The above title is also the title of an article in today’s online edition of The Guardian from London. Don DeLillo is one of my favorite contemporary American authors and I have read everything he has written. Known especially for his books White Noise (which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1985) and his 1997 magnum opus Underworld with its very eerily prescient (and now goosebump inducing) book cover of New York’s cloud-shrouded Twin Towers with the cross-topped monument in the dark shade in the foreground and the black outline of a bird looking like an airplane ready to fly into one of the towers (shown below/right). I love Don DeLillo, his crisp style of writing, and his choice of contemporary topics on which to expound.
This Guardian article is an excellent and timely interview of the semi-reclusive DeLillo by Xan Brooks on DeLillo’s observations on Trump, the state of America under Trump, and his prognosis for America’s future. It is an excellent article and interview with one of America’s brightest literary lights which I encourage everyone to read in its entirety, particularly those who are fans of Don DeLillo’s works. Now two paragraphs in particular in the middle of the article jumped out at me:
“Oh, I think whatever’s going on now seems unique,” he [DeLillo] says. “The question is whether the situation is terminal. I’m very reluctant to talk about Trump, simply because everybody else is. We’re deluged with information about Trump on every level – as a man, as a politician. But what’s significant to me is that all of his enormous mistakes and misstatements disappear within 24 hours. The national memory lasts 48 hours, at best. And there’s always something else coming at us down the pipeline. You can’t separate it all out. You get lost in the deluge.”
So what’s the prognosis? DeLillo, God help us, is as discombobulated as anyone. “It’s hard to know. I think it would take a great shift of events for the country to restore its balance, to restore its consciousness, and to think about things the way we did during the Obama administration.” He sighs. “Right now, I’m not sure the situation is recoverable.”
“Right now, I’m not sure the situation is recoverable.” Wow. I don’t know if I am as pessimistic as DeLillo, even if I am a bit pessimistic myself. However, I do respect Don DeLillo’s sharp observations on the state of current American society. And I hope you will give the whole article a read to learn more about DeLillo and his current thoughts about America from an insightful critic and writer about America.
And if you haven’t read anything by Don DeLillo yet, I heartily recommend him. You could start with White Noise, and then if you’re interested tackle his monumental and brilliant Underworld. The first chapter of Underworld is a simply amazing piece of writing that is canonically about Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard around the world” but is about so much more including a Russian atomic bomb test, Jackie Gleason, J. Edgar Hoover, what happened to Thomson’s home run ball, and so much more that it has actually been published separately as a novella entitled Pafko At The Wall. So you could also read Pafko At The Wall and see if that gets your DeLillo juices flowing enough to tackle the rest of Underworld.