Looking to start reading Don DeLillo, or already a fan and looking for ways to persuade your friends, relatives, or students to finally access the wonders of White Noise? In Episode Twenty, DDSWTNP offer an introduction to White Noise for the first-time reader of DeLillo, focusing on elements of plot, action, character, humor, and voice that often present stumbling blocks to initiates. We help listeners navigate DeLillo’s most popular novel, the “gateway drug” to the joys and challenges that a lifetime of reading his corpus holds in store. We also answer key questions like how to regard Hitler Studies and whether you need to know anything about “postmodernism,” philosophy, or how a media theorist might read the Most Photographed Barn in America before entering DeLillo’s world (spoiler: no!). Longtime listeners to the pod will find here, we hope, an episode to send along to anyone they’ve given a copy of White Noise for Christmas or ever told, “Hey, you should read Don DeLillo.” The first of several episodes to come from us on White Noise as the novel turns 40, this podcast will be followed in 2025 by our deep dives into the novel itself, its massive body of criticism, and the recent film adaptation – so stay tuned, and may you be immensely pleased.

First-time readers of White Noise looking for illuminating critical and contextual reading should try some of the essays and excerpts collected in Mark Osteen, ed., White Noise: Text and Criticism (New York: Penguin, 1998), as well as the many excellent resources at Curt Gardner’s website “Don DeLillo’s America” (http://perival.com/delillo/delillo.html). But as we suggest in the episode, mainly we advise just going back and re-reading all your favorite scenes, or even the whole thing!

In Episode Nineteen, DDSWTNP turn outward to a discussion of Rachel Kushner, whose Booker Prize-nominated Creation Lake, a 2024 novel about the folly of espionage, revolutionary violence, life underground, and confronting modernity with ancient practices in rural France, solidifies its author’s reputation as a key inheritor of DeLillo’s influence and themes. Creation Lake is narrated by a nihilistic spy named Sadie Smith who infiltrates a farming commune called Le Moulin and grows enchanted with the claims of their cave-dwelling philosophical advisor, who argues that Neanderthal life thousands of years ago holds the key to reshaping humankind. In it Kushner explores the legacy of France’s 1968 while echoing The Names, Great Jones Street, Ratner’s Star, Mao II, and other DeLillo works, as we outline in our discussion. We find rich references as well in Creation Lake to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Joan Didion, Michel Houellebecq, and Kushner’s own previous works, especially The Flamethrowers and The Mars Room. Listeners looking for new writing reminiscent of DeLillo and those already knowledgeable of Kushner’s works will find plenty here, and we hope this episode will be the first of several over time dedicated to DeLillo’s massive influence on exciting new world literature.

Texts and quotations mentioned and discussed in this episode, in addition to Creation Lake and those by DeLillo:

Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays (1970) and Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)

Dana Goodyear, “Rachel Kushner’s Immersive Fiction,” The New Yorker, April 23, 2018 (includes discussion of Kushner’s friendship with DeLillo)

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (1852) and The Scarlet Letter (1850)

Michel Houellebecq, Serotonin (2019)

Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers (2013) and The Mars Room (2018)

---. “Rachel Kushner: ‘The last book that made me cry? The Brothers Karamazov,” The Guardian, October 5, 2018 (source of this answer: “The book that influenced my writing: Probably novels by Joan Didion, Denis Johnson and Don DeLillo. But a whole lot of other books, too”)

“In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.” (F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up” (1936)– a line mangled slightly in the episode)

In Episode Eighteen, DDSWTNP wish our author a happy 88th birthday and talk about the international life he led between the mid-1970s and early 1980s. We follow DeLillo abroad, covering his year in Canada (1975) and his much-discussed time living in Athens (1978-1982), tracing influences of these experiences on portrayals of national identity and language in The Names especially but other works too. Central to understanding this period is the powerful change in method that DeLillo made at his manual typewriter that inspired slower, more “serious” work. For those who already know the biography pretty well we also have in this episode some surprising details garnered from his letters in these years to editor and friend Gordon Lish, the remarkable story of DeLillo’s response to a Utah banning of Americana in 1979, and connections between the 1981 Athens earthquakes DeLillo lived through and the 1988 short story “The Ivory Acrobat.” We end by considering the “toxic spill” of the news that greeted DeLillo on his return to America in 1982 and energized the writing of White Noise, and we announce too some upcoming episodes that will close out 2024!

As is often true, we get significant help in this episode from interview excerpts and more collected at Don DeLillo’s America: http://perival.com/delillo/delillo.html

Texts referred to and quoted from in this episode:

Ann Arensberg, “Seven Seconds” (1988), in Thomas DePietro, ed., Conversations with Don DeLillo, University of Mississippi Press, 2005, 40-46.

Adam Begley, “Don DeLillo: The Art of Fiction CXXXV,” The Paris Review 128 (1993): 274-306.

Don DeLillo, The Engineer of Moonlight, Cornell Review 5 (Winter 1979), 21-47. [Incorrectly placed in Epoch in episode.]

---, “The Ivory Acrobat,” Granta (Issue 108, 1988) (and collected in The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories).

Robert Harris, “A Talk with Don DeLillo” (1982), in DePietro, ed., 16-19.

Gordon Lish Manuscripts (1951-2017), Lilly Library, Indiana University (https://archives.iu.edu/catalog/InU-Li-VAC9786).

Mervyn Rothstein, “A Novelist Faces His Themes on New Ground” (1987), in DePietro, ed., 20-24.

Jim Woolf and Dan Bates, “Davis Official’s Action Dismays, Horrifies Author of ‘Americana.’” The Salt Lake Tribune, August 31, 1979.

In Episode Seventeen, DDSWTNP briefly discuss new Nobel Laureate Han Kang before digging into “A History of the Writer Alone in a Room,” DeLillo’s acceptance speech for an award he did win, the 1999 Jerusalem Prize. In this unpublished, hard-to-find text, DeLillo tells the humbling story of the novelist at frustratingly slow work, “shaped by the vast social reality that rumbles all around him,” in a narrative that conjures scenes that resonate with Libra, Mao II, and other of DeLillo’s portraits of the artist (while also raising the question of whether DeLillo has a cat). Novelists Thomas Mann, Philip Roth, and William Gaddis make their way into our analysis of this miniature fiction, and we consider as well the meaning of the Jerusalem Prize, the “nonchalant terror” of everyday life, and the young woman writer the essay at its end envisions taking up this legacy of lonely work.

Texts mentioned or cited in this episode:

Don DeLillo, “A History of the Writer Alone in a Room,” 1999 Jerusalem Prize For the Freedom of the Individual in Society acceptance address. Jerusalem: Jerusalem International Book Fair, 1999. Reprinted in German translation (“Der Narr in seinem Zimmer”) in Die Zeit (March 29, 2001). See also: https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog?op=AND&sort=score+desc%2C+pub_date_si+desc%2C+title_si+asc&search_field=advanced&all_fields_advanced=&child_oids_ssim=17371596&commit=SEARCH

---. “On William Gaddis.” Conjunctions (Issue 41, Fall 2003). https://web.archive.org/web/20031123133017/http://www.conjunctions.com/archives/c41-dd.htm

[Incorrectly placed in Bookforum in the episode.]

---. “The Artist Naked in a Cage.” The New Yorker, May 26, 1997.

“Don DeLillo: The Word, the Image, the Gun.” Dir. Kim Evans. BBC Documentary, September 27, 1991. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4029096/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DTePKA1wgc&t=63s

William Gaddis, The Recognitions. Harcourt Brace & Co., 1955.

In Episode Sixteen: “DeLillo’s Sentences,” DDSWTNP take a brief break from analyzing full novels to do some very close reading of single sentences from across DeLillo’s career. Style and craft, sound and rhythm, and what makes DeLillo (as one critic puts it) a poet writing prose—these are subjects we consider as we look closely at the lines noted below and try to figure out what DeLillo means when he says in 1997, “At some point you begin to write sentences and paragraphs that don’t sound like other writers’.” This episode is a deep dive into DeLillo’s language but also a pretty good introduction for those just starting to read him. #donutmaker #thehemingwayand

DeLillo lines analyzed in this episode:

“Much of the appeal of sport derives from its dependence on elegant gibberish. And of course it remains the author’s permanent duty to unbox the lexicon for all eyes to see—a cryptic ticking mechanism in search of a revolution.” End Zone (113)

“New York seemed older than the cities of Europe, a sadistic gift of the sixteenth century, ever on the verge of plague.” Great Jones Street (3)

“Around the great stadium the tenement barrens stretch, miles of delirium, men sitting in tipped-back chairs against the walls of hollow buildings, sofas burning in the lots, and there is a sense these chanting thousands have, wincing in the sun, that the future is pressing in, collapsing toward them, that they are everywhere surrounded by signs of the fated landscape and human struggle of the Last Days, and here in the middle of their columned body, lank-haired and up-close, stands Karen Janney, holding a cluster of starry jasmine and thinking of the bloodstorm to come.” Mao II (7)

“The last sentence was, ‘In future years, of course, men and women, in cubicles, wearing headphones, will be listening to secret tapes of the administration’s crimes while others study electronic records on computer screens and still others look at salvaged videotapes of caged men being subjected to severe physical pain and finally others, still others, behind closed doors, ask pointed questions of flesh-and-blood individuals.” Point Omega (33)

Other texts cited in this episode:

“Tom LeClair.” Interview by Andrew Mitchell Davenport. Full Stop, May 19, 2015. https://www.full-stop.net/2015/05/19/interviews/andrew-mitchell-davenport/tom-leclair/

“‘Writing as a Deeper Form of Concentration’: An Interview with Don DeLillo.” Interview by Maria Moss. Conversations with Don DeLillo. Ed. Thomas DePietro. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005. 155-68.

“Exile on Main Street: Don DeLillo’s Undisclosed Underworld.” Interview by David Remnick. Conversations with Don DeLillo. 131-44.

In Episode Fifteen, DDSWTNP take on The Names, a Greece-based story of a strange “abecedarian” murder cult, a novel regarded by DeLillo as his turn toward more “serious” writing and placed at or near the top of many a reader’s list of favorites. We discuss The Names as an examination of the “Depravities” and guilt of being an American in the complex late-1970s world of corporations, risk analysis, bank loans, and intelligence covers that narrator James Axton navigates, and we ask why The Names puts this geopolitical tumult (including the 1979 Iranian Revolution) in the context of ancient languages, ritual sacrifice, and a dissolving marriage and family life for James. Language-obsessed Owen Brademas (the archeologist and “epigraphist” who is drawn relentlessly to the fascinating cult) and filmmaker Frank Volterra (perhaps a sly satire of a certain American auteur?) figure in this story of religion, aesthetics, and the enduring appeal of violence, but we turn at the end of this episode to the nine-year-old author Tap, Axton’s son, whose misspelled, highly spirited tale of the spirit to which his tongue might “yeeld” lets DeLillo showcase all the ways to use the alphabet to salutary and generative ends. #getwet #themindslittleinfinite

We also announce the winner of our Amazons raffle and say thanks to all who have supported and continue to support us at buymeacoffee.com/delillopodcast.

Texts mentioned and discussed in this episode:

Burn, Stephen J. “‘A Paradigm for the Life of Consciousness’: The Pale King.” David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing”: New Essays on the Novels, ed. Marshall Boswell. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. 149-168. 

“Don DeLillo: The Art of Fiction CXXXV,” Interview with Adam Begley, The Paris Review 128 (1993): 274-306.

“A Talk with Don DeLillo,” Interview with Robert Harris, in Thomas DePietro, ed., Conversations with Don DeLillo, University of Mississippi Press, 2005, 16-19.

The Godfather (1972) and Apocalypse Now (1979), dir. Francis Ford Coppola. (We have the dates on both films slightly wrong in the episode.)

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991), dir. George Hickenlooper and Fax Bahr

Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer. Grove Press, 2015.

In Episode Fourteen, DDSWTNP turn our attention for the first time to DeLillo’s drama – and to a largely unknown work by DeLillo as playwright, a 1966 radio play and disturbing take on U.S. race relations titled Mother. We cover the circumstances of the play’s original broadcasts, its re-emergence in an internet archive recording more than 50 years later, and the strange way in which this story’s armchair progressives and Billie Holiday fans, Ralph and Sally, end up making a fetishizing travesty of civil rights and racial integration in the play’s brief 27 minutes. Topics include the importance of radio to Mother’s themes of media occlusion, moral numbness, and erasure; what DeLillo means by Ralph’s “white malady” of transparency and how it reworks images from another Ralph’s Invisible Man; and what this play has to do with contemporaneous issues like interracial marriage in Loving v. Virginia. We talk extensively as well about how Mother presages parts of the early novels, from jazz love in Americana to Taft in End Zone and Azarian in Great Jones Street. Before (and after) listening to our analysis, take in this troubling 27-minute play at https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3830.01

Our raffle for a hardcover Amazons has been extended to August 1 – donate and enter to win at https://buymeacoffee.com/delillopodcast

Texts mentioned and discussed in this episode:

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time. Dial Press, 1963.

Samuel Beckett, Endgame. 1957.

Don DeLillo, The Mystery at the Middle of Ordinary Life. 2000.

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/30660/pdf

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man. Random House, 1952.

“The writer is driven by his conviction that some truths aren’t arrived at so easily, that life is still full of mystery, that it might be better for you, Dear Reader, if you went back to the Living section of your newspaper because this is the dying section and you don’t really want to be here.” (Thomas LeClair, “An Interview with Don DeLillo,” Contemporary Literature 23.1 (1982): 19-31)

Eugene Ionesco, Rhinoceros. 1959.

Mark Osteen. “Chronology.” In Don DeLillo, Three Novels of the 1980s. Library of America, 2022.

Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit. 1944.

In Episode Thirteen, DDSWTNP follow the puck into the corners with Cleo Birdwell, first female NHL player and ostensible author of the farcical, sex-fueled, “intimate” memoir Amazons, the 1980 satire of a “pseudo-profound” America that DeLillo co-wrote with Sue Buck. Amazons is a sports novel with perhaps more interest in “strip Monopoly” than hockey, more investment by Cleo in her Badger Beagles youth softball team than the New York Rangers. We discuss how this odd book came to be, how it was marketed, how DeLillo never fully owned up to it, and its nevertheless surprising place in his career’s development, a comedic lark and palate cleanser in which he makes significant moves toward the vision of White Noise. These include a disease called Jumping Frenchman, simulated death in the American home, and the character Murray Jay Siskind, seen here writing about athletes and a deeply corrupt snowmobile industry before becoming the Elvis scholar readers of the later novel know. In an episode with insights for those who have read this rare book and those who haven’t, we show that Amazons, least-discussed of DeLillo’s works, really should not be that!

Support our work and enter the raffle to win a hardcover Amazons: buymeacoffee.com/delillopodcast

Discussed in this episode:

Gerald Howard, “The Puck Stopped Here” (2008)

https://www.bookforum.com/print/1404/revisiting-cleo-birdwell-and-her-national-hockey-league-memoir-1406

David Marchese, “We All Live in Don DeLillo’s World. He’s Confused By It Too” (2020)

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/12/magazine/don-delillo-interview.html

An excerpt:

You know who else shows up in two of your books? Murray Jay Siskind. Both times described as having an “Amish” beard. 

Murray Jay! Remind me, what book is he in?

“White Noise.”

And where else?

“Amazons.”

Oh god. How do you remember that? I don’t remember that.

I think I just got a scoop. I don’t know if you’ve ever publicly acknowledged that you wrote “Amazons.”

I probably did, somewhere or other. [Laughs.] Maybe to an interviewer from Thailand.

Susan Sontag, “The Pornographic Imagination” (1967), in Styles of Radical Will (1969).

Idries Shah: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idries_Shah

Jumping Frenchmen of Maine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_Frenchmen_of_Maine

In Episode Twelve, DDSWTNP interview Curt Gardner, creator and keeper of “Don DeLillo’s America,” a prolific and comprehensive website that for nearly 30 years has been the go-to spot for information about DeLillo, from reviews, appearances, and novel publication histories to news of film adaptations and play performances. We cover Curt’s stories of first discovering DeLillo in 1981, what he learned about the writing of Amazons at the Harry Ransom Center, and the letters he’s exchanged with the man himself as he’s built his site. We had a really fun time trading stories, insights, and interpretive connections with Curt. After listening to this in-depth interview, check out the riches of “Don DeLillo’s America” at http://www.perival.com/delillo/delillo.html

Support our work: https://buymeacoffee.com/delillopodcast

Mentioned and discussed in this episode:

Ant Farm, “The Eternal Frame” (1975):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mg1FCjvZ_jA

DeLillo, Don. “Notes Toward a Definitive Meditation (By Someone Else) on the Novel ‘Americana.’” Epoch 21.3 (Spring 1972): 327-29.

---. “The Sightings.” Weekend Magazine (Toronto) 4 August 1979: 26-30. 

---. “Total Loss Weekend.” Sports Illustrated Nov. 27, 1972.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090210115257/http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1086811/index.htm

“Is cyberspace a thing within the world or is it the other way around? Which contains the other, and how can you tell for sure?” (Underworld)

Game 6: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0425055/

LeClair, Thomas. “Missing Writers.” Horizon Oct. 1981: 48-52. 

Episodes Ten and Eleven: Running Dog (1 and 2) unpack DeLillo’s frightening post-Vietnam War vision of a nation marked by pornographic personhood, corrupt politics, and an openness to fascistic fantasy, all centered on the quest for a rumored film of an orgy in Hitler’s crumbling Berlin bunker. Pornographers and their well-armed henchmen, obsessive collectors of erotic art, and military men driven by profit saturate this narrative of New York and the Texas desert, while attempts to expose and subvert their cons by a journalist and a strangely spiritual intelligence agent reveal that all who resist these forces may end up mere lackeys and running dogs. DDSWTNP also draw clear links to U.S. politics in 2024, with orange make-up on a senator and a satire-proof dictator who dons the look of a clownish entertainer turning Running Dog, read now, into another of DeLillo’s uncanny prophecies of an image-mad American culture’s very grim potentials. #imperialistlackeys #thegreatdictator #hitlerhumanized #acourseindying

In this episode we also announce your chance to support our podcasting work and contribute to our trip this year to DeLillo’s huge archive at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas! If you enjoy this podcast we hope you’ll support us at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/delillopodcast

Texts and sites referred to in this episode:

Mark Binelli, “Intensity of a Plot” (interview with Don DeLillo), Guernica, July 17, 2007. https://www.guernicamag.com/intensity_of_a_plot/

Don DeLillo, “Silhouette City: Hitler, Manson, and the Millennium.” Dimensions 4:3 (1989: 29-34. Rpt. In Mark Osteen, ed., White Noise: Text and Criticism (Penguin Books, 1998), 344-352.

“Don DeLillo’s America – A Don DeLillo Site”: http://perival.com/delillo/delillo.html

Vince Passaro, “Dangerous Don DeLillo.” New York Times Magazine, May 19, 1991. https://www.nytimes.com/1991/05/19/magazine/dangerous-don-delillo.html