Geordie Williamson

It's glorious because it seems to take us out of our particular moment, a particularly frenetic and dark moment in many respects,

into that period in the late 60s and 70s and 80s and 90s where, yeah, lots was going on, but it seemed to be a general upward swing.

You know, people were getting richer.

The world was getting safer.

And in the midst of this was this amazing playwright with a talent that

for creating bulging sacks of plays filled with acrobatics and verbal brilliance and feeling and wit.

And yeah, it feels a little bit like reading an historical novel to me, but an historical novel of a really great time, an innocent time in retrospect.

Right.

Well, the thing about DeLillo is that he's been writing with a kind of late style ever since the beginning of his career, and by which I mean he was always a bit of a prophet.

He's an American novelist who had his finger on the pulse of what he called the world hum, a certain strain of modernity which he found bleakly comic and genuinely disturbing.

which he has sought over this long and storied career to try and bring out through some very dark, some very funny, and some very beautiful books.

Now, late DeLillo, and I'm thinking about his most recent book, Zero K, and then this book,

which is not really a novel at all.

It's barely 10,000 words.

It's a long, short story and a rather attenuated one at that, but it's replete with DeLillo's kind of style, which is so well-known now you could almost...

You know, it's almost parody.

And that is very short, flat, affectless sentences.

A lot of non sequiturs dialogue, which doesn't meet between people, but rather leaps over to some kind of third invisible interlocutor.

There's an obsession with technology.

There's a sense of, I know, closing time in the West.