Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘Don Delillo’ category

Reading Writer – what am I reading for?

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One of the most useful things I took away from my MFA program was a way to read with an eye on the writing. Maybe some writers do this instinctively, maybe I was doing it a little bit on my own before I became aware of it, but now I work very hard to do this consciously and with each book that I read.

I don’t just mean the larger decisions like POV or tense or structure. I try to keep track of the smaller stuff as well, like how a particular author handles transitions between scenes or time periods or how they might break into a scene with narrative summation, how long they let that summation last and how they get back to the action. I try looking for certain stylistic repetitions and why they might be useful or what kind of decisions an author has made about revelation vs. suggestion. I’ve found that cataloguing these kind of textual details gives me something to go and look at when I get stuck in a scene or an idea and don’t quite know how to work through it.

Sometime last year I read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and although this book was intensely gripping I couldn’t keep my writer brain from taking some serious notes about how he sustained such intensity for over 200 pages. First off, structurally, he does not ever give the reader a break. There are no natural pauses in the text, no line breaks and no real time jumps. Each scene moves directly and smoothly into the next, something which makes it difficult for many readers to put the book down. Second, he only allows his main character’s focus to waver from the present action (i.e. to reflect on the past) on three or four very short occasions. So those moments really stand out, like little psychic breakdowns, and are subsequently very powerful. Also, he doesn’t go into a lot of detail about any actual violence. His restraint is pretty amazing and I think it pays off. Leaving things to the reader’s imagination in many scenes is much worse. There’s plenty of examples and I should drag out my notes and do a proper post on this book sometime, because in terms of crafting this type of fiction, it’s a goldmine.

So if I ever want to write a novel with a similar intensity I would go back and read The Road about a million times, looking for all these details. I would probably also take out Don Delillo’s The Body Artist and Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Another writer that comes to mind is Virginia Woolf. In To The Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway she writes with a similar intensity, keeping the reader thoroughly submerged beneath the story, although her overall affect is much less “dark”.

I enjoy going through as much fiction as possible this way because it helps me understand what kind of aesthetic I create with my own choices when I’m writing. I like what McCarthy did to establish an intense reading experience so I want to see if some of those techniques apply to my own writing. They won’t always but I hope that examining his choices is one way to develop as a writer.

Reading Writer – The Body Artist cont.

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I mentioned in my recent reading review of The Body Artist that reading this novel was a bit awkward and felt like attending a performance piece. I want to talk more about where I think the reader’s self-consciousness comes from.

In the novel, Delillo positions the narrator within the main character Lauren’s head – third person limited. There is the smallest sliver of distance in the odd formulation of “she thought”, but most of the narration comes unhampered by any tags. In this way, the narrator is fused to her movements and thoughts. In essence, Lauren is the narrator, even if technically the point of view is third person. This free indirect technique creates a sort of tunnel vision that in less expert hands would lead to a lot of confusion. (This is something that beginning writers often do without realizing it (yep, been there, done that) and it can create a real problem for the reader). There isn’t any place for the reader to move back and look at the larger scene. The largest “visual” we ever get that isn’t filtered by Lauren’s eyes is something like, “They sat reading…” with anything that follows unfolding through Lauren’s perception and thoughts.

What this near-fusion of main character into narrator accomplishes in The Body Artist is to turn the reader into a voyeur. Delillo doesn’t let Lauren tell us her story in her own voice, something which would be a more traditional experience for the reader and wouldn’t feel so intrusive, instead he traps us inside her experience at the same time as he reminds us that we’re only watching:

She tried to work past the details to the bird itself, nest thief and skilled mimic, to the fixed interest in those eyes, a kind of inquisitive chill that felt a little like a challenge.
When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see. Think. What a shedding of every knowable surface and process. She wanted to believe the bird was seeing her, a woman with a teacup in her hand, and never mind the folding back of day and night, the apparition of a space set off from time. She looked and took a careful breath. She was alert to the clarity of the moment but knew it was ending already. She felt it in the blue jay. Or maybe not. She was making it happen herself because she could not look any longer. This must be what it means to see if you’ve been near blind all your life. She said something to Rey, who lifted his head slightly, chasing the jay but leaving the sparrows unstarted.

It’s a technique with very definite aesthetic repercussions. It creates a restriction for the reader, turning the character’s mood and psychic state into a filter for the story. Both these things can be quite meaningful when executed skillfully. I think the benefit of using this for The Body Artist is that the technique marries so nicely with the novel’s thematic preoccupation. Grief is a dictatorial emotion – it weighs on us, makes us hyper-aware and uncomfortable or unreasonable. Grief becomes a filter for everyday experience and so forcing the reader into that experience is a meaningful narrative experiment.

Don Delillo – The Body Artist

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The more I read Don Delillo, the more I enjoy the dark aesthetic of his fiction. I sat down last night with the short and brutal The Body Artist and read it in one sitting. I re-read it this afternoon and decided that might be the best way to enjoy this particular novel – in repeated samplings.  

The Body Artist is an uncomfortable and uneasy read. Both for its narrative peculiarities and for the alarming substance of its story. On the surface, the story couldn’t be simpler -man and woman together, man kills himself, woman grieves. But that triptych has a much more intriguing focus in its investigation of emotional expression through our physical being.  

Lauren is a body artist. Someone who creates an exploration of an idea with her movements, corporal presence and acting. We meet her first in a moment of comfort – a morning with her husband. Delillo presents even the smallest detail of their interplays of exchange. Lauren exists in a hyper-deliberate state, moving from gesture to gesture and thought to thought. We have to savor their interactions slowly to catch the hints of discord. They are extremely subtle, but they are there.  

The next chapter relates the details of her husband’s death. Within two pages we are back with Lauren, and by this point we’re so tightly merged with her it is difficult to come up for air. She discovers a young man stashed away in the house. He cannot speak properly on his own but begins to repeat verbatim entire conversations that occurred between Lauren and her now dead husband. In her grief, Lauren begins to believe he’s some manifestation of her husband and instead of calling the police or a hospital, tries to take care of him. She just wants him to keep speaking to her. 

The experience of reading The Body Artist is similar to attending an intense play or observing a performance piece. It’s disturbing to see our main character humiliate and endanger herself. This kind of reader-character fusion doesn’t occur often. Usually, there is more distance. But the narrative perspective of The Body Artist doesn’t allow for any detachment. We follow Lauren like a voyeur, listen to her thoughts and watch even her most mundane movements. Time runs too slowly. It’s suffocating and frustrating. But each time she snaps out of her trance, we’re brought up short and offered a glimpse of the heartache and disbelief that inform her most routine actions.  

Of the three Delillo novels I’ve now read, this was the most experimental but also, I felt, the most powerful. In the past, I’ve criticized him for holding me at an arm’s length from his characters. The Body Artist did the exact opposite. It was a visceral experience, both severe and wearisome (I mean those to be taken as positives, or at least for their intensity). I think a longer book would have been far too exhausting so I approve of his restraint. Definitely a novel I will go back to again.

Don Delillo – Falling Man

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Delillo’s most recent and ominously titled novel tackles the aftermath of September 11th by giving us the story of two New Yorkers – Keith and Lianne. We meet Keith on the horrifying day itself as he slogs, dazed and stunned and holding someone else’s briefcase, away from the rubble and toward Lianne, his almost ex-wife, whom we are told he has been separated from for over a year. Lianne, who we learn later had watched the towers fall believing Keith was inside, believing he was dead, lets him in and slowly these two bewildered individuals find themselves a family again.  

Bewildered, stunned, shocked, numb…these are the predominant flavors of Delillo’s exquisitely-written feast. Both Lianne and Keith seem to move through a foggy haze. There are moments that they lose control, like when Lianne finds herself attacking a neighbor woman for playing music too loud in their building, but that stronger emotion is swallowed up by the whale of her own shock. And again for Keith, who gets in a fight in a department store, he seems to experience this loss of control as a curious and misplaced moment in his day, a fluke. Although this myriad of astonishment and numbness seems to ring true, psychologically speaking, following this kind of traumatic event, it did create a wall between me as the reader and the novel’s characters. Neither Lianne nor Keith, despite the carefulness of Delillo’s description and the thoughtfully attended subject matter, managed to create a ripple on my reservoir of sympathy. Their stunned bearing kept them watching their own lives from a distance and therefore, held me behind the same restraining wall.  

On the day the novel opens, the twin towers are no longer a part of the New York City skyline but their ghost looms over the entire novel with a lurking shadow and Delillo parallels this metaphorical reality in several places: Lianne’s father’s years-before suicide, the children hunting the skies for planes and believing that the already fallen towers will fall again, and even the sporadic attention paid to Keith’s missing friends. It’s extremely well-done, this idea that something missing can take up more space in its absence and just one example of the many questions that Delillo poses in Falling Man.  

Despite the more personal nature of this novel, Delillo is still exceptionally good at turning a microscopic lens on America in a general sense, at its nuances, its eccentricities and emotions and Falling Man is no exception. His characters may remain enmeshed inside their own personal story but they externalize more global fears and opinions: 

But that’s why you built the towers, isn’t it? Weren’t the towers built as fantasies of wealth and power that would one day become fantasies of destruction? You build a thing like that so you can see it come down. The provocation is obvious. What other reason would there be to go so high and then to double it, do it twice? It’s a fantasy, so why not do it twice? You are saying, Here it is, bring it down. 

There is quite a lot packed inside this novel, a lot of questions and a lot of ideas in only 246 pages. In one sense it presents just one single road inside September 11th, only one example of an individual’s reaction to the trauma and damage of that day. But at the same time, Keith and Lianne’s couple offers the dual perspectives of survivor and spectator and Delillo works these distinctions very well.

Among other literary explorations of America’s response to September 11th as a defining moment, Falling Man stands out as careful and specific, as honest but still kind, and most of all, as an attentive work of art.