Slow Players #13: "Terror Makes the New Future Possible" (DeLillo)

Hello,

Last week, I took off for a few days. Sam and I drove up the coast to Cambria, looking to get away from this infernal heat, unplugging our laptops and checking into a beachside motel with nothing but fog, surf, and novels for company. The book we both took with us was Libra, Don DeLillo’s novel about Lee Harvey Oswald, which wrapped up in my case a re-read of DeLillo’s first dozen novels undertaken over the last year or two. Something about the room’s perfect blankness—white walls, white sheets, nothing in the way of color beyond the green glass of bottled mineral water—made it the perfect spot to encounter DeLillo’s forensically attentive telling of (a possible version of) the Kennedy assassination.

A possible version. Maybe I left this novel for last in my revisiting because it’s closest thus to The Golden Hour, the manuscript of which I delivered to my editor last week. In point of fact, DeLillo is all over The Golden Hour, which I’ve described to others (somewhat, but not entirely, facetiously) as “Underworld, if the book were centered around the movies instead of the bomb,” and to Sam as “a systems memoir.” It’s the story, in other words, of the American Century, which is a lot to ask of a novel, let alone a memoir, but DeLillo seemed to manage that remit better than anyone, over and over in the books of his mid-career peak. There’s been plenty of writing about those novels lately (see, for example, Christian Lorentzen’s sharp piece in Bookforum here), but something about them won’t let me go.

Something about Mao II, in particular, won’t. A runt of the litter, sandwiched as it is between his best book (according to the heads, with whom I might agree in this case) The Names, his most popular (White Noise), and then the twin towers of Libra and Underworld, the latter of which I first read in a windowless room in Tribeca while I was working for Robert De Niro, 1100 unbound manuscript pages that landed on my desk at eight AM and kept me in place until almost midnight. That’s . . . an unimpeachable run, and so it’s no wonder people tend to gloss past Mao II as it’s the shortest and arguably (“arguably”) least ambitious of the batch, the one with terrorism and mass violence on its mind, the least funny (well, not as funny as White Noise or End Zone or Running Dog at least), most cryptic, and least anchored to American history (no Lee Harvey Oswald in this one, no J. Edgar Hoover taking in a ballgame with Jackie Gleason, as in Underworld). If you were coming to DeLillo as a neophyte, you certainly wouldn’t start with Mao II, would you? (Would you? I guess that’s a question that’s open to the floor, since God knows the Delillo Hive likes to debate this one, but . . . I wouldn’t.) Why, then, am I so obsessed with it?

“There’s a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists. In the West we become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and influence . . . Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were incorporated.”

How quaint that passage (if Mao II has a “most famous passage,” that would be it) seems in a way, and how very nearly full of shit. It reminds me, in this regard, of Bob Dylan’s “to live outside the law, you must be honest,” a line that probably seemed true in 1966, at least. But DeLillo was certainly on to something. Novelists may not be terrorists, but there’s something solitary and perverse about the position, something decidedly opposed to the notion that (as he puts it in the novel’s other most famous line) “the future belongs to crowds.” And if Mao II is neither the first nor the last time DeLillo would write about terrorism, it is, in a way, the most insistent. The book begins with a mass wedding—a vast group of Moonies getting married in Yankee Stadium—and concludes with a photographer on assignment in Beirut, where an obscure poet is being held hostage by a terror group. In between is the story of Bill Gray, a reclusive and very famous novelist (Pynchon? Salinger? Somewhere in-between, I would think) who emerges from his isolation to be photographed for the first time in many years, only to be slowly dragooned into a plot (always, with DeLillo, there is the plot, the plot-within-the-plot) to free the captive poet. This, too, is quaint, in its way. A writer refusing to be photographed? For anyone under eighty—most writers I know are dying to be photographed, if only they knew any periodicals that would care enough to run the pictures—this seems . . . what? Glamorous? Aspirational? Maybe neither, but DeLillo is interested in the matrix of image and power, how the repetition of an image can drain or amplify that power, depending (in a way, Bill Gray, the Most Unphotographed Writer in the World, is an inversion of the barn in White Noise, just as the Moonie wedding prefigures the baseball game at the beginning of Underworld), and in how privacy is the starkest, perhaps even the only, way to oppose state power. “A writer creates character as a way to reveal consciousness, increase the flow of meaning,” is how DeLillo (or “Bill Gray”) puts it. “This is how we reply to power and beat back our fear.”

Maybe even this is quaint, now that we’re all drowning in “revealed consciousness,” the firehose of other people’s thoughts we encounter online every day—and now that privacy itself is a luxury good; not too many of us can afford to go unphotographed at the moment, whether or not anyone’s interested in the result—but what else is there? The best one can do is what DeLillo does, which is not just to reveal consciousness but yoke it, in writing, to history. As for the rest, the ridiculous (I think, at this point, impossibility) of considering “fame” for a serious writer, I am reminded of something DeLillo said around the time of Underworld’s publication, claiming that the novel as an artform “has moved to the margins and we cannot expect it to be anywhere else. From this sideline vantage, the novelist can assert an influence in a context that may be relatively narrow, but may be all the more forceful and incisive for this very reason.” Whether or not one finds this trade-off a little depressing, at least in theory (must one sacrifice breadth for “incisiveness?”), it’s really nothing new. The book is designed for narrowness—for privacy by its very nature, and I doubt any strong writer, any really strong one, wouldn’t make gladly make that bargain every day of the week.

As this newsletter brushes off its cobwebs and springs back to life—now that my manuscript is delivered, there may be a little more time to maintain it—it’s likely to remain occasional, as it’s been so from the beginning by design, but I am planning to launch a paid tier that will be less so. That tier will focus on writing advice, everything from craft matters—beginnings, endings, and everything that lies between—to business stuff (agent questions, how to write a nonfiction proposal, film adaptations) and then some. It will, I promise, be an excellent value for its modest cost, and a wonderful way to support my work on the margins and otherwise. More on that shortly.

Until very soon,

Matthew