare to modern literature. From JFK to rock 'n' roll, from suburbia to the CIA, DeLillo has crafted defining portrayals of many touchstones in the American psyche.
Over the course of time, the dismissive accusations have lost their bite. DeLillo's clearly focused vision of the contemporary landscape -- once so despairing and unlikely -- has become, startlingly, more and more our own. He worried about a world in which spectacle and terror would achieve totemic significance in the everyday lives of Americans. From attacks on American money markets to bioterror in the heartland, DeLillo's work has long anticipated a world in which acts of terror would achieve unprecedented historic consequences. He has also probed deeply the role of Americans and their reputation in the modern world, and worried about the invasiveness of its popular culture. "We're all one beat away from becoming elevator music," he once said.
Sympathetic critics have increasingly suggested that Don DeLillo is probably the best living American writer that living Americans do not read. Today, the growing relevance of his work has him poised to become more than a critics' darling. His literary peer Thomas Pynchon has applauded DeLillo for "a voice as eloquent and morally focused as any in American writing." In light of the events of Sept. 11, Don DeLillo's America may assist many readers in making sense of a newly uncertain world.
Modern American history has proven itself reliably frustrating in the hands of its most capable chroniclers. As Philip Roth, speaking for historians and artists alike, famously observed of the reality of American life, "It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's own meagre imagination." The pressing need for a broad historical understanding -- while deriving some meaning from the daunting, terrific violence of recent weeks -- is more pronounced than ever.
DeLillo's rejoinder to Roth's shrug can be seen throughout his oeuvre. As he wrote in a 1997 essay, "The sweeping range of American landscape and experience can be a goad, a challenge, an affliction and an inspiration, pretty much in one package." His literary career has taken up this express challenge with remarkable aplomb.
Born in 1936 to Italian immigrants, DeLillo grew up in New York in the Bronx. There he actively played sports among fellow Italian-Americans, harboring no interest in the writing life. A teenage job as parking attendant one summer proved to be a pivotal experience. According to DeLillo, the vast hours spent waiting and watching over vehicles encouraged a reading habit that became, over time, the beginnings of a writer's education. He discovered Faulkner, Joyce, Melville and Hemingway. He attended Fordham University as a self-described listless youth, and over the early '60s toiled discontentedly in advertising. The writing of his first novel, "Americana," would occupy the second half of the '60s, with DeLillo alternating between novel writing and freelance copywriting. In 1975 he married Barbara Bennett, a banker and, later, landscape designer, and they traveled for several years across Greece, the Middle East and India. He has repeatedly remarked on the influence of these travels, as well as his many years in New York. "I think more than writers," he has added, "the major influences on me have been European movies, and jazz, and Abstract Expressionism."
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