7.16.2003
Fiction chronicler: bleeding sure of himself?
[Posted 12:45 PM by James Panero]
Our Letters page has been updated with two new posts. Here is a sample
Dear Max Watman, you really do know a lot about Don DeLillo,
don’t you? (“A
safe preserve for sport,” May 2003). You tell us a great deal
about the man and his books in the course of your spiffy little
review in New Criterion–what he does, the mainstays of his work,
what he’s been telling us for years, the fact that
self-indulgence and daydreams are now all that he has left.
Astonishing really, that you should know all this–I doubt if
DeLillo himself knows as much about his own motives, methods and
current predicament. But tell me this Max, where did you get
your information? Don’t say his books because that’s much too
vague to do justice to the kind of hard facts that you seem to
have at your disposal. Where then? Interviews? Other people’s
views on his books perhaps? Thin air?…
Read the whole correspondence here.