Episode 37: Uncovering Underworld

Episode 37: Uncovering Underworld

In Episode 37, DDSWTNP kick off the Summer of Underworld with an overview that, like Episode 20: Discovering White Noise, offers newcomers to the novel a set of things to look out for as well as readings bound to appeal to those already familiar with DeLillo’s big book and headed back to it. How is this mega-novel structured in its six main Parts bookended by Prologue and Epilogue? How and why does it portray time’s variability and crisscross four decades of history? What to make of all the depictions of art and artists, from Klara Sax to Moonman 157, that populate these pages? What does a reader have to look forward to when they make it to the remarkable Lenny Bruce stand-up DeLillo creates? How do we keep track of all the meanings of waste and “under” in this book, and how does the quest for a single baseball help move the reader along? How to describe all the uncanny connections between paired characters and images, and is an aesthetic of filmic montage the way to understand Underworld’s method? Has DeLillo somehow made this giant book into both a vast, scattered history of the Cold War and a page-turning, character-driven account of personal transgression, confession, and regret? With these and other questions DDSWTNP begin a series of episodes, featuring many a guest appearance and working through the sections of Underworld one by one.  Enjoy the new variations in intro and outro music, and stay tuned for more episodes in the Summer of Underworld. Coming up next, an episode devoted to the Prologue and “Pafko at the Wall” with DeLillo scholar John Duvall. Texts mentioned in this episode:  Mark Osteen, American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture. Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania P., 2000.

Episode 36: Ratnerama

Transmission incoming from the insane world of Ratner’s Star, DeLillo’s fourth novel, a major change in his fiction and his most difficult text, underappreciated as precedent for his later turns on encyclopedic form in Libra and Underworld. Ratner’s also has, though, tons of connections to earlier works like Americana and End Zone. In this episode DDSWTNP celebrate Ratner’s fiftieth anniversary with a wholly new re-reading of a book that remains for us hilarious, pleasurable, and a huge reading challenge. We consider how Ratner’s Star, like any masterpiece, teaches us how to read its fabulations from its first page on. We examine its relentless juxtaposition of minds and bodies, as well as its dissection of the impulses toward pattern, order, and other “convenient fictions.” We ask what kinds of narrative experimentation with time and perspective DeLillo carries out, especially in the quest for an ultra-logical metalanguage in Part 2. We wonder about how science and math as fields of knowledge and uncertainty relate to DeLillo’s later turns to examining history. We do our best to try to understand the relationships of DeLillo’s “mohole” physics to Einstein’s relativity, and we offer a reading of a Jesuit’s interrogation of “red ant metaphysics” and “premature genuflection” that marks a new turn in DeLillo’s satires of his Catholic education. We close by disagreeing with a 1976 panning review of the novel as a pale imitation of Pynchon. As we say in the episode, Ratner’s fiftieth makes for a great transition into our Summer of Underworld – look for a string of episodes on that big novel from us in the next few months! Enjoy the Ratnerama rendition of our intro music, too. And the rats and the bats and the stars. And in a nod to all ARS Extants out there, this episode is being sent into the podcast universe at exactly 14:28:57 (China Standard Time). Texts mentioned and discussed in this episode: David Cowart, Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. Athens: U. of Georgia P., 2002. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. New York: Oxford UP, 1967. Tom LeClair. In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. U. of Illinois P., 1987. Mark Osteen, American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture. Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania P., 2000. Peter S. Prescott, “Mandarin’s Apprentice” [review of Ratner’s Star]. Newsweek, June 7, 1976, p. 88.

Episode 35: "Creation"

Anticipating a summer to be spent exploring Underworld, DDSWTNP in Episode 35 take a small detour to a DeLillo short story, “Creation,” which distills DeLillo’s omnipresent motifs of Romanticism and Christian mythos, transports literal and figurative, and disillusionment with the maintenance of Edenic experience — perhaps especially for the American tourist trying to escape from, rather than into, their vacation world. This 1979 story of infidelity, manipulation, and fantasy depicts repeated journeys to a small, jammed Caribbean airport that draw thoughts about godliness, meaning, and mortal fear from an unnamed narrator who has the impulse to write but perhaps not the skills and honed perception. In “Creation” we find many unexpected things: stirring parallels to the space orbits of “Human Moments in World War III”; a precursor to the voice of James Axton to emerge amid Mediterranean islands three years later; and of course new turns on the key DeLillo topos of plane travel and the contingencies of leaving the earth for the sky. Elements of journeys in Americana, Mao II, Cosmopolis, and Valparaiso come up, and we conclude that Rupert the cab driver may be the hero of this tale, or the figure who understands these affairs the best. We give listeners quite a few reasons to read or re-read this under-appreciated story that DeLillo would later choose to place first in The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories (2011).   The cover image incorporates part of Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897-98) by Paul Gauguin, who seems the likely reference point when the narrator of “Creation” says of his canceled seat on a flight out, “I’ll marry a native woman and learn how to paint.”

Episode 34: An Interview with Tom LeClair

In Episode 34 DDSWTNP sit down for a revelatory talk with Tom LeClair, a founding critic in the study of DeLillo, his longtime friend and liaison to the literary world, and a figure who has both written fiction shaped by DeLillo’s and (he suggests) seen his own stories turned into scenes and dialogue by DeLillo himself. We get into LeClair’s relationship with DeLillo going back more than forty years, starting from the time the author sent him a copy of Ratner’s Star and proceeding to a 1979 interview in Athens that illuminated a then rather reclusive and secretive writer, including the story behind a card DeLillo handed out in those years reading “I don’t want to talk about it.” We also ask LeClair questions about his many readings of DeLillo’s and others’ works over the years, starting from his major books In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel (1987) and The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction (1989), studies that initiated LeClair’s career-long examination of encyclopedic works that form categories of “systext,” “monsterpiece,” and others he has defined in his many major magazine and newspaper reviews and in his current substack. What does LeClair make of the many mentions of “systems” in Underworld? What does a line from Point Omega suggest to him about the possibility someday of a DeLillo biography? What does LeClair mean when he calls DeLillo a thoroughly “intuitive” writer and an artist obsessed his whole life with embodiment, birth, death, and fear? Is “mystery” the right word for what drives DeLillo’s narrative seeking, and is Catholicism a useful lens? What to make of the ending of Zero K? Why did DeLillo want to visit Beirut with LeClair? And what do these two talk about when they have lunch together? The interview also gets into depth on the many comparisons LeClair sees with his own fiction, its set of Kierkegaardian maneuvers through the Greece-based world of basketball player Michael Keever, the hero of Passing Off (1996) who begins for LeClair a series of examinations of games, terrorism, and some familiar DeLillo territory that extends through the four other Passing novels that LeClair has published in the thirty years since.    Cover photograph by Kinga Owczennikow. A native of Poland, Kinga Owczennikow is currently based in New York City. She holds a BA (Hons) in Photography from the University for the Creative Arts in the UK. Kinga is an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society, a member of the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel and an exhibiting member of the Soho Photo Gallery in New York City. Kinga had a solo exhibition “The secret paths of Hong Kong” at the Asia and Pacific Museum in Warsaw, in 2011. Her photographic work has also been exhibited internationally in group shows. Her first photobook "Framing the World" was published by Ephemere in Tokyo, in 2025.   Texts by Tom LeClair and others discussed in this episode:   “Don DeLillo: The Word, The Image, The Gun.” BBC, 1991. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4029096/ [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4029096/]   Amy Hungerford, “Don DeLillo’s Latin Mass.” Contemporary Literature 47.3 (Autumn 2006): 343-380.   Tom LeClair and Larry McCaffery, eds. Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists. U. of Illinois P., 1983.   Tom LeClair. In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. U. of Illinois P., 1987.   ---. The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction.U. of Illinois P., 1989.   ---. “Me and Mao II” (1993). https://perival.com/delillo/meandmaoii.html [https://perival.com/delillo/meandmaoii.html]   ---. Passing Off. Permanent Press, 1996.   ---. “An Under-history of Mid-Century America” (review of Underworld). The Atlantic, October 1997.   ---. “Two On One: Writing a Basketball Novel.” In What to Read (and Not): Essays and Reviews. Dzanc Books, 2014.   ---. “Serious But Not Dangerous Don DeLillo” (review of The Silence). American Book Review 42.4 (May/June 2021): 10-11.   —-. Harpooning Donald Trump: A Novelist’s Essays. Mediacs, 2017.   ---. Passing Again. 2022.   Tom LeClair’s Substack: https://tleclair.substack.com/ [https://tleclair.substack.com/]   Vince Passaro, “Dangerous Don DeLillo.” New York Times Magazine, May 19, 1991. https://www.nytimes.com/1991/05/19/magazine/dangerous-don-delillo.html [https://www.nytimes.com/1991/05/19/magazine/dangerous-don-delillo.html]   Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology. Vintage, 1995.

Episode 33: Mao II

“Here they come, marching into American sunlight.” In Episode 33, DDSWTNP follow Mao II from this opening line into a chilling view of a mass Moonie wedding at Yankee Stadium, and on into the story of reclusive novelist Bill Gray, whose work, maybe, has a chance of deprogramming the mind and language of Karen Janney, one of the participants in that wedding – but maybe not, given the totalizing dominance by images that this novel documents. Our conversation delves into the several rich dialogues Mao II is known for, especially that about (quoting Bill) the “curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists,” the differing attempts by writers and bomb-makers to “alter the inner life of the culture” and “make raids on human consciousness” that DeLillo juxtaposes in this novel, which follows the writer from his cloying “bunker” to London, Athens, and (almost) Lebanon, while also taking in scenes from Iran, China, and the homeless encampments of lower Manhattan. Throughout we discuss the many followers of and sequels to Mao and Maoism DeLillo analyzes, all the ways his characters foolishly seek, outside the values of deep reading and the novel, scenes of “total vision” and messianic “total being,” the “lightning-lit” language of information and the terrorist’s mastery of “the language of being noticed.” We examine in detail as well the effects of Andy Warhol’s work as DeLillo sees it; what it means that readers never learn much at all about the content of Bill’s famous novels; the commonalities he has with Rushdie, Salinger, Pynchon, and DeLillo himself; and why terrorist go-between George Haddad loves word processors so much. We also have a lot to say about the ailing, injured body and spirit of Bill Gray, as well as the simplicity of spoons and what they might teach us about objects and art. Mao II is a book that, as we say in the episode, sums up much of the DeLillo that came before it, lays the groundwork for the masterpiece to come, and contains so many of what have come to seem over the years since 1991 (and over the run of our episodes) the foundational DeLillo ideas and questions, especially ones about politics, violence, and images. Hope you’ll have a listen and, if moved, tell us what you think!   Texts referred to in this episode:   David Cowart, Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. Athens: U. of Georgia P., 2002.   “Mao II is a sort of rest-and-motion book, to invent a category.  The first half of the book could have been called ‘The Book,’ Bill Gray talking about his book, piling up manuscript pages, living in a house that operates as a kind of filing cabinet for his work and all the other work it engenders. And the second half of the book could have been called ‘The World.’  Here, Bill escapes his book and enters the world. It turns out to be the world of political violence . . . I was nearly finished with the first half of the book before I realized how the second half ought to be shaped. I was writing blind . . .” –“Don DeLillo: The Art of Fiction CXXXV,” The Paris Review 128 (1993): 274-306. Interview by Adam Begley.   “I called him Bill Gray just as a provisional name,” DeLillo says. “I used to say to friends, 'I want to change my name to Bill Gray and disappear.’ I've been saying it for 10 years. But he began to fit himself into the name, and I decided to leave it.” –Vince Passaro, “Dangerous Don DeLillo,” New York Times Magazine, May 19, 1991 (https://www.nytimes.com/1991/05/19/magazine/dangerous-don-delillo.html)   Mark Osteen, American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture. Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania P., 2000.   Sources of interlude clips from Warhol and Moon:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vCKc7r8U8E [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vCKc7r8U8E] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiCYKJc_VwI [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiCYKJc_VwI]