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.