Q&A: Don DeLillo

The train ride from midtown Manhattan to the picture-book Westchester County suburb where novelist Don DeLillo lives offers a capsule view of virtually the entire spectrum of American life. After leaving Grand Central Station, the train comes up from underground at Ninety-sixth Street on Manhattan’s East Side, rolls serenely through Harlem, then crosses the Harlem River and enters the devastated landscape of the South Bronx.

The journey continues through the North Bronx, the working-class neighborhood where DeLillo, whose parents were Italian immigrants, grew up and attended college at Fordham University. Finally, the train passes into Westchester’s leafy environs.

At DeLillo’s station, the author and his wife, Barbara Bennett, are waiting. The sun is blazing, and the August heat is crushing. Like the train trip, which links the quotidian splendor and the nightmarish underside of the American dream, the brutal weather seems appropriate. “This is the last comfortable moment you’ll have for a while,” DeLillo says with a smile as he gets into the car. “The car is air-conditioned, but the house isn’t.”

One of the major voices in American fiction for nearly two decades, DeLillo, who is now fifty-one, rarely grants interviews. He lacks “the necessaryessary self-importance,” as he puts it. “I’m just not a public man,” he says. “I’d rather write my books in private and then send them out into the world to discover their own public life.” But the publication of his ninth novel, Libra – a fictional account of the assassination of John Kennedy, told from the perspective of Lee Harvey Oswald – has prompted him to speak.

“Libra is easier to talk about than my previous books,” DeLillo says. “The obvious reason is it’s grounded in reality and there are real people to discuss. Even someone who hasn’t read the book can respond at least in a limited way to any discussion of people like Lee Oswald or Jack Ruby. It is firmer material. I’m always reluctant to get into abstract discussions, which I admit my earlier novels tended to lean toward. I wrote them, but I don’t necessarily enjoy talking about them.”

Still, Libra – which is DeLillo’s first best seller and a nominee for a 1988 National Book Award for fiction is more of a culmination than a departure. DeLillo’s first novel, American, which appeared in 1971, ends in Dealey Plaza, in Dallas, the site of the Kennedy assassination, and references to the slaying turn up in several of his other books. In 1983, DeLillo wrote a piece for Rolling Stone about the impact of the assassination twenty years later. Titled “American Blood,” that essay effectively serves as a précis for Libra.

Moreover, rather than advancing yet another “the-ory” of the assassination, Libra simply carries forward the themes of violence and conspiracy that have come to define DeLillo’s fiction. “This is a work of the imagination,” he writes in the author’s note that concludes the book. “While drawing from the historical record, I’ve made no attempt to furnish factual answers to any questions raised by the assassination.” Instead, he hopes the novel will provide “a way of thinking about the assassination without being constrained by half-facts or overwhelmed by possibilities, by the tide of speculation that widens with the years.”

In Libra, DeLillo describes the murder of the president as “the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century.” But this cataclysm differs only in scale from the killings that shatter complacent, enclosed lives in the novels Players (1977), Running Dog (1978) and The Names (1982). Similarly, the college-football player who is the main character in End Zone (1972) and the rock-star hero of Great Jones Street (1973) both achieve an alienation that rivals the emotional state DeLillo sees in Lee Harvey Oswald. Apocalyptic events profound in their impact and uncertain in their ultimate meaning shadow Ratner’s Star (1976) and White Noise (1985), just as the assassination does the world of Libra – and our world, a quarter of a century after it occurred.

This interview takes place in DeLillo’s back yard; afterward we’ll head to a diner on the town square – a village center “like something out of the Fifties,” DeLillo says approvingly – for a late lunch of burgers, fries and Cokes. In his yard, DeLillo sits on a lawn chair and sips iced tea. Fortunately, the yard is shady, and the sky clouds over a bit. Even so, the heat, the humidity, the lush green of the grounds and the eerie din of cicadas give the scene an almost tropical feel. DeLillo – wiry and intense, wearing jeans and a plaid shirt open at the collar, speaking with deliberate slowness in a gripping monotone – seems the image of a modern-day Kurtz, a literary explorer of the heart of darkness comfortably at home in the suburbs of America.