Cassie McCullough

Guilt, there you go, reading guilt.

So before we get to Tegan Bennett Daylight's take on this latest novel, Geordie, can you describe the late style of Don DeLillo?

So, yeah, is it just as simple as a blackout or is there something more sinister going on?

I guess when you're talking about it, I'm thinking of shades of 9-11 and the city disrupted, New York disrupted.

Is it something along those lines?

Yeah.

I love that question of the late work, though, when maybe as an artist, a writer, as a thinker, by the end of your life, you go into this final phase where you're also possibly contemplating the end, but also maybe free from a lot of the earthly concerns of life, children and, you know, whatnot.

And sometimes those works are almost...

hard to understand whether they're brilliant and we don't quite get them or whether they are a sense of decline.

And I guess one of the things I would put into that category is Shakespeare's Winter's Tale, you know, the one that's called one of the problem plays where, you know, some of it just doesn't really make sense.

But this is something that happens in visual art and in music.

The late works sometimes are these works of misunderstood genius.

You're listening to The Bookshelf on ABC Radio National with me, Cassie McCullough and Kate Evans.

And our guests today, critic Geordie Williamson and novelist and teacher Tegan Bennett-Daylight.

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It all helps.

Martin Amis being the English writer and son of Kingsley Amis, another English writer.

Martin is the author of London Fields, Night Train, Lionel Asbo and part of the English set of writers with Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens.