THE publication of Don DeLillo’s
Underworld five years ago was greeted in Britain as proof that it was still possible to write The Great American Novel. The Cold War epic climbed to the top of the bestseller lists and the chunky 827-page tome became the fashion accessory of the season. DeLillo was hailed by Salman Rushdie, a writer he reveres, as an “American master”.
But the author himself, a slight and beguiling man who tramps into his agent’s office on the Upper East Side in New York in muddy hiking boots, forswears the idea of The Great American Novel as “terrifically outdated”. “I think it’s something that only Europeans ever mention. I never hear it,” he says. “When Underworld came out, British reviews mentioned it in one context or another. But not here.”
DeLillo, his antennae always straining for the latest frequency, has his eyes set on a far greater prize. He calls it “The Global Novel”. “That’s what we’re aiming for next,” he insists. From its title alone, it is clear that his 13th novel, Cosmopolis, the story of the financial wunderkind Eric Packer slouching crosstown towards the setting sun and self-destruction on Manhattan’s 47th Street, is his entry in the field. “I think of this novel not as an American novel, but as a novel about New York and the world,” DeLillo says. “I may be alone in this. I might stay alone. That is how I thought of it. And Eric himself said something to this effect. He calls himself ‘a world citizen with a New York pair of balls’.”
DeLillo insists he is “not egotistical enough” to imagine that Cosmopolis is the first Global Novel. It is not that, despite his admiration for Rushdie, he thinks that such a novel already exists. The growing number of writers who come from one culture and live in another perhaps come close, but their work remains at most bi-cultural. Indeed, DeLillo’s own parents, a seamstress and a payroll clerk, emigrated to the Bronx from Italy. “New Yorkers have felt for 50 years that they don’t quite belong to America — that they are either an independent entity or they belong to the world,” he says. “For many of us who grew up in immigrant families there has always been a gaze out across the Atlantic to Europe.” No, the Global Novel, in DeLillo’s imagination, captures something more than the drama of the immigrant: it encompasses the whole stew of globalisation, right down to the Ethiopian food that Eric tries to eat on his way through midtown Manhattan. “I’m not sure there is such a novel. There may be. But I think it must be coming. I think someone’s writing it. . .” DeLillo says. “It will be written by a young Pakistani woman. We will know when we see it.”
DeLillo is a spry 66. For a writer of his generation, however masterful, there is inevitably a danger of being left behind by history. Perhaps especially for a writer who is so closely bound to history. Ever since Libra, his conspiracy theory about his former Bronx neighbour Lee Harvey Oswald, interviewers have asked DeLillo where he was on the day President Kennedy was killed. He vividly recalls that he was eating lunch on November 22, 1963, at an Upper West Side restaurant called Davy Jones. He relishes the poetic irony of the fact that Kennedy was a sailor and the name is a nautical euphemism for meeting a watery death.
I ask him where he was on another defining moment for America, even the world, arguably the start of a new era: September 11, 2001. “My involvement was much more immediate and, shall we say, non-historic compared to the Kennedy assassination,” he says. “I remember that day much more vividly than I do September 11.”
DeLillo was at his home in the New York northern suburb of Westchester with his wife, Barbara Bennett, a landscape designer, and her brother, who was visiting from Texas. The brother got a call from home asking: “Do you know what is happening in New York?”. The household immediately switched on the television. But their attention quickly turned to the fate of DeLillo’s nephew, his wife and two children, who were stuck in their flat just two blocks from the twin towers.
DeLillo spoke to them twice that day. “They were in their apartment, which is on Broadway and Maiden Lane. They thought it would be safer to go into the hallway,” he recounts. “The street itself was pure hell. What they had seen from their window indicated it was safer inside. Others from the building joined them, until there were 12-15 people. Eventually they were rescued, after the building collapsed. Two or three weeks after, I remembered snatches of the conversation my nephew and I had had. It took that long.”
Just as Underworld charts the Cold War, Cosmopolis clearly records the ending of the brief era that ended that day — usually described as the “post-Cold War world”. “This was the day, was it not, for influential men to come to sudden messy ends,” DeLillo writes.
“I was well into the novel before I began to understand that the day on which the novel was set was the end of an era, and that the era quite clearly delineated between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the current period of terror,” DeLillo explains. “That is when the Dow kept soaring and the internet kept getting faster and more inclusive, and when CEOs became global celebrities and ordinary individuals had dreams of enormous wealth and sometimes achieved it.”
DeLillo had almost finished Cosmopolis when the hijacked jets smashed into the twin towers, trapping his nephew’s family amid the falling debris. He took a long pause to digest the attack, and wrote an essay about it for Harper’s. But he insists that September 11 had “absolutely no influence on the book”. That is a shame, because terror makes for vintage DeLillo and what we have instead is, in the words of The New York Times’s chief book reviewer Michiko Kakutani, “a major dud, as lugubrious and heavy-handed as a bad Wim Wenders film, as dated as an old issue of Interview magazine”.
And yet: “I would say that everything has changed since September 11. There is a new perception,” says DeLillo. “During the Cold War people thought about the fate of the Earth and about destruction so massive that it would mean the end of life on earth. Now what we think about is that they are going to kill us, you and me, and they are going to kill us in our trains, our planes and our office buildings. So it’s more immediate. It’s far less abstract.”
Such material would seem a dream for a writer Martin Amis described as a “poet of paranoia”. Instead, we get the self-loathing of the Clinton boom, right down to a pathetic scene in which Eric’s finance chief reaches climax while watching her boss get a rectal exam from his doctor in the back of a stretch limousine. Despite its global ambition, Cosmopolis does not attempt to address the new world narrative. We can only hope that maybe his next novel will.
HEAR DON DE LILLO
The Times Foyles Writers & Readers Forum presents Don DeLillo
At the Institute of Education, 20 Bedford Way, London, WC1H 0AL
Tuesday, May 27 at 7pm. Evening hosted by Mark Lawson. Tickets cost £8 (concessions £6) and are available on 0870 420 2777 (8.30am - 6pm, Mon - Fri). Tickets are limited so book ahead to avoid disappointment.
