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> A character is part of the pleasure a writer wants to give his readers. A character who lives, who says interesting things. I want to give pleasure through language, through the architecture of a book or a sentence and through characters who may be funny, nasty, violent, or all of these. But I’m not the kind of writer who dotes on certain characters and wants readers to do the same. The fact is every writer likes his characters to the degree that he’s able to work out their existence. This is exactly how I feel about characters in novels. It reminds me of Nabakov, who famously ended a lecture with: > In this course I have tried to reveal the mechanism of those wonderful toys — literary masterpieces. I have tried to make of you good readers who read books not for the infantile purpose of identifying oneself with the characters, and not for the adolescent purpose of learning to live, and not for the academic purpose of indulging in generalizations. I have tried to teach you to read books for the sake of their form, their visions, their art. I have tried to teach you to feel a shiver of artistic satisfaction, to share not the emotions of the people in the book but the emotions of its author — the joys and difficulties of creation. We did not talk around books, about books; we went to the center of this or that masterpiece, to the live heart of the matter I think that's basically right: the best way to read a novel is as a dialogue with the author. DeLillo is the only example of an American who has written about recent history and contemporary American life in a way that resonants with me: unmistakably American, involved, but also detached. He's written about everything from foreign policy (The Names), to academia (White Noise, Ratner's Star), to JFK's assassination (Libra), to the Cold War (Underworld), to finance (Cosmopolis), to 9/11 (Falling Man), to the Iraq War (Point Omega), to start-up culture and worship of technology (Zero K). |