What do you think?
Rate this book
Conversations with Don DeLillo
In novel after award-winning novel, Don DeLillo (b. 1936) exhibits his deep distrust of language and the way it can conceal as much as it reveals. Not surprisingly, DeLillo treats interviews with the same care and caution. For years, he shunned them altogether. As his fiction grew in popularity, especially with White Noise, and he began to confront the historical record of our times in books such as Libra, DeLillo felt compelled to make himself available to his readers. Despite claims by interviewers about his elusiveness, he now hides in plain sight.
In Conversations with Don DeLillo, the renowned author makes clear his distinctions between historical fact and his own creative leaps, especially in his masterwork, Underworld. There it seems the true events are unbelievable and imaginary ones not. Throughout long profiles and conversations ranging from 1982 to 2001 and published in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and Rolling Stone, DeLillo parries personal inquiries. He counters with the details of his work habits, his understanding of the novelist's role in the world, and his sense of our media-saturated culture. A number of interviews detail DeLillo's less-heralded work in the theater, from The Day Room to a recent production of Valparaiso, itself a stinging satire on the interviewing process.
DeLillo also finds time to comment on his nonliterary passions, primarily the movies and baseball. Lee Harvey Oswald also inspires much extraliterary discussion, not just as the subject of Libra, but as a figure who, like the terrorists always lurking in DeLillo's fictions, captures our attention in ways novelists cannot. For DeLillo, a writer who eschews celebrity, the ultimate response might be the one he offered in his very first interview, paraphrasing Joyce: "Silence, exile, cunning, and so on. It's my nature to keep quiet about most things." Fortunately for his many readers and fans, he proves himself here to be a talker.
In Conversations with Don DeLillo, the renowned author makes clear his distinctions between historical fact and his own creative leaps, especially in his masterwork, Underworld. There it seems the true events are unbelievable and imaginary ones not. Throughout long profiles and conversations ranging from 1982 to 2001 and published in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and Rolling Stone, DeLillo parries personal inquiries. He counters with the details of his work habits, his understanding of the novelist's role in the world, and his sense of our media-saturated culture. A number of interviews detail DeLillo's less-heralded work in the theater, from The Day Room to a recent production of Valparaiso, itself a stinging satire on the interviewing process.
DeLillo also finds time to comment on his nonliterary passions, primarily the movies and baseball. Lee Harvey Oswald also inspires much extraliterary discussion, not just as the subject of Libra, but as a figure who, like the terrorists always lurking in DeLillo's fictions, captures our attention in ways novelists cannot. For DeLillo, a writer who eschews celebrity, the ultimate response might be the one he offered in his very first interview, paraphrasing Joyce: "Silence, exile, cunning, and so on. It's my nature to keep quiet about most things." Fortunately for his many readers and fans, he proves himself here to be a talker.
208 pages, Paperback
First published January 18, 2005
About the author
Don DeLillo
89 books6,127 followersDonald Richard DeLillo is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, the complexities of language, art, the advent of the Digital Age, mathematics, politics, economics, and sports.
DeLillo was already a well-regarded cult writer in 1985, when the publication of White Noise brought him widespread recognition and the National Book Award for fiction. He followed this in 1988 with Libra, a novel about the Kennedy assassination. DeLillo won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II, about terrorism and the media's scrutiny of writers' private lives, and the William Dean Howells Medal for Underworld, a historical novel that ranges in time from the dawn of the Cold War to the birth of the Internet. He was awarded the 1999 Jerusalem Prize, the 2010 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2010, and the 2013 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
DeLillo has described his themes as "living in dangerous times" and "the inner life of the culture." In a 2005 interview, he said that writers "must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments... I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us."
DeLillo was already a well-regarded cult writer in 1985, when the publication of White Noise brought him widespread recognition and the National Book Award for fiction. He followed this in 1988 with Libra, a novel about the Kennedy assassination. DeLillo won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II, about terrorism and the media's scrutiny of writers' private lives, and the William Dean Howells Medal for Underworld, a historical novel that ranges in time from the dawn of the Cold War to the birth of the Internet. He was awarded the 1999 Jerusalem Prize, the 2010 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2010, and the 2013 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
DeLillo has described his themes as "living in dangerous times" and "the inner life of the culture." In a 2005 interview, he said that writers "must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments... I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us."
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
June 16, 2016
I don't create characters. I let them speak for themselves.
I am not really the sort of readers who believe that it is crucial to read about an author in order to understand his works better. But I may start to question that assumption. Reading interviews with DeLillo offered me a broader vision of his novels. It's not that he established some truths about his works. quite the contrary. He shows us that we need to actually dialogue with the characters rather than with their writer. Most of the time, when he is asked about why this or that character does this or that, he answers that he does not particularly know because he isn't the character, or that he does not understand the character himself. This incites me to give more attention to characters, and actually try to 'dialogue' with them in order to understand them better. Therefore, authors do not give straightforward answers; they rather give us clues about how to approach characters ourselves.
I am not really the sort of readers who believe that it is crucial to read about an author in order to understand his works better. But I may start to question that assumption. Reading interviews with DeLillo offered me a broader vision of his novels. It's not that he established some truths about his works. quite the contrary. He shows us that we need to actually dialogue with the characters rather than with their writer. Most of the time, when he is asked about why this or that character does this or that, he answers that he does not particularly know because he isn't the character, or that he does not understand the character himself. This incites me to give more attention to characters, and actually try to 'dialogue' with them in order to understand them better. Therefore, authors do not give straightforward answers; they rather give us clues about how to approach characters ourselves.
October 15, 2017
just an amazing collection of interviews! yes, sometimes it sounds repetative, sometimes as it seems Don just didn`t want to talk much, but nevertheless this collection is a great insight into "frolic of his own", these interviews give a much more than tons of critical articles.
August 25, 2008
The interview from Paris Review is by far the best interview to be found in here. It's worth either getting a copy of this book, or hunting down the issue itself (it doesn't seem that this one has come out in the so-far published volumes of The Paris Review Interviews). Many other interviews have moments of mild interest, but I'm shocked to think that these were the best of the available interviews out there (though that number isn't all that high, since DeLillo doesn't like doing many interviews or public appearances).
Part of my reason for finding many of these interviews pale is that some are downright sycophantic (one interviewer basically asks DeLillo to discuss the source of his "comic genius"), and some are so pedantic that I nearly fogged out with the interviewer's bio. This is a man with some fascinating perspectives on culture and our national identity, but you're going to get more from the novels themselves than this collection of interviews.
Part of my reason for finding many of these interviews pale is that some are downright sycophantic (one interviewer basically asks DeLillo to discuss the source of his "comic genius"), and some are so pedantic that I nearly fogged out with the interviewer's bio. This is a man with some fascinating perspectives on culture and our national identity, but you're going to get more from the novels themselves than this collection of interviews.
December 1, 2015
Five stars.
DeLillo is eerily prophetic as always. At the end of a 1997 interview, a paragraph reads: Underworld ends with the fall of the Soviet Union and its conflict with the West. As DeLillo thinks about the era we’re living in, and writing about it, he has also been thinking about a passage in Hermann Broch’s novel The Death of Virgil. “He uses the term ‘no longer and not yet,’” DeLillo said. “I think he’s referring to the fact that his poet, Virgil, is in a state of delirium, no longer quite alive, and not yet dead. But I think he may also be referring to the interim between paganism and Christianity. And I think of this ‘no longer and not yet’ in terms of no longer the Cold War and not yet whatever will follow.” But six months after finishing Underworld, he added, the germ of something really new has not yet shown itself.
The only shortcoming—and I say shortcoming because it leaves me wanting—is that all the interviews take place in the 80’s and 90’s except for the last one which is from 2001, obviously before 9/11. Post-Underworld novels (and short stories and plays, naturally) are not discussed.
DeLillo is eerily prophetic as always. At the end of a 1997 interview, a paragraph reads: Underworld ends with the fall of the Soviet Union and its conflict with the West. As DeLillo thinks about the era we’re living in, and writing about it, he has also been thinking about a passage in Hermann Broch’s novel The Death of Virgil. “He uses the term ‘no longer and not yet,’” DeLillo said. “I think he’s referring to the fact that his poet, Virgil, is in a state of delirium, no longer quite alive, and not yet dead. But I think he may also be referring to the interim between paganism and Christianity. And I think of this ‘no longer and not yet’ in terms of no longer the Cold War and not yet whatever will follow.” But six months after finishing Underworld, he added, the germ of something really new has not yet shown itself.
The only shortcoming—and I say shortcoming because it leaves me wanting—is that all the interviews take place in the 80’s and 90’s except for the last one which is from 2001, obviously before 9/11. Post-Underworld novels (and short stories and plays, naturally) are not discussed.
December 21, 2019
Used for my MA dissertation "A more or less moving picture: film and Don Delillo's fiction."
Want to read
November 19, 2008MUST READ. I bet DeLillo is awesome and mildly crazy. If he's even half as crazy as Philip K Dick was I'll be happy. Ha
September 6, 2015
The interviews are very much repetitive
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews