By ROBERT McCRUM [The Guardian] – As a champion of “difficulty”, albeit in an American mode, [DeLillo] is an heir of modernism and says that he sees himself as “part of a long modernist line starting with James Joyce”. Unlike his friend Paul Auster, there’s no part of his creative make-up that owes much to the 19th-century American masters. “I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne.” Instead, he listens to jazz: “Charlie Mingus, Miles Davis, the same music I listened to when I was 20.”
This comes as a reminder that DeLillo stands in the middle of a postwar generation of American writers, ranging from the senior (Philip Roth) to the junior (Paul Auster), all of them from the suburbs. “We are not native,” DeLillo explains. “We have no generations of Americans behind us. We have roots elsewhere. We are looking in from the outside. To me, that seems to be perfectly natural.”
Continued at The Guardian | More Chronicle & Notices.
