By Erin Overbey)
In 2010, after the acclaimed Bronx-born novelist Don DeLillo won the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, Philip Roth extolled the “combination of terror and comedy and sheer song” in DeLillo’s prose. DeLillo, who has contributed eight pieces to The New Yorker since 1971, was famously called the “chief shaman of the paranoid school of American fiction” by the New York Review of Books nearly twenty-five years ago. In the past forty-some years, he has written about such diverse topics as Lee Harvey Oswald, mathematics, the Cold War, and global terrorism. Much of his work explores the themes of home-spun paranoia and the fantasies that people construct in order to deal with their own sense of powerlessness. The story we’ve unlocked this weekend, “Midnight in Dostoevsky,” takes its name from a line in Frank O’Hara’s poem “Meditations in an Emergency” (1954), and is a perfect example of this “paranoid” style.
“Midnight in Dostoevsky” follows two male students as they trudge across a wintry campus landscape, debating about their enigmatic logic professor and a mysterious, elderly hooded man whom they’ve encountered along their path. The classmates dissect the world around them and speculate about the people they see as if they were characters in a novel, creating intricate fantasies about their lives and professions. As the story progresses, the narrative dioramas they construct become increasingly byzantine and weighty.
We went walking but we did not see the man. The wreaths were mostly gone from the front doors and the occasional bundled figure scraped snow off a car’s windshield. Over time, we began to understand that these walks were not casual off-campus rambles. We were not looking at trees or boxcars, as we normally did, naming, counting, categorizing. This was different. There was a measure to the man in the hooded coat, old stooped body, face framed in monkish cloth, a history, a faded drama. We wanted to see him one more time.
Gradually, they come to believe that there may be a connection between the old man and their professor. As their speculations intensify, the significance of these narrative constructs takes on greater importance, and we begin to perceive the fragility of the students’ relationship with each other—and with the “reality” that they’ve fabricated.
The whole story is available in our archive. If you’d like to read more about Don DeLillo, you can check out John Updike’s 2003 review of the novel “Cosmopolis” (now unlocked) and our 2010 Fiction Podcast which features the novelist Chang-Rae Lee reading DeLillo’s short story “Baader-Meinhof.”
No comments:
Post a Comment