The Paris Review is a literary magazine featuring original writing, art, and in-depth interviews with famous writers.
When did you first come across DeLillo?
I remember a Christmas visit to my wife’s family during which she gave mePlayers. I remember reading it on the train back up to Boston and having one of the purest aesthetic responses I’ve ever had. I’d finally found somebody who was putting on the page the apocalyptic, postindustrial urban aesthetic that I’d been looking for in film and photographs and had found expressed in music, particularly by Talking Heads. And here was somebody who was getting it on the page and writing like a dream. His prose was like a call to duty: You must write better. Here, see, it can be done. I find it remarkable that people don’t talk more about Players. In certain ways, DeLillo never wrote better.
What did you find so attractive about him?
It came as no surprise when I learned, later, that he sometimes composed books with one paragraph on each page, starting a new page after only a few sentences. His paragraphs really do have a stand-alone quality. It was through reading him that I came to see pages as collections of individual sentences. For a young writer, in particular, the terrors of the paragraph become more manageable when you see it as a system of sentences. I also started to see all the junk DNA that had cluttered my paragraphs before then, and that I’d been unaware of.
DeLillo’s sentences seem to involve intimate connections between individual words, even letters—a visual patterning.
Yes. In my own work, I can see his visual influence in the dinner-table scene inThe Corrections that I wrote immediately after reading Underworld. But I don’t think my pages read like his, because I had a preference for rounder letters—c ’s andp’s. I think of him as being more into l ’s and a’s and i ’s.
I kept seeing a plate of food with beet greens and liver and rutabaga—intense purple green, intense orange, rich rusty brown—and feeling a wish to write sentences that were juicy and sensuous.
Do you mean the sound, too?
No, the way they looked, the roundness of b’s and g ’s, the juiciness. That’s almost the last time I remember thinking about the words that way. Nowadays I have almost the opposite aesthetic—I’m looking for transparency.
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