randomWalks

Ah, but Don DeLillo's America (a Don DeLillo page) "takes the position that every bit of DeLillo writing is worth documenting."

NYT Life & Times: Don DeLillo.

just based on quick scans, I'm much more fond of Don DeLillo's America. (Also check out the proprietor's reading lists, which you can get to from perival.com.)

October Book of the Month Discussion: White Noise

23 Oct 95

Dear Jon Jackson

Thanks for sending the observations of your e-mail group. It's always a jarring experience for me to revisit earlier work but I found most of the comments informed and quite enlightening at times. My head is bent with current work these days and all I can say about White Noise from this distance is that the book is driven by a connection I sensed between advanced technology and contemporary fear. By the former I don't mean bombs and missiles alone but more or less everything -- microwaves, electrical insulation etc. One would have to write a long dense essay to explain this connection adequately -- that's why I wrote a loose-limbed and shadow-sliding work of fiction.

I think your Man in Tokyo is correct when he points out that a satisfying ending might represent a kind of deathliness. To which I would add that Libra may be the only book I've done in which plot points are fairly well resolved, but of course this is a special case: I was trying to fill in the lost narrative of Kennedy and Oswald in Dealey Plaza.

For me, wellbehaved books with neat plots and worked-out endings seem somewhat quaint in the face of the largely incoherant reality of modern life; and then again fiction, at least as I write it and think of it, is a kind of religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment, and it is language, in its beauty, its ambiguity and its shifting textures, that drives my work.

If you want to post some or all of this, fine.

Best,

(signed)

Don DeLillo

White Noise on White Noise: a collection of 36 randomly selected fragments of text from Don DeLillo's novel.

I read stuff like that letter posted above and I realize, God, I love this guy. It makes me want to reread all of his best stuff.

...all I can say about White Noise from this distance is that the book is driven by a connection I sensed between advanced technology and contemporary fear.

which makes it all the more pertinent today, doesn't it.

Good book to read after White Noise: The Denial of Death.