What does the déjà vu allegedly caused by the Airborne Toxic Event have to do with a disease called Jumping Frenchman? How is Jack Gladney’s “day of the station wagons” connected to the first female NHL player’s longing for quaint hometown holidays? In Episode 24, DDSWTNP continue our White Noise residency by showing listeners all the hidden connections between DeLillo’s most famous novel and his most obscure: Cleo Birdwell’s Amazons, his pseudonymous 1980 collaboration with Sue Buck, written as a kind of lark but we think absolutely integral to the satiric vision of White Noise five years later. Our discussion suggests all the ways in which DeLillo seems to have used Amazons as a “laboratory” of sorts, developing Cleo’s thoughts on ad shoots, celebrity athletes, Americana, and an ex-player in a deathlike suspension into the richer, more in-depth meditations on similar topics in White Noise. Naturally we give major attention to Murray Jay Siskind, a sportswriter in Amazons who’s become an Elvis scholar in White Noise, expressing above all our gratitude that DeLillo came back to him and transformed him, reshaping an already very funny snowmobile obsessive into a Mephistophelean wit and one of the darkest, most memorable characters in the corpus. Those who haven’t gotten to read Amazons but know other DeLillo will get a ton out of this episode, for we end up drawing surprising connections not just to White Noise but Americana, End Zone, Great Jones Street, Underworld, Zero K, and others. Turns out this prank of a novel in 1980 paid many dividends for DeLillo. Tune in to hear some fun thoughts as well about a prank of our own: an April Fool’s post about a brand-new DeLillo novel we put on social media a few weeks ago.

Texts and quotations referred to in this episode:

“Pynchon Now,” including short essay on Pynchon’s example by Don DeLillo, Bookforum (Summer 2005). https://web.archive.org/web/20050729023737/www.bookforum.com/pynchon.html

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (Free Press, 1973). 

John N. Duvall, “The (Super)Marketplace of Images: Television as Unmediated Mediation in DeLillo’s White Noise.” In Mark Osteen, ed., White Noise: Text and Criticism (New York: Penguin, 1998), pp. 432-55.

Adolf Hitler, “Long Live Fanatical Nationalism” (text of speech). In James A. Gould and Willis H. Truitt, Political Ideologies (New York: Macmillan, 1973), p. 119.

Gerald Howard and Mark Osteen, “Why Don DeLillo Deserves the Nobel: A Conversation with Gerald Howard and Mark Osteen,” Library of America, January 17, 2024 (source for Howard’s remark that DeLillo’s manuscripts need no editing).

https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/why-don-delillo-deserves-the-nobel/