Bill Buford’s assistant was there in place of The New Yorker’s literary editor. Her name was Karin, or Carin, and she said Bill was “so sorry he couldn’t make it.” Stephen King was in the fifth row. People stared. And like all virtuoso performances-Ali, Hendrix, Sinatra, Clinton at the convention-this one had a prelim.
Chang-rae Lee, the acclaimed two-time novelist, went on first. He was deferential, the young Lee. When I heard DeLillo would also be reading, he said, I thought I’d come “to ensure myself a seat.” He made a joke about the weather, which on that Monday night, Feb. 5, was in full northeaster mode. “I drove in from New Jersey, it was terrible. The weather I mean, not New Jersey.” Lee is a very talented writer, and deliberate reader, but no one really listened. The crowd was there for the main event.
Jonathan Franzen came out to introduce Don DeLillo, the author of perfect sentences, paragraphs that equal poems and 12 novels.
Jonathan Franzen came out to introduce Don DeLillo, the author of perfect sentences, paragraphs that equal poems and 12 novels. His most recent is the searching, oblique, painfully skilled 124-page “The Body Artist.” Franzen, like Lee, wore a suit. Those in the know-and at the 92nd Street YMHA everyone is in the know (or believe themselves to be, which may be the same thing)-understand that Franzen is an admirer of DeLillo. “Many writers of my generation can quote directly from ‘Americana’,” he said of the Poet of Lonely Places’s forgotten debut masterpiece from 1971, and everyone knew who those writers were.
“Writers are a difficult group to admire,” is how Franzen opened. Many write one or two books and are never heard from again, he said, “or, worse, write a book a year that’s the same book.” Everyone knew who he meant; many of them have read at the very same 92nd Street Y. He said more: “We [writers] pull one too many punches in the New York Times Book Review,” and “We’re all envious, scared.” He meant these words, and was moved by them. He looked nervous and didn’t care who he might offend. He spoke of the “culture of exhibitionism” and of DeLillo’s transcendence (not his word), his “seriousness of purpose.”
And out he came, DeLillo. When he passed Franzen, they merely clasped hands in full stride, like the home-run hitter and the third-base coach, the old school way, 1951, say. Had DeLillo heard such cheering?
He wore a dowdy green shirt and unfashionable jeans and was completely at ease with the world. More so than when he appeared at the Limbo cafe, circa 1995, where he read a long piece of short fiction titled “The Angel Esmeralda.” The piece was published in Esquire that year and later incorporated into “Underworld,” the magnum opus few finished. Back then, the rumor went, DeLillo had read only five or six times in his career. While Amy Bloom (of all people) read before him, he sipped a deep-green bottle of beer and smiled, a rock star among the people.
Tonight, though, he was a natural. He won’t be narrating the next Ken Burns series (thank God), but his words were his words, his accent, there but obfuscated, from seven miles away-a literal straight line uptown, over the Third Avenue bridge, west of Yankee Stadium, up Webster Avenue, to Belmont.
He read from the quiet, still “Body Artist,” a masterpiece in minor key, about death and time and language. It is about a woman dealing with her husband’s suicide, about an inscrutable stranger “anonymous to himself.”
DeLillo picked up from chapter two, after his reticent, choreographed opening, as claustrophobic and seemingly humdrum as the big enormous prologues to his last two novels were immense and grandiose. All three openings are spectacular: Moonies at Yankee Stadium, Pafko at the Wall, and this, where husband and wife barely seem to know each other. They say “What” as answers and questions. It’s out of Bergman or Antonioni or Bresson-there’s even fog on page 83-DeLillo imbued with ’60s cinema, which may, in the long run, be the best way of understanding the work.
Immediately, he made people laugh: “When the phone rang she did not look at it the way they do in the movies. Real people don’t look at ringing phones.” Another paragraph or two of portent and then: “How completely strange it suddenly seemed that major corporations mass-produced breadcrumbs and packaged and sold them everywhere in the world and she looked at the breadcrumb carton for the first true time, really seeing it and understanding what was in it, and it was breadcrumbs.” And later: “She called Mariella and got the machine. A synthesized voice said, please/leave/amess/age/af/ter/the/tone. The words were not spoken but generated and they were separated by brief but deep dimensions. She hung up and called back, just to hear the voice again. How strange the discontinuity. It seemed a quantum hop, one word to the next. She hung up and called back. One voice for each word. Seven different voices. Not seven different voices but one male voice in seven time cycles. But not male exactly either. And not words so much as syllables but not that either. She hung up and called back.”
That he’s funny is no secret-all readers of “White Noise” knew that. But hearing him be funny, live, voice flat and deadpan, is something different. It’s almost disconcerting. Same as when he says the word “penis.” He read for 30 minutes.
And then the fans came. They came with books to be signed, first editions of “Americana,” “Players,” “The Names,” British first editions of “Ratner’s Star,” French first editions of “End Zone,” first editions of his two plays, “The Day Room” and “Valparaiso,” all in double shopping bags. These were “DeLillo heads,” benign youngish men, nerdy, but not-at-all smarty-pants pretentious, kind of sweet. Many seemed to have known one another. In the best interview out there on DeLillo, a 1993 Paris Review piece by Adam Begley (who’s fast becoming the most important DeLillo scholar next to Frank Lentriccia), the Cardinal Hayes H.S. alum is asked: “How do you imagine your audience?” “When my head is in the typewriter,” he answered, “the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don’t have an audience; I have a set of standards. But when I think of my work out in the world, written and published, I like to imagine it’s being read by some stranger somewhere who doesn’t have anyone around him to talk to about books and writing-maybe a would-be writer, maybe a little lonely, who depends on a certain kind of writing to make him feel more comfortable in the world.” Benign nerds, except Buford’s assistant and the friend. Surprisingly, none appeared to have him sign the copy of the 1993 Paris Review.
He signed for over an hour. Pynchon never did show, his assigned seat nabbed by a haughty Upper East Sider, without even noticing the name on it. As the line wound down, one DeLillo head said to the other, in a panic: “He’s losing his patience.” In other words, maybe we shouldn’t have gotten on line three different times with four books each time. Maybe, but he was gracious, looked at everyone through his thick glasses as he signed and smiled genuinely. Finally, said one, not one of the DeLillo heads, but someone by himself, to DeLillo: “The Bronx is proud of you.” DeLillo couldn’t look up for a moment. When he collected himself from the brush back he looked up and again, he smiled and said thank you.
