Novelist leaves audience wanting more
DeLillo reads from his books, answers a few questions and departs
	
By Patrick Beach

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Friday, February 11, 2005

As precise and measured in his speaking as in his prose, National Book Award-winning novelist Don DeLillo was the hottest ticket in town Thursday night.

But the novelist with a somewhat exaggerated reputation for standoffishness, who read and took a few questions, didn't give the sellout crowd of 330 people at Jessen Auditorium on the University of Texas campus the chance to ask for an encore.

Standing at a lectern in a chamber music recital hall, DeLillo read from two of his best-known books, "Libra," an imagining of President Kennedy's assassination and the tortured psyche of Lee Harvey Oswald, and "Underworld," his sweeping take on America from the Cold War to the Internet age. Then he took a handful of questions that he answered with graciousness and parchment-dry wit and announced that it was time to go.

DeLillo, the author of 13 novels, is regarded as one of the preeminent voices of his generation, sweeping up vast swaths of pop culture, conspiracy theories and the dehumanizing effects of technology and crafting novels that simultaneously feel disorienting and vastly more vivid than real life. His work is also as painstaking as a jewel cutter's and is as much about language as anything else. Michael Adams, the acting director of the Michener Center for Writers at UT who introduced DeLillo, quoted the man as saying, "I write for the sake of sentences."

DeLillo, answering a question, put it another way.

"I'm a showoff Italian," said DeLillo, who was born in 1936 and grew up in an Irish-Italian neighborhood in the Bronx, New York. He allowed that his Catholic upbringing and education affected him in ways too deeply to enumerate.

"It's a little like breathing, or like seeing," he said.

Indeed, DeLillo's are novels of ideas, but ones that tend not to scrimp on the "novels" portion of that characterization. Notable exceptions are his last pair of outings, "The Body Artist" (2001) and "Cosmopolis" (2003), which are comparative works in miniature, almost tone poems. The change in prose style in "The Body Artist" "was forced on me by the subject matter more than the fact that I wanted to do it consciously," he said. He said that slim work "is more abstract. It deals with how we perceive time and how we may misperceive it in order to survive. In this book . . . I thought I was forced to elliptical."

Of the book that many critics and fans found difficult to read, DeLillo said, "The book was quite difficult to do. It's an acetic book, a very spare book and, in large part, involuntarily so."

In October, UT's Harry Ransom Center acquired DeLillo's papers, allowing academics an opportunity to scour the author's drafts and correspondence for posterity.

pbeach@statesman.com; 445-3603