Geordie Williamson

It's very nihilistic.

It's still funny sometimes, but more often quite kind of bleak and lonely.

I think that he is allowed to do anything he wants.

I'd say that as a former Picador publisher and having Delilo's novels coming down the chute.

We'd do the same if Cormac McCarthy ever got round to writing that novel that he's been promising for 25 years or so.

But let's just say that I think what Tegan's got right on the money is that what Delilo is interested in is a great subtraction.

Now, what actually creates a situation is less important than what it means.

And I think that those historians who say that the trace of us here today as human beings is as light as it has ever been in terms of the actual kind of technology of recording, that we haven't kept great libraries full of bound books.

It's all digital.

And when that flicks off,

It's all gone.

And, you know, humans in the future looking back would say literally nothing happened in the early 21st century.

There is no evidence that there was anyone there.

And I think that kind of chilling thought, that chilling thought experiment is so DeLillo because he's all kind of, you know, like inside of a very shiny, very cold freezer.

That's where his prose and his worldview does its best work.

Well, I think it's a bit the way that you'd have those little plastic signs on your shop that you flip over to say closed or open.

Because this latest work by Amos, he's so close to autobiographical record, it really should be regarded as a memoir.

But look, it is a mystery to me what's happened here.

This is a long book.

It is an adoring and gossipy and very intimate account of, I'd say, and they're a little sundry episodes, but really four powerful relationships.