Episode 34: An Interview with Tom LeClair cover art

Episode 34: An Interview with Tom LeClair

Episode 34: An Interview with Tom LeClair

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 In Episode 34 DDSWTNP sit down for a revelatory talk with Tom LeClair, a founding critic in the study of DeLillo, his longtime friend and liaison to the literary world, and a figure who has both written fiction shaped by DeLillo’s and (he suggests) seen his own stories turned into scenes and dialogue by DeLillo himself. We get into LeClair’s relationship with DeLillo going back more than forty years, starting from the time the author sent him a copy of Ratner’s Star and proceeding to a 1979 interview in Athens that illuminated a then rather reclusive and secretive writer, including the story behind a card DeLillo handed out in those years reading “I don’t want to talk about it.” We also ask LeClair questions about his many readings of DeLillo’s and others’ works over the years, starting from his major books In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel (1987) and The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction (1989), studies that initiated LeClair’s career-long examination of encyclopedic works that form categories of “systext,” “monsterpiece,” and others he has defined in his many major magazine and newspaper reviews and in his current substack. What does LeClair make of the many mentions of “systems” in Underworld? What does a line from Point Omega suggest to him about the possibility someday of a DeLillo biography? What does LeClair mean when he calls DeLillo a thoroughly “intuitive” writer and an artist obsessed his whole life with embodiment, birth, death, and fear? Is “mystery” the right word for what drives DeLillo’s narrative seeking, and is Catholicism a useful lens? What to make of the ending of Zero K? Why did DeLillo want to visit Beirut with LeClair? And what do these two talk about when they have lunch together? The interview also gets into depth on the many comparisons LeClair sees with his own fiction, its set of Kierkegaardian maneuvers through the Greece-based world of basketball player Michael Keever, the hero of Passing Off (1996) who begins for LeClair a series of examinations of games, terrorism, and some familiar DeLillo territory that extends through the four other Passing novels that LeClair has published in the thirty years since. Cover photograph by Kinga Owczennikow. A native of Poland, Kinga Owczennikow is currently based in New York City. She holds a BA (Hons) in Photography from the University for the Creative Arts in the UK. Kinga is an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society, a member of the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel and an exhibiting member of the Soho Photo Gallery in New York City. Kinga had a solo exhibition “The secret paths of Hong Kong” at the Asia and Pacific Museum in Warsaw, in 2011. Her photographic work has also been exhibited internationally in group shows. Her first photobook "Framing the World" was published by Ephemere in Tokyo, in 2025. Texts by Tom LeClair and others discussed in this episode: “Don DeLillo: The Word, The Image, The Gun.” BBC, 1991. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4029096/ Amy Hungerford, “Don DeLillo’s Latin Mass.” Contemporary Literature 47.3 (Autumn 2006): 343-380. Tom LeClair and Larry McCaffery, eds. Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists. U. of Illinois P., 1983. Tom LeClair. In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. U. of Illinois P., 1987. ---. The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction.U. of Illinois P., 1989. ---. “Me and Mao II” (1993). https://perival.com/delillo/meandmaoii.html ---. Passing Off. Permanent Press, 1996. ---. “An Under-history of Mid-Century America” (review of Underworld). The Atlantic, October 1997. ---. “Two On One: Writing a Basketball Novel.” In What to Read (and Not): Essays and Reviews. Dzanc Books, 2014. ---. “Serious But Not Dangerous Don DeLillo” (review of The Silence). American Book Review 42.4 (May/June 2021): 10-11. —-. Harpooning Donald Trump: A Novelist’s Essays. Mediacs, 2017. ---. Passing Again. 2022. Tom LeClair’s Substack: https://tleclair.substack.com/ Vince Passaro, “Dangerous Don DeLillo.” New York Times Magazine, May 19, 1991. https://www.nytimes.com/1991/05/19/magazine/dangerous-don-delillo.html Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology. Vintage, 1995.
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