DeLilloscape.

30.EPILOGUE.45: May 23, 2003.
"DeLilloscape (or: People Who REALLY Matter: Don DeLillo)."

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 a culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.
-- Don DeLillo, Mao II.

        "Don DeLillo."
        "Don DeLillo?"
        "Don DeLillo."
        "Oh." Bob took a sip of coffee.
        "I read White Noise in the early 1990s. I didn't like it," I said. "I reread it a few years later, and then I realized it was brilliant."
        "I remember you made me read it."
        "That was after the second time I'd read it."
        "Oh." Bob leaned back in his chair.
        I rested my elbows on the table.
        "And when I read Underworld in 1997," I said, "it finally dawned on my primitive brain that Don DeLillo is one of the greatest living American novelists, if not maybe the greatest living American novelist." I took a sip of my coffee. For some reason I felt like I hadn't been here for what seemed to be years. Even though I'd been here all along. Still, it felt good to be here, now. "As far as I'm concerned, Underworld is hands down the best book of 1997, one of the best books of the 1990s, and easily one of the best books I have ever read."
        "I would have thought you would have put Thomas Pynchon in the whole 'Greatest American Novelist' thing."
        "It's sort of touch-and-go with me. Pynchon's output is brilliant. And while Gravity's Rainbow is one of the best books ever written. But, still, Pynchon's post-Gravity's Rainbow writing has been, while technically excellent, less 'important,' maybe somehow less 'valid' than DeLillo's. I mean, Pynchon is still amazing. Don't get me wrong. Mason & Dixon is a great book. And depending on the mood I'm in I might say it's a tie-- Pynchon and DeLillo both occupy the position of Greatest Living American Novelist. They are very, very close. But, for the purposes of this exercise I'm siding with DeLillo. Especially after read Underworld."
        "Why Underworld?"
        "It's DeLillo's 'big book.' It's about 800 pages long and covers fifty years of American history. It sort of traces the rise of the hyperreal in American culture, among other things. And it's one of his best, has many of his most well-defined characters, and all of his main obsessions."
        "Oh."
        "But as far as the DeLillo/Pynchon thing, DeLillo is more of an observer, a cultural commentator than the post-Rainbow Pynchon. Also, Pynchon still has a little too much 'fight the power and stick it to The Man' 60s and early 70s hippy radicalism. This makes his later stuff seem kind of naive."
        "Okay. So you're saying DeLillo's stuff is somehow more...."
        "I don't want to say 'inhuman,' but maybe not as starry-eyed. More: This Is The Way The World Is, and less Give Peace A Chance. But, again, this applies to Pynchon's later stuff, and not Gravity's Rainbow which is pretty cynical and dark, and sharp."
        I sipped my coffee. Cappuccino, actually. Heather was behind the counter, talking to friends. I watched her.
        "Anyway, DeLillo's writing is cool (in all senses of the word), direct, and precise. He is also very readable. And can be quite funny."
        "White Noise was kind of funny, in places," Bob said. "But it was weird. Sometimes the stuff in the book wasn't funny while I was reading it. Then later, when I thought about it more I saw the humour."
        "Yeah, DeLillo's 'funny' is a different kind of 'funny.' It's more subversive."
        "And White Noise kind of felt like a thriller, too," Bob said.
        "Yeah. A lot of his books read like thrillers. Also, a lot of his later works read like science fiction set in the present day."
        "Yeah. There were parts where White Noise felt like a kind of sf. Sort of."
        "It's the way DeLillo describes things," I said, "that make his writing seem science-fiction-y. Information networks proliferate, everything is computerized. People are always commenting on how life has become artificial and plastic and regulated. The television is always on. People talk about space travel and obsess on math. The media makes you immortal, everything everybody does is always recorded. Technology is dated a week after it is released."
        "It feels weird when you read about it, but then you realize that all these sorta sci-fi-ish things are just the trappings of daily life."
        "Well, yeah," I said. "I mean the contemporary world has, in a certain sense, become a science fiction movie. When you have the Internet, and primitive virtual reality, and people honestly working on nanotechnology, and others working out theories of how to literally to 'reprogram' the universe because they're starting to think of matter as raw information that can be edited, you don't really need sf. All sf can offer you, now are westerns in outer space and (in most cases) quickly dated scientific extrapolations."
        Watching Heather walk back and forth, I paused.
        "And so," I said, "when Don DeLillo describes real life, it seems like science fiction. Sometimes, people find this effect funny. And sometimes it is. But a lot of the time people find it 'funny' simply because it's different and doesn't jibe with what they believe to be their experience. This is because people tend to filter out the world around them and focus on the broad view, the interpersonal relationships. And there is more to life than interpersonal relationships. There is also the relationship with the individual to his/her environment, for one. And, in the late 20th Century the environment is becoming more and more important-- almost to the point of superseding the interpersonal.
        "And a lot of this is because the environment is becoming more and more interactive in an interpersonal way."
        "Yeah, but a lot of people don't notice this," Bob said, "and when they read about a world where the environment is as interpersonal as 'real' interpersonal relationships, they become alienated."
        "In other words," I said, "the majority of people still consider the minutia of daily life in a 19th Century way. In the 19th Century the minutia of daily consisted of things like dinner with the kids; a wife cleaning house; a man going to work at a job and what he does there and what his boss is like; slow and languid work days, even in hellish factories; looking at starving beggars. The invention of better printing presses and steam engines were in the background-- and so was the burgeoning information explosion-- but they were still just that, backgrounded. And so the personal sphere of the individual still wasn't that saturated with information and different kinds of textual interactivity. Coal was energy, and that was still tangible, a fuel you could hold, not electrical. People went down to the pub after work to complain about the government while still ultimately trusting them. Wars were slow moving wars. There was only one newspaper per city, maybe two if you were lucky. Literacy was on the rise, but still there were lots of people who didn't read, and who didn't even go to school. Life was domestic. People were starting to think, but everyone wasn't bombarded with intelligence...."
        "What do you mean 'bombarded with intelligence?' Do you mean that people are 'bombarded with intelligence' now? People are just as stupid now as they were 100 years ago."
        "Oh yeah," I said. "There are lots of stupid people, now. Sure. Maybe even more-- but that's partly because we are bombarded with intelligence. There is so much information out there, and so much of it is so incredible, and intelligent, and amazing, that people have to make an effort not to absorb it. It's easy to learn stuff on the Internet, or on tv, and there are more books now than ever before-- in fact, in many ways smarts are just dropped onto your laps every day. And the crime is that no one notices. In fact, people seem to go out of their ways not to absorb it-- which makes the stupidity double. Because all it takes is just opening your eyes to all the multiplex waves of data out there, all the amazing, contradictory, ever-proliferating reams of data. All you have to do is approach the world data banks with an open mind and within a few months you'll have absorbed enough information to totally shatter all your preconceived notions of what the universe is and can be. And that puts everything and everyone into perspective-- or rather perspectives-- and when you wrestle with that it can only make you smarter. Life actually is more complex now than ever, but that's what's so freeing about being alive now. People just don't want to be free. They'd just rather wallow in their own tunnel-vision. So, yes, we are being bombarded with intelligence. It's just that the majority of the free world refuses to notice. And that makes people even dumber now than before, because when you have no choice but to be ignorant you can't really be faulted for being ignorant-- but when you have the choice to break away from ignorance, and you choose not to, that's even worse."
        I stopped and Bob looked at me like I was insane.
        "Anyway," I said, "back to DeLillo and the minutia of daily life."
        "Sure," he said.
        "Anyway, where was I?" I thought for a minute. "Oh yeah. However, in the 20th Century, especially in the last half of the 20th Century-- and in the 21st, things become different. All the quaint domestic aspects of the 19th Century are still around, but something else creeps in-- technology and information. This is sort of what I said above, but I'll deal with the technological aspects of it, now."
        "Okay."
        "In the contemporary age," I said, "the minutia of daily life now consist of all the 19th Century stuff plus:
        "Watching a constant stream of images on a flickering box; talking with your friend using a machine that makes it seem as if his or her voice is inside your head; playing videogames; seeing movies; going to work and compiling huge streams of data using a computer; driving in a car everywhere, flying 100 miles to work and back each day; coal as energy, but also nuclear fission, petroleum byproducts, solar power, and hydrogen; music playing constantly, making it seem as if you are the star of your own movie; being surrounded by computers-- some of which can call you by name and actually do what you say; starving beggars with laptop computers and their own webpages. Robots: robot dogs, robot cats, robots that make other robots. Global data networks. Enormous government files on each and every one of us. The daily discovery of new superdiseases coupled with the more-or-less successful containment of said diseases within short periods of time. Wars that start and stop within the blink of an eye. Cybernetic body parts. Holograms, computer chips, biochips, primitive nanotechnology, the possibility of the breaking of the light barrier, quantum computing, the mathematical 'discovery' of parallel universes. And so on.
        "DeLillo's books elaborate upon the minutia of the 20th / 21st Century. All the domestic stuff is there, but so is the silicon, the hyperreal
        "And, because of this, the more time goes on, and the more the world begins to resemble a Don DeLillo novel. The more his viewpoint seems less like satire, and more like prophecy."
        "Right."
        "But, let's move on."
        "Moving on."
        "Sometimes the people in DeLillo's books tend to talk at each other, not to each other."
        "How do you mean?"
        "The effect is hard to describe, you just have to see it in action in order for it to make sense."
        "It's different?"
        "Yeah. Like there's communication going on but the signals aren't synching up."
        "How."
        "Well, one person talks about one thing and the other talks about something else, but related."
        "Like when you're maybe in the supermarket and you're trying to read from a list and you know what you want but she has her own list and doesn't really hear you right?"
        "It's related but not really the same. They try to communicate, but it turns into a one-way thing."
        "Well, I mean she hears you but she's thinking about something else and so when you say 'jam' she misinterprets it? This is a bad example."
        "When they talk at each other, it gives the characters an aura of self-absorption. But it also comments upon the society in which they life: one of supreme self-interest, a world of communications breakdown."
        "I think I know what you mean, though. Even though the example I used was, well, incoherent."
        "After a while, it doesn't really matter who's talking. All that matters is that there are words."
        "Because jam in a supermarket, I don't even know why I was thinking about jam in a supermarket. That's just dumb. Or, like I said, incoherent."
        "I think what he's trying to say is that even when you want to talk to your wife, husband, or mother, even when you're confessing the secrets deepest in your heart, sometimes the signal somehow doesn't get through."
        "But I know what that'sÝlike."
        "Occasionally, you end up just hollering out into an indifferent void, even when you're talking to the person you love the most. Or a friend, to use a a less extreme example."
        "But to do that well, you have to be talented. To pull it off, I mean, in writing. The talking at each other thing."
        "Yeah, and I'm just not that good. I mean, I tried, but in the end it's just an approximation of his technique."
        "But doesn't it, this 'talking at people' technique, doesn't it make DeLillo's characters occasionally tend to be kind of distant and cold, emotionally unevolving, and emotionally uninvolving?"
        "In a way," I said. "And there are people who criticize DeLillo for presenting characters as flat, 2-dimensional, cardboard cutouts. But to these people I say, take a look around you. Take a look at all the people walking by that fit DeLillo's pattern. Also, take a look at yourself.
        "How are the people in DeLillo's books really any different than the people you see in a mall, or on the street, or at the office any given day, in real life?"
        "Basically," Bob said, "you're saying they're not."
        "That's right. They're not. Lots of people are unemotional-- on the surface at least. And when they do express outpourings of emotion-- in this culture doing that looks phony, like they're just looking for attention or acting sad. I mean, look at tv. We watch people suffering, or pretending to suffer all the time on talk shows. People sobbing and blubbering on Oprah, or white trash scrapping on Springer-- and every time people explode into emotion it looks like an act. And most of the time, if it's not an overt act it still is 'played up' for the cameras. People cry more on tv than they do in real life. And DeLillo presents people more like they are in real life. Distant and unemotional. Most of the time, I think, the people who criticize DeLillo on grounds of coldness are simply lashing out because they don't want to be faced with the possibility they are just as 'flat' and '2-dimensional' as some of the people DeLillo creates. They want to believe that they are vibrant and compelling, and they don't like it when they're shown they're not."
        "But still, art should have emotional content."
        "Sure, and DeLillo does have a lot of emotional content as well. It's just not overblown and in your face melodrama like Toni Morrison, Anne Rice or Harlequin Romances. Especially in the later writing, emotions become very important. White Noise and Underworld and The Names all contain very emotional scenes. But the emotions DeLillo presents are always very carefully controlled, utilized in strategic places for maximum effect. It's not melodrama. Don DeLillo has learned that it is easier to produce an emotional reaction in a reader by being restrained because if the writing is restrained it allows the reader to bring his or her own emotions into the text. The texts do not force emotions on the reader. And then when things explode into emotion, there's a greater effect.
        "In the early stuff, there is more emotional flatness, though. The books read more like cool European existential thrillers and so everyone is very distant."
        I paused.
        "And as far as the criticism that DeLillo's books lack characterization, that's just bunk. All books have characters, there are just different kinds of characterization. There are characters that grow and change, and characters that remain the same. Characters that are open and characters that are closed-off and reserved. And so on. If you write a description of someone doing something, those actions you've described have just created a character. It's actually that simple.
        "Now you have to decide if that character's actions are going to be consistent, or whatnot-- give that person a past and a friend or two to interact with, and you've got a character. It's not all that hard.
        "And, so, DeLillo has characters. And, like I said, a lot of DeLillo's characters are distant, and reserved (until they explode into violence) and they don't really seem to grow and change much throughout the narrative-- but then again, I don't really know all that many people who have actually grown and changed much in real life, either. They may pretend they've grown and changed, but deep down inside everybody I knew in highschool is basically the exact same person I knew in highschool. Personal growth is, in a large part, a myth. And, if DeLillo's books are to be accurate representations of life in the late 20th/early 21st Centuries, the people in them should not grow or change much at all.
        "That said, there are still plenty of vivid and interesting characters in his writing, especially again the later books. Later works are very strongly character driven. Jack Gladney, the protagonist of White Noise and Nick Shay (among others) in Underworld are very well-defined, solid characters. Underworld, with its ensemble cast, is especially rife with likable, interesting, humane, 'real' people. As 'real' as anyone in fiction ever really is, anyway.
        "And this doesn't mean that people in fiction are in any way less real then people on the street. Sometimes, they're actually more real."
        "Yeah," Bob said, "but you're bitter."
        "And getting more bitter every day.
        "But a bit more about character:
        "In general, plot matters less in DeLillo's books than ideas. This necessitates that his characters be very smart, always looking at the world, and always thinking. This makes his books a veritable well of intelligence.
        "However, Don DeLillo does not talk down to his readers. Nor does he flaunt his intelligence, revel in complex structures or self-indulgent obtuseness. Even when he presents references that are obscure they are done in a mater-of-fact way that can be easily assimilated or-- if the reader does not understand the reference-- readily ignored without damaging the integrity of the narrative. All of his characters are always operating at peak mental capacity.
        "And in a world where people in books are stupider than bags of bricks because everything has to appeal to a generically retarded lowest-common-denomiator, this is refreshing as hell.
        "Basically, DeLillo is smart. Maybe the smartest writer in America. He knows pop culture and high culture, ancient and contemporary philosophy, he knows art and videogames, and tv, and books and sports and politics and quantum physics and religion and rock music and standup comedy and computers. He's one of those writers who-- even though he probably doesn't because no human being can-- seems like he knows everything.
        "But this also isn't to say his books don't have plots. Many of them actually overflow with plots of all kinds. Plots and subplots and paranoia. It is true that his earlier books had stronger, more defined plots. But around the time of Ratner's Star and The Names things change. Don DeLillo begins to loosen up a bit and meander. And this suits him well. My favorite DeLillo books are the ones that wander around, that eventually settle on a plot-- like White Noise-- or that have so many plots they become a web of events revolving around one or two people (or ideas)-- Underworld.
        "On the whole, DeLillo's books are novels of ideas first and foremost and then story or (occasionally) character-driven secondly. However, it is important to keep in mind that his novels of ideas are deceptive. For example, End Zone presents itself as a collegiate comedy about a football league when in fact it is a study of nuclear war, technology, and cold war paranoia. DeLillo uses one idea to open onto others. Therefore, "his book about football" isn't really about football, "his book about Hitler" isn't really about Hitler, "his book about rock music" isn't really about rock music, and so on. But, at the same time there is a sense in which "his book about football" really is about football, and so on.
        "He's a complex guy.
        "Anyway, the books:
        "Underworld (1997) covers half a century and begins with a baseball game and a nuclear blast, and ends with the Internet and the immortality of a digital afterlife. In between the reader follows a baseball as it intersects with a multitude of people, and also follows those people as they intersect with others, over the course of 5 decades. The central focus of the novel is Nick Shay, a waste-planning technician, the man who is seeking both the baseball and release from his past. Nick works with refuse, garbage, the things postmodern culture discards. This allows Shay to comment directly on the workings of society in an intimate way-- what we throw away is who we are. Another main thread in the narrative is the idea of cold war paranoia and what it does to the culture. The book is also structured like a thriller, or a whodunit: after a prologue in the 1950s, Underworld jumps to the present and then moves backwards in time, back to the 50s, decade by decade, circling a crucial point in Shay's life. And the reader is drawn to this point slowly and deliberately, and tensely. Finally, when the narrative explodes, the effect is stunning. Then, in a epilogue we're back into the late 1990s, and Shay is traveling to the collapsed Soviet Union to deal with some nuclear waste disposal issues. Then we get a hint how The Other Side views the West, and see what they throw away, and how that defines them. Ultimately, describing the plot of Underworld is pointless because it's more like a tapestry of intersections than a 'plot.'
        "White Noise (1985) deals with Jack Gladney, a professor of "Hitler Studies," a field Gladney himself invented in order generate a peculiar type of job security-- after all, who would fire the only world authority in a field, even if it is technically a field of one? A world authority is a world authority after all. Gladney gets exposed to fallout from a toxic chemical cloud, the effects of which could manifest and kill him any time between the day after he was exposed and 40 years later. Since he is well past mid-life, the point is probably fairly moot, but nonetheless it is worrying. White Noise is also about experimental drugs, marital infidelity and paranoia, and when it doesn't read like an enormous conspiracy novel, it reads like a thriller. Or a weird comedy. The action is fast and the confrontation between Jack Gladney and the novel's secret antagonist is Tarantino-esque: swift, tense, and bloody. In White Noise, everyone is surrounded by consumer culture: commercials are the 'white noise' of society. The book has product placements which mirror the moods of the characters. DeLillo originally wanted to call the novel Panasonic. But the Panasonic corporation got upset at him for using their name. Possibly because of what the product placement of 'Panasonic' signals. I'm not going to tell you what that is, because you have to read the book."
        "I have read the book," Bob said.
        "I meant the people out there, the readers."
        "Oh. I've actually forgotten why 'Panasonic' is important, though."
        But, anwyay:
        "The 'white noise' is also the obsessive mental gyrations the characters do trying to explain things to themselves and others: from blaming the state of the world on the viral nature of pop culture, the clogging effects of 'high' culture, the simultaneous paralysis and necessity of thinking way too much all the time, to the fact that the government seems to have huge files on absolutely everybody, detailing every aspect of their existence, for absolutely no reason at all. This is also one of DeLillo's funniest books, and also one of his darkest.
        "Great Jones Street (1973): a book about Rock and Roll and suicidal excess, written in the early 70s and more and more valid each day. Bucky Wunderlich is a 70s glam/prog/stadium rocker who has holed himself up in a seedy apartment because he's just has enough of life, touring, and everything. It's also about how both the media and language create the world we live in. Even though the music culture it describes seems dated by today's standards, the seeds that exist behind the culture still remain active. People are looking for Bucky and he wants to end it all. To say, as some critics have, that this book prefigured the deaths of both Curt Cobain and Ian Curtis and gave voice to their complaints before they even formulated them is patently ridiculous. But, by the same token, there sure does seem to be something there....
        "Mao II (1991) is about a reclusive novelist, and terrorists, and crowds. It stemmed from an idea DeLillo had when looking at a terrified photograph of J.D. Salinger trying to hide his face from the photographer: the idea of what it really means to 'take' someone's picture.
        "The Names (1982): a haunting book about serial killings, international intrigue, religion, and the nature of language.
        "Those are just some of the biggies.
        "And then there's:
        "Americana (1971): about how the media makes reality, among other things. His first literary salvo.Ý It's a little unfocussed and wild, but still fascinating.
        "End Zone (1972): about football. But, like I said, it's really not about football. It's about paranoia and nuclear war.
        "Ratner's Star (1976): about math and science fiction.
        "Players (1977): about terrorism and the stock market and the extent people go to when they get bored and want to feel something... anything....
        "Running Dog (1978): a tense novel about journalism, spies, and Hitler's private porno movie. Not as funny as it sounds and there's even a beheading!
        "The Engineer Of Moonlight, a play (1979): haven't read it, so I dunno.
        "Amazons: An Intimate Memoir By The First Woman Ever to Play In The National Hockey League (1980) (Cleo Birdwell, pseudonym): haven't read it, so I dunno. It's also really hard to find, seeing as it only had one printing and has the words "Cleo Birdwell" on the cover, not "Don DeLillo." And from what I've heard from people who've read it, it's a mixed bag.
        "The Day Room, a play(1987): an absurdist meta-play about paranoia, acting and psych wards. An actor in a straitjacket plays a tv. Funny but also, like Samuel Beckett's plays, disturbing.
        "Libra (1988): a book about Lee Harvey Oswald, paranoia, and how media makes reality. I actually haven't read this one because I find it very hard to get into anything about the Kennedy assassination. I don't know why. Maybe it's just sort of over-saturation. Anyway, I will still read it in the future, and I'll probably like it when I do. It also got Don DeLillo called a bad citizen by rightwing critic George Will. While other detractors of the novel have simply labeled DeLillo as a conspiracy nut and a psychotic paranoid. Most of these detractors seem to come from the conservative right. So I'm guessing that means Libra's probably a pretty good book.
        "The Rapture Of The Athlete Assumed Into Heaven, a play(1990): again, haven't read it, so I dunno.
        "Valparaiso, a play (1999): a play about a guy who gets on the wrong plane twice, ends up going to two different places called Valparaiso, neither of which are the particular Valparaiso he wanted to fly to, and thus because of this he becomes a celebrity. It's a comedy. But despite the wacky premise, the play's haunting and kind of creepy, and filled me with s strange kind of end-of-the-world dread. I'd like to put it on, but I don't know how to direct plays and I don't know any actors and the ones I do know are mostly annoying, so....
        "The Body Artist (2001): a very cryptic book about the nature of time and memory. A strange, bald, retarded man moves into a performance artist's house. He doesn't really talk and all he does is look at things. Again, not as funny as it sounds. More eerie and just sort of mysterious. It made me feel an emotion, but I'm not really sure what kind of emotion it was.
        "Pafko At The Wall: The Shot Heard Round The World (2001): the exceptionally cool stand-alone prologue to Underworld, published separately in a small hardcover. It's kind of a cash-grab, but still neat nonetheless. If you want to be a real nerd, you can rationalize its existance by the fact that Pafko was originally published as a stand-alone short story in the early 1990s, and then DeLillo used it as the jumping off point for Underworld. So, they published it on its own because it stands alone. And, actually, it does. It's about a baseball game and the first Soviet nuclear test. If you feel like you don't have the time to read Underworld, at least read Pafko. It's amazing.
        "Cosmopolis (2003): a book about a guy stuck in a traffic jam, the nature of technology, the way the media makes reality, the end of the future. It's being panned these days for, well, simply being a book by Don DeLillo-- which is weird as hell because all the other times DeLillo has written like DeLillo the critics have absolutely fucking loved it. Anyway, it's being unjustly maligned for being a little too close to the truth, and will in a few years probably be seen as being one of his most significant works."
        I stopped.
        And Bob said:
        "Okay."
        "Okay?"
        "Okay. Yeah. You've babbled on long enough but I have a question."
        "Okay."
        "You've gone on and on endlessly about style and technique-- and I mean endlessly-- frankly so much so that I was bored out of my Goddamn skull-- and all you really did was make DeLillo's writing seem like a bunch of cold intellectual exercises. And I even read White Noise, but after your turgid torrent of words I can't even remember what I read."
        "Sorry."
        "So, basically, the question is this: are his books actually entertaining or are they just a bunch of postmodern formalist tripe?"
        "They're great. They're totally entertaining. DeLillo's books are very formal and structured. But they are also immensely readable, almost frighteningly so. They're entertaining as hell. They're suspenseful and funny. His characters say the coolest things and his observations are sharp. They all have sort of anticlimaxes, though. Sometimes they just seem to stop, or trail off into confusion. All the loose ends are never tied up because he respects you as a reader enough to believe that you can and will fill in the gaps on your own. If you want something really intellectual, you will find it in a DeLillo book, but if you want something entertaining and suspenseful, you will also find that."
        "Okay. And you also said that DeLillo's writing is like science fiction, or like a thriller-- but that means that it really isn't science fiction or a thriller. So then just what the hell is it?"
        "I don't really know. I guess it's a kind of bastard genre of writing that came to the foreground in the late 60s and early 70s and just sort of stuck around, that combines elements from other types of 'genre' writing and uses them in new-- but still strangely familiar-- ways. There really isn't a name for it. It used to be called 'black comedy' but that was too limiting a name and pretty vague and made the books seem funnier than they really were. Bruce Sterling calls this type of writing 'slipstream' in that it sort of flows in and out of different genres at will. So you can read something that seems like a mystery one minute, then a sci fi novel then next, then maybe a horror novel or some sort of romance and then maybe a wacky comedy. The 'slipstream' genre is kind of hard to nail down because it can be many things at once. You could also call it 'postmodernism,' but that term kinda sucks also."
        "Okay, so let's say I read and liked DeLillo. Or I recovered from your lecture and found myself being able to remember White Noise again. So what else is out there that's kinda like him that I might also like?"
        "If you liked DeLillo you might also like J.G. Ballard-- who is essentially a British version of Don DeLillo complete with the media fixation, the awareness of contemporary philosophy, and the tense, tight writing style. Although Ballard is more sexual. You might also like Chuck Palahniuk who wrote Fight Club which was very DeLillo-esque, and well as the excellent Choke and Survivor. Also, Alex Garland who wrote The Beach and The Tesseract. Maybe you might also like Paul Auster. And Steve Erickson. And also Thomas Pynchon-- but be warned, he's weird. He's much, much weirder than DeLillo, and a lot harder to read. And maybe even William Gibson's latest novel Pattern Recognition. People also want to compare David Foster Wallace to DeLillo, but I think that's just because he's on public record saying he likes DeLillo and that DeLillo is one of his influences. I'd say if you like DeLillo, Wallace wouldn't be your next choice, really."
        "Why not?"
        "I mean, David Foster Wallace is an entertaining writer but his stuff is a little, too-- I dunno-- cute or something, and not in a 100% good way. He's kind of like Tom Robbins mixed with Cliff Claven from Cheers. He's not really that weighty, uses lots of big words and convoluted sentence structures just to show how smart he is, and depending on your mood that gets annoying fast."
        Heather walked up to the table.
        "What're you guys talking about?"
        "Don DeLillo," Bob said.
        "Oh," she said.
        I watched her pull up a chair and sit down and for some reason I didn't understand, I felt sad.
        "But it's been going on for far too long," Bob said. "Do you want to do the honors or should I?"
        "I'd like to," I said. "For some reason I feel like I haven't done it in a long time."
        "Be my guest."
        And so I turned to the camera and said:
        "30."

Next: Moo....

Epilogue 46.
Epilogue 44.
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