Tegan Bennett-Daylight

So there's these kind of weird little interventions into the text.

So you feel kind of continuously confused.

I just thought it was Delilo imagining the thing that surely all of us have imagined.

I imagine this every time we have a power blackout up here in the Blue Mountains where I think, huh, what happens now?

Now that everything's gone, everything that our entire lives are connected to has gone, what do we do?

Who are we?

What will we become?

So I didn't really imagine Delilo imagining beyond the page.

There's a kind of a suggestion that it might be an extraterrestrial thing, but to me it was just a kind of willed blank.

All the power goes, the screen goes, the phones go, everything is gone.

Yeah, I think I could be wrong, but it feels to me that it's very much DeLillo's intent to leave that space open for the reader to inhabit.

So all he describes is the shutting down.

And, of course, Jim and Tess's plane sort of falls out of the air.

They survive the crash, but everything disappears at once.

But I didn't have a real sense of what the cause might have been.

Sometimes with, I mean, what's really fun about today, apart from the joy of talking to you two and my dear friend Geordie, is the fact that we've got two writers in their late style.

And for some writers, their style becomes more difficult and more distilled.

And I would say that that is definitely true of DeLillo.

So I sort of turned to reading this kind of as a prose poem.

And I didn't actually find it too clever by half.